Pros and Cons of AI in Education

AI is increasingly present in schools—it’s hard to ignore its impact. Students are using AI, or artificial intelligence, to help them with their assignments. Teachers are using AI to save time. And school leaders are using AI to quickly analyze districtwide data.

According to HMH’s 2025 Educator Confidence Report (ECR), the share of educators using AI has grown sixfold since 2023, and 9 in 10 educators who use AI say it is valuable to their work. But perspectives on AI vary widely from person to person. Ask any school leader, teacher, student, or caregiver, and their opinions on AI shift based on their needs, concerns, and experiences.

Balancing AI’s potential while remaining realistic about its limits is exactly what educators are navigating right now. This article discusses AI in schools—pros and cons. Additionally, it explores what can be done to turn those shortcomings into benefits—drawing on perspectives from HMH leaders, classroom teachers, and education researchers.

Note: The benefits of AI rarely fall neatly into one category. What helps students often helps teachers, and vice versa.

Advantages of AI in education

For students

Personalized learning and targeted feedback

One of the advantages of AI in education is its ability to help educators personalize instruction to meet the needs of every student.

Edward Howard, former educator and vice president of product management at HMH, writes in one article, “AI enables personalization by doing what teachers have always done but at a scale and speed that humans cannot sustain alone.” Howard provides examples of what AI can do, such as analyzing performance data, response patterns, fluency rates, and engagement. Plus, adaptive learning technology that employs AI can adjust content difficulty, pacing, and scaffolds, and suggest targeted practice.

Andrew Goldman, executive vice president at HMH, explains how AI personalizes learning: “We can take a high-quality lesson from the curriculum and then understand the teacher profile and the classroom and student profile and create a much more personalized lesson that connects more directly with the students and their needs in the classroom.”

Many teachers are already using AI to personalize learning, such as quickly creating presentations and assessments or differentiating instruction for students at different levels. Elementary teacher Nicole Radosti offers one example: “Too often, above-level students get overlooked, but AI can ensure they stay engaged and keep growing.”

Additionally, educators are using AI to provide targeted feedback. Goldman says, “When AI increases a teacher’s ability to provide high-quality feedback to their students, they’re giving more opportunities for students to revise. And that leads to both growth as communicators and growth as thinkers because each revision is refining the thinking that’s going on there.”

Susan Lafond, a nationally board-certified veteran educator of multilingual learners and an advisor and contributor to Colorín Colorado, explains how AI can help teachers personalize learning for multilingual learners at different proficiency levels, with L1 backgrounds, and with different learning needs. “AI can analyze student performance and suggest modifications for different learning levels, whether accommodating newcomer or long-term ELLs, students who are striving readers, or ELLs with IEPs,” says Lafond. “AI can generate leveled texts, bilingual glossaries, sentence frames, word banks, and guided reading questions—all tailored to where a student is.”

Whether students need support catching up or more of a challenge, AI can provide educators with the tools they need to meet every learner where they are in their journey.

Making learning more accessible

Any tool that makes learning more accessible benefits everyone—and AI can do this. As explained in this article, AI can help students with motor challenges or dysgraphia complete the same written assignments as classmates, using features like speech-to-text and AI-supported word prediction.

Additionally, AI can effectively support multilingual learners. HMH AI Tools, for example, provides scaffolded vocabulary support and AI-generated family and caregiver communications in multiple languages.

Like all students, multilingual learners need meaningful feedback to grow. Through carefully crafted prompts, Lafond explains, teachers can direct AI to generate feedback that’s calibrated to a student’s proficiency level. “AI can generate formative assessments like quizzes and exit tickets, create rubrics, analyze student responses, and tailor reteaching strategies,” says Lafond. “As a result, students get timely, actionable feedback.”

Making learning more accessible for all students continues to be one of the most important goals in education, and AI serves as a powerful tool to support this pursuit.

For teachers

Time saving

There’s no question that AI saves educators significant time. According to the ECR, 68% of educators who use AI say it saves them up to five hours each week, hours that can be redirected toward students. As Francie Alexander, senior vice president of efficacy research at HMH, puts it: “When educators have more time to connect with students, teaching and learning thrive.”

