In lower Manhattan, there’s a building at 26 Broadway. It’s a grand, historic address in the financial district, the kind of street where there’s still a hint of ambition and money in the air. The Next Generation Technology High School was scheduled to open there this autumn. One hundred chairs. One thousand people applied. collaborations with Google and Carnegie Mellon University. eleventh-grade calculus. credentials in digital audio production, coding, and cybersecurity. On paper, it appeared to be exactly what a city attempting to prepare its kids for a world dominated by artificial intelligence would construct.
It didn’t open. In late April, Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels quietly withdrew the proposal from a planned vote before the Panel for Educational Policy had a chance to reject it, which by most accounts would have been a resounding defeat. The panel’s chair, Gregory Faulkner, stated that the great majority of the emails he got from parents were critical. His assessment of the space was direct: “If there’s anything that even has a hint of AI, there’s strong opposition to it.”
Let’s take a moment to consider that statement. not the curriculum of the school. Not the admissions guidelines. not the location of the building. Anything that has an AI component.
Exactly, the opposition wasn’t irrational. Earlier this month, parents and educators gathered outside City Hall with signs demanding a two-year ban on AI in classrooms. They had legitimate concerns that should be taken seriously. Research has indicated a connection between increased AI use and diminished critical thinking. Teenagers’ long-term cognitive effects are still genuinely unknown. Instructors have observed students using generative tools in ways that seem to undermine the learning process itself. These concerns are real and shouldn’t be written off as a form of technophobia.
However, there was obviously more to the criticism of Next Gen. Veteran education advocate Leonie Haimson, who has spent 25 years observing fights in New York City schools, said the outcry was unlike anything she had ever seen. That’s a startling statement about a city that has fought fiercely for decades over racial integration, gifted programs, school closures, and rezoning. This specific moment, for some reason, opened something.
The equity aspect was a part of it, and that’s where the argument really got complicated. Next Gen was situated in one of the wealthiest areas of the city and was intended to be a selective, screened school that admitted students based on their grades. For those reasons, Faulkner, who claimed to personally favor the concept of an AI-focused school, opposed it. He wasn’t particularly worried about chatbots or algorithms. It was about a well-known pattern: students who already have advantages are given access to a demanding, well-funded program, while everyone else falls behind. “Poor kids and kids of color wind up in one school system, and wealthy and privileged wind up in another,” he stated.
This framing was challenged by the school’s supporters, who pointed out that Next Gen’s applicant pool was 39 percent Hispanic, 21 percent Black, 20 percent Asian, and 17 percent white. They contended that it was contradictory in and of itself to close a school with that demographic profile in the name of equity. It’s possible that the school demonstrated a sincere commitment to diversity and that the larger system it would be a part of is still incredibly unfair at the same time.
It is more difficult to argue that eliminating Next Gen will solve any problems. An AI pronunciation tool is still in use in elementary schools back in Brooklyn. Students in Queens continue to request essay reviews from Google Gemini. Without a single protest outside the building, a robotics lab in the Bronx is utilizing AI tools. Schools in New York City already have the technology. AI’s place in education has never really been a question. It had to do with who gets to learn it, how, and under whose guidance.
Samuels has stated that he plans to review the proposal. Additionally, he has given the education department the responsibility of creating actual guidelines for the use of AI, which, to be honest, ought to have been done years ago. The resultant “playbook” received a lot of flak for being ambiguous, which is telling in and of itself. The most honest thing about this whole situation is probably that no one in a position of authority has a definitive answer yet.
It’s not that parents in New York City detest technology, as the Next Gen cancellation revealed. It’s because they’re worn out, wary, and don’t think the people making decisions for their kids have given any of this enough thought. That school on 26 Broadway was shut down before it even got underway because of that feeling, not the AI itself.
