Parents, Students, and Educators are at the Center of AI in Special Education

As artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities rapidly advance, there is increasing discussion around how it could be used in special education classrooms. Policies are being developed to guide how AI tools meet the needs of parents, students with disabilities, and educators. The first foundation of such policies, according to the US Department of Education Office of Educational Technology, should be to put humans at the center of AI in education, including special education.

Any education-focused AI policy should guide decision-making in a way that empowers students and those closest to students - parents, and teachers. While AI can offer potential benefits like personalized learning and automating routine tasks, humans must remain central. Teachers, therapists, parents and students themselves should determine what an AI system's outputs and recommendations actually mean for their unique situations.

Ultimately, AI systems in special education should be designed with the core principle of "human-in-the-loop" decision making. The goal is to keep human autonomy, dignity and expertise as the essential drivers, using AI as a supportive tool. This could mean AI providing customized learning content recommendations for a student's IEP, but then the special education team determines if/how to implement it. Or an AI system could flag certain patterns in a student's data that may warrant intervention, but educators and parents then investigate the root cause and consider several options for intervention.

As AI applications are explored, policies must safeguard against AI being used to completely automate high-stakes decisions or circumvent human judgment. The focus should be leveraging AI's capabilities to enhance special education services and instruction, while reinforcing human agency over appropriate, ethical and unbiased implementation.

For parents new to AI's potential in special education, it's understandable to feel some mixture of apprehension and optimism. Ongoing open dialogue, data protections and human-centered policies will be important to guide new technologies to remain in service of your child's needs.

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This blog post was inspired by The U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology’s policy report, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning. Every parent of a child with special needs should read it!