Here’s how one educator, Latonia Grant, a third-grade teacher in Georgia, uses AI to save her time: “I took our district pacing guide, popped it into the HMH AI Lesson Planner, and within minutes—it gave me a full day-by-day plan for our unit.” Of course, in cases like this, AI works best as a starting point. AI can’t replicate teachers’ knowledge of their students and their classroom. That’s why reviewing AI-generated content is critical.

Lafond knows firsthand how much time teachers of multilingual learners spend creating materials, preparing lessons across English language proficiency levels, grading assessments, and communicating with families. AI, she notes, can take on more of the administrative load—formatting lesson plans, generating worksheets, handling routine grading. That way, teachers have more time to focus on student engagement.

The same holds for scaffolding. Rather than teachers spending time adapting a single text for three proficiency levels, AI can produce those versions in minutes, which, according to Lafond, leaves teachers time to review and refine as they know their students best. She explains how this works: “AI tools can translate materials, simplify complex texts, generate scaffolded activities, and draft feedback based on a student’s English language proficiency level.”

By saving teachers time, AI tools support, but do not replace, teachers. As Goldman puts it: “The role of the AI is to provide the science in a way that enables the teacher to maximize their art.” In this way, AI gives teachers more space to do what they do best: connect with their students and meet their needs.

System coherence strengthens instruction

In education, system coherence means seamlessly aligning instruction, assessment, and professional learning components to ensure a harmonious educational experience where everyone flourishes. AI tools thoughtfully integrated into a school’s existing system can strengthen instruction and overall coherence.

Goldman writes, “Teachers don’t need more complexity in their daily lives. They need easy-to-use technology that understands their curriculum, values their time, and puts instructional insights at their fingertips.”

When an instructional system is coherent, it improves student outcomes in tandem with teacher support. According to a report from the Consortium on Chicago School Research, “Schools with stronger instructional program coherence make higher gains in student achievement, and school improvement frameworks that incorporate instructional program coherence are more likely to advance student achievement than multiple, unrelated efforts.”

Without system coherence, fragmentation follows. As noted in HMH’s white paper on coherence in classroom AI, “The DIY era of online marketplaces showed us that bad outcomes follow when coherence is lost. The improvisational use of standalone AI tools risks repeating those same patterns, making it harder to ensure students are mastering the right content at the right time, in the right way.”

For school leaders

Early identification of at-risk students

AI provides school leaders with a transformative way to identify at-risk students, predict academic outcomes, and recommend targeted interventions. With high-quality AI tools, school leaders have access to dashboards and reporting tools that provide up-to-date student performance trends, helping them identify and address learning gaps at the classroom, school, or district level.

Some states are already building these capabilities into statewide systems. Kentucky’s Department of Education, for example, created an early warning tool that uses AI to analyze student data to identify students at risk of dropping out or failing, available to every district in the state.

At the classroom level, tools like HMH’s Amira Learning use AI to quickly and accurately screen an entire class for dyslexia risk.

When used effectively, AI provides school leaders with the tools to support teachers and connect students with the right support at the right time.

Disadvantages of AI in education

AI’s benefits come with real challenges. However, with the right support, educators and school leaders can thoughtfully navigate these challenges to continue to meet the needs of school communities. Here are some disadvantages of AI in education, and what can be done.

For students

Risk of short-circuiting learning

Many students, without guidance, see AI as a shortcut. They might see AI as something that can give them immediate responses rather than something they must engage with to produce high-quality work.

“If you’re at a point where your interest is in just getting the job done and getting onto the next thing as quickly as possible, students will short-circuit their own learning opportunity,” says Goldman.

What can be done: Avoiding AI isn’t the solution, but teaching students to use it well and developing AI literacy is. When students can critically evaluate and thoughtfully use AI tools, they can understand what AI can and can’t do and approach AI as a tool that assists learning rather than generates answers.

