Washington, Aug 25 (IANS) US Education Secretary Linda McMahon said on Monday that artificial intelligence must be embraced in schools but should operate with safeguards and never be treated as a replacement for teachers.

“We haven’t really talked about regulating, but what we are talking about is making sure that we’re embracing AI,” McMahon told reporters during a press gaggle at the White House here.

“AI is here. I have been to the Alpha School in Austin, Texas. I’ve seen it at work,” she said. “But we need to embrace this technology, but it has to have guardrails because it’s very important that we understand that AI cannot replace a teacher in the classroom.”

McMahon stressed the importance of direct contact between teachers and students even as schools introduce rapidly developing technology into lessons.

“We need that human interaction with children in the classroom, but it can act as an, an individual tutor for children to help those who may be falling a little bit behind to, to go over, programs again, or it can feed more advanced, classes for those who are, excelling,” she said.

“And so it has a, it has a really wonderful opportunity used correctly, to, to service children.”

McMahon also outlined the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and return greater control over schools to the states.

She said President Donald Trump had told her that the federal education system required a “hard reset” after decades of spending and declining test scores.

“He said, look, we have failed our children in education. The Department of Education was set up in 1980. We spent over three trillion dollars. Our test scores have continued to decline,” McMahon said.

“So we’re failing our students and he wanted a hard reset for education. Education returned to the states where it needs to be.”

McMahon described the department as largely a conduit for money authorised by Congress. She said programmes administered by the department had existed under other federal agencies before it was established.

The administration is now signing inter-agency agreements to shift some responsibilities to those agencies. McMahon said the transfers were intended to demonstrate to Congress that the programmes could operate more efficiently elsewhere.

“We know ultimately Congress must vote to close the Department of Education,” she said. “So I said, ‘Let me prove it. Let me prove it to you that it will work.’ And so that’s what we’re in the process of doing.”

On school choice, McMahon said a federal tax credit contained in Trump’s major tax and spending legislation represented “the closest we’ve come so far to nationalizing the opportunity for school choice”.

The programme would allow governors to opt in and establish scholarship-granting organisations. Individuals could contribute to the organisations and receive a tax credit of up to $1,700, she said.

McMahon said the funding could help families move children out of failing schools or institutions that did not meet their needs. It could also pay for after-school or private tutoring and assist children with disabilities.

She also said an inter-agency agreement had been signed with the Treasury Department to transfer monitoring of the $1.7 trillion student debt system in stages. The administration was approaching those transfers deliberately, she said, while deciding which responsibilities should move and when.

The US Department of Education became a Cabinet-level agency under legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and began operating in 1980. It administers federal education funding, civil rights enforcement, student aid and education data programmes, while states and local authorities retain primary responsibility for running public schools.

–IANS

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