The Blogs: The Best Use of AI in Schools May Have Nothing to Do With Students

Most conversations about AI and schools end up in the classroom.

Should students use ChatGPT, Claude, etc?

Is it cheating?

How should teachers change assignments?

Will students still learn to write, research, and think critically?

We should be having those conversations.

But I we’re overlooking another part of the school entirely.

The office.

Schools are complicated organizations.

There is enrollment and re-enrollment. Admissions. Scheduling. Billing. Compliance. Staff onboarding. Parent communication. Reporting. Purchasing. Student records. Forms that need to be completed, information that needs to move between systems, and countless emails that need to be answered.

And if you work in education you know the list of responsibilities is endless.

More than anybody could ever imagine

And all of it has to happen.

However depending on the school much of it is still being done manually.

I’ve spent enough time around schools to see incredibly talented people spending hours moving information from one place to another, creating reports, tracking down forms, rebuilding schedules, answering the same questions, or trying to figure out which system has the information they need.

That’s time.

More importantly, it’s human capacity.

And in schools, human capacity is incredibly valuable.

Every hour a school leader spends fixing a process is an hour they aren’t supporting a teacher.

Every hour a teacher spends on unnecessary administrative work is an hour they aren’t planning, mentoring, learning, or engaging with students.

Every frustrating process a parent encounters takes a little attention away from the relationship we actually want that family to have with the school.

This is where some of the most interesting opportunities for AI in education may be hiding.

Not in front of the classroom. Not with the students.

Behind it.

Imagine information moving between systems without someone having to enter it twice.

A schedule that takes hours instead of days to build.

Routine parent questions getting quick, accurate answers while more complicated ones immediately reach a person.

Reports being assembled automatically instead of someone spending Friday afternoon building them.

A new employee arriving on their first day with everything already set up because the right processes happened automatically in the background.

Some of these solutions will involve AI.

Some will involve automation.

Some will simply require fixing a process that hasn’t been questioned in years.

That’s actually the point really.

We shouldn’t be looking for places to put AI.

We should be looking for work that doesn’t need to consume as much human time as it does today. And then see how to solve it. Might be AI. Might not be AI.

That distinction matters.

The value of a great Jewish day school has never been its administrative efficiency.

It’s the teacher who notices a student having a difficult day.

The administrator who knows a family well enough to pick up the phone.

The educator who brings a text to life.

The coach, mentor, rabbi, counselor, or staff member who becomes an important adult in a child’s life.

Those are deeply human experiences.

And they require something our schools never seem to have enough of.

Time.

That’s why I believe we are starting the AI conversation in the wrong place.

There will be enormous changes in the classroom. Teachers and school leaders absolutely need to think about them.

But perhaps one of the first questions every school should ask is much simpler: