Executive Summary

American workers and students must prepare for significant changes to the workforce and economy due to artificial intelligence, which is already reshaping the nature of work across the economy. While there is good reason to question how much AI should be incorporated into K-12 learning and schooling, it is evident that AI will transform the world that today’s students will live in. The White House Council of Economic Advisors, for example, has estimated that 20 percent of Americans are employed in occupations that are vulnerable to replacement by AI, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, raising national unemployment to between 10 and 20 percent. At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected job growth over the next decade in many occupational fields due to augmentation and productivity gains.

The American K-12 and postsecondary education systems and job training programs are not currently designed to prepare students and workers for a labor market that is disrupted by AI. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (“The Nation’s Report Card”) showed lower test scores in reading and mathematics compared to a decade prior, as well as growing achievement gaps between low- and high-performing students. While public schools are working to remediate learning losses that occurred during prolonged school closures, many public schools are not prepared to teach AI literacy, computational thinking, or other digital skills. In a recent study, for example, the majority of educators reported that their school districts’ policies on AI were unclear. American colleges and universities, meanwhile, have traditionally been slow to adapt to technological trends; today, they have not broadly introduced programs to ensure that students are prepared to thrive in the twenty-first-century workforce. And government-sponsored job training programs are of questionable value and tend to focus on short-term employment goals and legacy skills. They are similarly not focused on preparing workers for AI-required job reskilling.

In April 2025, President Trump issued an executive order aiming to prepare the U.S. and the nation’s youth for a future shaped by AI. The administration aims to provide early exposure to AI in elementary and secondary education, encourage student and teacher engagement with the technology, and encourage comprehensive teacher training to prepare educators to use AI in the classroom. The White House also directed federal departments and agencies to use existing funding and programs to promote AI’s use in education, which could involve applying federal funding to teacher training programs. Beyond K-12 education, the executive order directs the Department of Labor to develop apprenticeships related to AI to help Americans prepare for future workforce opportunities.

The Trump administration is right to promote a national strategy for encouraging AI-related education and workforce training activities to prepare students and workers for the changing workforce. Many of the initiatives directed by the executive order have the potential to strengthen the value of federal education and job training programs and provide more direct and meaningful benefits for the American people.

In addition to these reforms, we recommend the following:

1. The Trump administration should engage the private sector and civil society to promote and advance AI education. Moreover, the administration should direct the federal education R&D enterprise to apply existing funding programs to encourage innovating in AI education.

2. The administration and Congress should apply AI to increase transparency about K-12 public education spending, academic achievement, and options for children to transfer to better learning environments.

3. The administration should direct the Departments of Education and Labor to begin regular forecasting of potential workforce disruptions due to AI’s displacement or augmentation of American workers.

4. The administration and Congress should reform federal education R&D programs by applying AI to highlight opportunities for the implementation of evidence-based best practices and to support the development of AI tools that improve learning.

5. The administration and Congress should repurpose some of the funding provided for the Education Innovation and Research program, which received $284 million in FY 2023, to create an Open Education Technology Fund to support open source tools that improve learning opportunities.

6. The administration should provide guidance for state and school districts on establishing pathways for workers to transition to teaching and other education careers as anticipated workforce disruptions occur.

7. The administration and Congress should modernize government-sponsored workforce and job training programs to provide workers with better opportunities for acquiring new skills and accessing new opportunities in the workforce.

8. To inform the ongoing use of AI in the classroom, the administration and Congress should promote the collection and sharing of useful and timely data that is essential for R&D efforts in education.

9. The administration and Congress should ensure that the education sector’s adoption of AI is consistent with federal privacy laws and provide guidance to states, school districts, schools, and postsecondary institutions to secure sensitive data and maintain students’ privacy.