Academic integrity concerns

According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of teens say they have used chatbots to get help with schoolwork. In this discussion, Pat Yongpradit, chief academic officer at Code.org, and edtech leader Dr. Kecia Ray discuss how students have found ways to get around AI detection software, plus the risk of false positives, or AI incorrectly flagging human writing as AI-generated.

Goldman warns: “We need to be cautious to make sure students are doing all of the traditional learning—that they have the foundation, that they’re not becoming dependent on the machine.”

What can be done: Rather than relying on AI detection software alone, educators can focus on fostering academic integrity in the context of AI use. This means having explicit conversations with students about what it means to use AI ethically and creating assignments that require students to show their own thinking. For example, one article explains how educators can build students’ oral communication skills in an AI world, a skill that’s difficult for AI to replicate.

Teachers recognize that students need ethical AI training. To support schools, many states have already released guidance on the use of AI in K–12 schools—individual educators and schools don’t have to figure this out alone.

For teachers

Lack of professional development

According to an article by Lindsay Dworkin, senior vice president of policy at HMH, “Only 11% of educators report receiving ‘a lot’ of training on AI, yet nearly all (91%) are open to more.”

At the same time, as the ECR notes, while nearly 80% of educators feel confident using AI themselves, fewer than half feel ready to prepare students for an AI-driven world.

What can be done: Effective professional development can provide the skills educators need. HMH CEO Jack Lynch reinforces this: “As AI tools become more embedded in daily practice, educators are looking for meaningful support—training, guidance, and clear expectations—to ensure AI strengthens, not replaces, the human work at the center of teaching.”

Several organizations have offered guidance for teachers on their AI journey, including TeachAI, AI4K12, ISTE, AI for Education, and Digital Promise.

In the meantime, many teachers are turning to colleagues and online communities (such as through HMH’s Teacher’s Corner Facebook group) to share what’s working, raise concerns, and build confidence together.

Tool overload

The number of AI tools available to educators continues to grow. How many tools are needed? Which tools are worth the investment? Professional learning can help educators feel more confident navigating the tools available to them. However, juggling AI tools on top of existing responsibilities could still feel overwhelming.

What can be done: Dworkin suggests, “District and state leaders need to move beyond a ‘Wild West’ approach and create coherent strategies that give all students equitable access to safe, effective AI use.” This could mean establishing clear guidance on which AI tools are approved for use and prioritizing solutions that integrate with existing systems. For further support, the American Federation of Teachers provides a living framework so that leaders can make more informed decisions about AI in schools. 

For school leaders

Data privacy and the absence of clear guidance

With 87% of educators saying all AI users should be taught ethical use, Dworkin flags that “educators shouldn’t be left to figure this out on their own. Clear and consistent guidance can help build public trust and educator comfort.”

As Goldman notes in HMH’s guide to AI privacy in schools, student data privacy must remain a top priority as AI becomes more deeply integrated into schools. “Trust,” he writes, “isn’t built overnight—it’s earned through thoughtful planning, open communication, and a commitment to putting students first.”

What can be done: School leaders can audit existing AI tools for how student data is collected, stored, and deleted. To ensure peace of mind, vendors with zero data retention policies should be prioritized. Additionally, school leaders can maintain open dialogue with families and caregivers about data practices and provide their staff with ongoing training on privacy and ethical use of AI.

Moving forward: Navigating the pros and cons of AI in schools

If you’re an educator, you know what works best for your district, school, or classroom—and you know which students would especially benefit from AI. AI is an ever-evolving frontier. With hundreds of tools to choose from, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The key is ensuring your voice and your students’ voices remain at the center of learning while determining what best fits your needs.

Keep exploring the pros and cons of AI in education:

Key takeaways

• AI is most effective when it expands educators’ ability to personalize learning, provide feedback, and support students.
• Many of the biggest concerns about AI—from academic integrity to data privacy—can be addressed through clear guidance, training, and responsible use.
• As AI becomes more common in schools, success will depend on balancing innovation with responsibility.
• The schools that benefit most from AI will be those that pair new technology with strong instructional practices and educator expertise.

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