Teachers are heading back to school, and ChatGPT is coming with them.
OpenAI announced 55 new partnerships with American school districts on Wednesday, roughly doubling the reach of its ChatGPT for Teachers product. The districts signed on represent more than 300,000 staffers and 2 million students. The product, a slightly tweaked version of OpenAI’s traditional business offering, aims to bring teachers on board with AI tools and give districts oversight.
The product is strictly for adults, since OpenAI is not yet integrating student accounts or student-facing features.
Not everyone is on board with AI in the classroom, as more students use it to complete assignments. A Pew Research Center survey last year found that more than half of teenagers have used AI chatbots for help with schoolwork, and more still believe their peers have used them to cheat. Some parents have begun organizing against AI in schools.
Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education, said in a press briefing about the ChatGPT for Teachers rollout that improvements in AI’s capabilities make “teacher judgment, teacher guidance, and district oversight even more important than before.”
OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teachers last November and has committed to keeping it free through June 2028. Districts in 30 states have now onboarded with the tool, OpenAI said, with the densest uptake in the Los Angeles area and in the Northeast. The company said several of the nation’s largest school districts now participate, including Houston’s.
OpenAI’s product includes onboarding and prompts tailored to educators. A company webpage suggests that teachers use ChatGPT to develop lesson plans and explanations on topics.
OpenAI says it doesn’t train its models for this product on information users submit to the chatbot. The company has also signed data privacy agreements that cover 16 states, it said.
The company will provide its latest AI models to the product in “waves,” Belsky said, adding, “The goal is really to keep teachers and districts at the frontier.”
She also said she hopes the product will help teachers “save time, support students, and strengthen their own professional judgment.”
Christine Mai, the Houston district’s director of innovation, said on the briefing that her district has used ChatGPT to help staff write curricula and summarize documents. She said there has to be a “human in the loop.”
“The teacher is still the professional, right?” Mai said. “They still need to make the final judgment in terms of, if they’re going to use AI in that way, then they are also responsible for making sure that it’s accurate, that it actually will benefit the students.”
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