Highlights
Last week, the country’s largest school district, New York City Public Schools (NYCPS), pushed pause on AI in the classroom. According to the new policy, shaped in part by feedback from families, educators, and students, AI will be banned and daily screen time will be limited in grades K-8 for the 2026-2027 school year. The policy also blocks companion chatbots for all grades. In the words of NYCPS Chancellor Kamar Samuels, the goal of the pause is to “make sure technology serves learning—not the other way around.”
Two days later, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest school district in the United States, enacted a similar policy that went even further by prohibiting the use of AI in all grades and even restricting specific AI features within Google Classroom. This “pause” builds on recent policies by the LAUSD to block cellphone use during the school day and limit the number of hours a student can work on a laptop in a given week.
Coverage in the New York Times underscored the support of parents for reconsidering the place of technology in schools. “Both developments [in L.A. and New York],” according to the Times, “seem to respond to an extraordinary movement, driven by parents, to push back against the incursion of technology and screens into childhood.”
In the midst of all this political action, where do American parents actually stand on AI in the classroom? This November, we will be releasing a report that will help answer that question, based on a survey of 2,000 parents of school-age kids fielded by YouGov in July of 2026. That report will cover a wide range of issues, including where parents stand on the policy to pause AI in schools (which we present here as a preview).
Most Parents Support Pausing AI in Schools
In one part of our survey, we asked American parents of school-aged children, “Would you support or oppose such a policy to pause the introduction of AI into schools?” Here is what we found:
As the figure below shows, 75% of parents support pausing AI in schools, while only 25% oppose this measure. That is, parents support pausing the introduction of AI in schools by a margin of 3 to 1.
According to our findings, it is not just parents of elementary-school students who support the pause, but also parents of middle or high schoolers. In fact, 72% of parents of high-school age children strongly support pausing the introduction of AI in schools, while 28% oppose it. In sum, a strong majority of parents of children in each grade level support pausing AI.
Bipartisan Agreement Among Parents
Is AI in schools a partisan issue? On the one hand, blue cities like LA and New York are pushing pause. On the other hand, the Trump administration has pushed full steam ahead on AI adoption, with its “Pledge to America’s Youth” and promotion of robot tutors—though its position is more mixed these days, as evidenced by the Department of Education’s recent “Dear Colleague Letter,” which advises that technologies must be “judged by their impact on learning, not simply whether they happen on a screen.”
With midterms right around the corner, we wanted to know what voters think. Is the policy only popular in blue districts like LAUSD or NYCPS or opposed by Trump votes? No, we find that parents across the political spectrum support this measure.
In fact, Republican voters support this policy by a margin of 3 to 1. Support amongst Democrats is similarly strong. After testing for statistical significance, we find that Independents are significantly more likely to support this measure than are Democrats (and on par with Republicans). The policy is truly bipartisan.
Support From Parents of All Education Levels
Does education affect how parents view this policy? Conceivably, parents with graduate degrees could be more excited about having their kids learn to operate a frontier technology that enables computers to solve complex tasks. Or, perhaps parents with only a high school education see AI as an opportunity to give their children access to powerful tools that can level the playing field.
However, we find no difference among parents by education level. Strong majorities of parents support the policy to pause AI in schools, no matter how much education they have received. Indeed, as we will show in our fuller report in November, a strong majority of parents support pausing the use of AI in schools across all demographic groups.
What Matters Most to Parents
The Institute for Family Studies has surveyed how Americans feel about AI on eight separate occasions. We have yet to find voter opposition to a policy that would give lawmakers more latitude to govern AI, let alone significant enthusiasm for AI in general. As we put it in one previous report, “our results range from cases where the public overwhelmingly opposes the interests and arguments of the AI industry, to cases where it is at best ambivalent towards them.”
Like our previous findings, our latest findings underscore that when it comes to AI, the top priorities for parents are safety and student success (whatever other advantages AI might provide).
As we will explore in greater detail in the November report, parental support for pausing AI in schools is far from a simple ‘no’ to new technologies. Rather, it’s an indication that parents are no longer willing to let America’s classrooms morph into labs for technological experiments on their children. Parents don’t want empty promises of “revolutionary” education; they want a safe and effective learning environment that offers their children a real chance at academic success.
Jared Hayden is a Policy Analyst for the IFS Family First Tech Initiative. Michael Toscano is Senior Fellow, Director of the Family First Technology Initiative for the Institute for Family Studies. Ken Burchfiel is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.
*Photo credit: Shutterstock
