Microsoft seeding Washington schools with free AI • The Register
Not content to shove Copilot into every corner of the enterprise it can think of, Microsoft has announced plans to force feed AI to students across its home state of Washington.
Microsoft president Brad Smith announced a new program called Elevate Washington last week that he described as taking advantage of an “opportunity gap” across Washington schools to ensure that every district in the state has equal access to AI tools – Microsoft’s AI tools, naturally.
“Analysis of Microsoft data by our AI for Good Lab shows a marked disparity in AI use across the state,” Smith noted. Districts in the western part of Washington, where most of the money and economic opportunity is (driven by companies like Microsoft and Amazon), are also where most AI usage happens. In eastern Washington, on the other hand, AI usage is far less prevalent. Microsoft, a company pushing hard for people to adopt AI, naturally wants to change that.
“As we’ve learned firsthand from working for a decade on broadband accessibility across the state, this isn’t just a technology gap; it’s an opportunity gap,” Smith said. “In tomorrow’s economy, those who understand and use AI will do better than those who don’t.”
Bridging that gap through the Elevate Washington program will see Microsoft doling out three years of free Copilot Studio for all of Washington State’s school districts and community colleges, plus and $25K in consulting grants for a select few.
High school students across Washington will get three free years of Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 desktop apps, Teams for Education, and Learning Accelerators (AIs designed to help students study – here’s hoping they’re accurate). Community college students are also getting a handout from Redmond in the form of 12 free months of Microsoft 365 personal and its myriad Copilot integrations.
As for educators themselves, Microsoft said they’d “support AI training programs,” but with a focus on “streamlining administrative tasks and enhancing operational efficiencies” – a.k.a., how to use AI in the educational equivalent of the enterprise.
Teachers will also be getting support to help them “explore AI adoption, implementation, and best practices in education,” but Microsoft didn’t mention any specifics as to what that training will involve.
Get ’em while they’re young!
Microsoft’s announcement comes the day after the Center for Democracy and Technology published a study that noted just 50 percent of students with access to AI actually used it for school purposes, with many turning to it for companionship, and even romance. Teachers who responded to CDT’s study weren’t too thrilled with AI’s impact on their students either, with 71 percent saying that AI was weakening key academic skills like writing and critical thinking. Most teachers also felt that they weren’t getting the necessary training to deal with those negative outcomes, either.
CDT isn’t the first to point out the less-than-stellar effect AI might be having on academic development. MIT reported over the summer that its research found less brain activity among students who used AI to help them write essays, and their recall of what was written suffered as well.
Like the raft of government discount deals the Trump administration has signed since it became hell bent on adopting AI in the face of FOMO, Microsoft’s Washington state AI deal comes with expiration dates, meaning districts, teachers, and students are getting a few years of free AI to decide whether it’s worthwhile or not before Microsoft tries to get them to pay.
The whole program is reminiscent of earlier efforts from Microsoft and other tech giants to seed schools with technology, something Google has done to great success in the US, with Chromebooks and Google Apps serving as something of a default in many districts. But those previous products didn’t come with a risk of producing hallucinatory slop and impaired reasoning.
Microsoft didn’t respond to questions for this story. ®
