New Google partnership a ‘sizable investment’ in AI for teachers

This article was originally published by The 74.

A top professional organization for teachers has inked a three-year deal with Google to offer AI training to “all six million K-12 teachers and higher education faculty” in the U.S., an audacious undertaking by the tech giant that could reach millions of students and dwarf previous tech forays into education.

“While Google’s been offering educational products for 20 years, this is a different moment for us,” said Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager of education.

He called the effort the largest for Google in two decades of working with teachers and students. Phillips didn’t immediately offer a price tag, but said it’s “a sizable investment.”

The training, offered through the ed tech-focused group ISTE+ASCD, will include hands-on experience with Google’s Gemini and NotebookLM tools, offering certificates and digital badges.

“We have just heard so much feedback from teachers that are just saying, ‘We are not prepared,’” said Richard Culatta, ISTE+ASCD’s CEO. “‘We don’t have the training, we don’t have the background that we need for the realities of teaching in an AI world, both teaching in the classroom and also, secondarily, but equally as important, preparing students for the world that they’re going to be in.’”

It’s the latest in a series of large-scale teacher training initiatives over the past few months. In July, the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, announced its own $23 million National Academy for AI Instruction, partnering with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to train up to 400,000 educators.

At the time, AFT President Randi Weingarten said the academy was a way to ensure that teachers, not technology, remain in control of the classroom.

But AFT’s partnership with OpenAI and Anthropic drew sharp criticism from educators and researchers, who questioned whether tech companies with products to sell and market share to protect are the right architects for teacher training. Education technology critic Audrey Watters called AFT’s academy “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for,” while ed tech analyst Alex Sarlin said tech companies were in a “land-grab moment.”

Microsoft has also launched its own community-based platform, Microsoft Elevate for Educators, offering free courses, live training sessions and credentials. 

Google itself in 2024 committed $25 million through its philanthropic arm to several nonprofits, including ISTE+ASCD, 4-H, and aiEDU, with particular attention to reaching underserved communities. Its goal at the time was to reach more than half a million K-12 and college students, as well as educators.

ISTE+ASCD — the group is a combination of two that merged in 2023 — was the beneficiary of $10 million of the $25 million, saying it would collaborate with several other groups, including the National Education Association and the Computer Science Teachers Association.

Though Google has its own AI platform, Culatta insisted that the work won’t be about pushing specific tools, saying that kids need enduring AI skills as the tools change.

In 2023 ISTE+ASCD introduced its own AI chatbot built on educator-focused content and trained solely on materials developed or approved by the organization. The chabot tapped into curated databases in a bid to give teachers routine access to high-quality research. 

In some ways, efforts like those of AFT and others reflect a lack of leadership at the federal level. The Trump administration, through an executive order, has backed efforts to expand AI in schools, but has also eliminated the Office of Educational Technology, which long focused on making access to technology equitable until Trump closed its doors last spring.

Culatta, who ran the office under President Obama, said it’s important that organizations like ISTE+ASCD “step up when there are key needs that may not be filled at the federal level. And we just want to make sure that, regardless of where we would like some things to happen, at this point we just have to do all-hands-on-deck and make sure we’re supporting kids and teachers.”

‘Massive Undertaking’ Or Waste of Time?

The sheer scale of Monday’s announcement underscores how urgently educators see the need to learn about AI: RAND Corp. last spring found that the number of school districts training teachers on AI more than doubled from 2023 to 2024, from 23% to 48%. Researchers predicted that as many as three-fourths of districts would be in the AI training business by the end of 2025. 

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, said the new partnership is “a massive undertaking that is urgently needed right now. I hope it includes a research component so we can learn from it because much more is needed.”

Google’s Phillips said the company has “multiple arms of research happening all around the world” and “will start to produce some of those and share them publicly where we’re doing studies” in classrooms.

“We’ll see how the results land, but ultimately we want to improve learning outcomes,” he said. “We want to help change. We want to bend the curves on proficiency.”

Lake, who has long urged schools to take AI readiness seriously, said school principals, district leaders and teachers-in-training “also need to be AI literate, as do students and families. We can’t rely only on private companies with an interest in AI products to fund and lead AI readiness.”

Others were more sharply critical of the new partnership.

Justin Reich, an associate professor of digital media at MIT and host of the podcast The Homework Machine, said industry-sponsored professional development is, at its core, a “customer acquisition” campaign. Since ISTE+ASCD is historically both a membership-driven teacher organization and an industry trade association, he asked, “How can it be an honest broker to those two constituencies, while also launching an enormous initiative that privileges the products of one particular vendor?”

Google’s past educator certification programs, he said, “focused more on tool use and adoption than on learning,” with no substantive evidence that improved student outcomes followed.

Phillips said its research is ongoing, but noted that its Guided Learning app is allowing students to self-pace lessons. “Where they struggle, they can dive deeper and learn more and get more up-to-date,” he said. Among several unpublished findings, Phillips said, is one that found students spend more time on topics they’re struggling with and end up learning these topics more deeply. 

Culatta admitted that Google would of course like to see its products in the hands of teachers. But he said he and his colleagues “want to make sure that if there are products going to schools — and they already are — that they’re being used in ways that are really impactful.”

He added, “If it was going to just be, ‘Here’s how to use Gemini,’ Google actually doesn’t need us. We are coming in because Google is looking for somebody who can say, ‘What are really the best practices for learning with AI, not necessarily learning about AI?’”

Google’s Phillips said teachers and students “can choose other products in the market and so forth, but this program does come with using our products so that we can help teachers really get started, get going.” 

He noted a “super-generous free tier” to make the tools widely accessible, and the training to use it. “But schools, districts, teachers themselves have choice, and I think that’s perfectly fine, but we want to play a role with not just providing tools, giving people access, but actually helping them apply it and use it” to jumpstart “safe, appropriate use of AI.”

MIT’s Reich said his deeper concern is what he said is the near-total absence of evidence underlying AI professional development, either to teach educators how to use AI in their classrooms or simply to teach them how AI and large language models work.

“Literally no one on the planet understands how [AI] works,” he said. “The best computer scientists in the world cannot explain why LLMs generate plausible sounding text in a convincing theoretical framework.”

Reich recounted asking engineers at a Google DeepMind event in November whether they knew how to train junior engineers to use AI tools effectively in their work. “Every single person I talked to said, ‘No,’” he said. “If Google doesn’t know how to effectively use AI to write code, what is this business about teaching people AI literacy? We just don’t know.”

Benjamin Riley, a well-known AI skeptic who founded the think tank Cognitive Resonance, was more blunt, casting the Google partnership as part of an ongoing process making ISTE+ASCD a “shill” for Big Tech.

“I admit I’m fascinated to see the major Big Tech companies competing so vigorously to control ‘the education market,’” Riley said. “OpenAI is giving away their premium model to teachers (until they won’t), and now Google is doing whatever this is.”

In the past, Riley has questioned whether offering teachers and students skills such as “AI literacy” and “AI readiness” are effective, even as many others warn that they’ll be essential.

“I guess I’d credit their clairvoyance a tad more if ISTE+ASCD had not claimed, as recently as just a few years ago, that ‘the future’ would also demand that everyone learn to code. Oops!”

Riley, who also founded the cognitive science advocacy and research group Deans for Impact, predicted that much of the training will end up wasting teachers’ time, Google’s money and ISTE+ASCD’s relevance. 

“Human beings have evolved to learn from each other in the context of our relationships. This is the superpower of our species, and the kids who’ve grown up in the past 20 years are increasingly disgusted by what tech has done to them personally, and society more broadly. They are not happy about the world we’ve given them, and their voices are growing ever louder.”

Culatta, for his part, said AI “is not going away. Does learning happen with people connected with each other? Sure. It’s not the only way learning happens, but it’s a very important way. And we actually think AI can help make those human-to-human learning experiences much better.”