Education

Invasion of the Robot Teachers

New Mexico required kindergarten through second-grade students to learn literacy skills from a purple-haired AI avatar called Amira. Parents are pushing back. 

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 9.2.2026 12:06 PM

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(Illustration: Funtap P/Dreamstime/Midjourney)

In New Mexico, Facebook and Instagram are considered a "public nuisance," but letting artificial intelligence systems record and store young kids' voices and score their reading prowess is state policy.

Starting last school year, the state required all public schools to use Amira—a personified AI system designed to assess and instruct elementary school students—for mandatory literacy assessments, dyslexia screenings, and weekly tutoring sessions in kindergarten through second grade.

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As the 2026–27 school year drew to a start, some parents and school districts began pushing back, concerned about how Amira Learning retained and used student voice recordings and whether it was actually effective at assessing student reading skills.

The state's Public Education Department (PED) responded by granting school districts the right to opt out of Amira this year if they obtain PED approval.

Nonetheless, robo-teachers and testers were rolled out with seemingly little oversight or notice last year and are still being used in most New Mexico school districts this year, despite the fact that evidence on the efficacy of AI tutoring is thin.

And New Mexico isn't alone in allowing or requiring AI tutors and testers. "Amira is required for assessments in two states—New Mexico and Idaho—and is authorized for state use in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Texas though some New Mexico policymakers have admitted its rollout was hasty," reports the Albuquerque Journal.

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I'm far from an AI skeptic or unilaterally averse to childhood technology use and screen time. But I instinctively balk—perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly—at using AI to monitor or teach very young students. And from what I've learned looking into Amira and New Mexico's hasty rollout of it, I think parents are right to be concerned.

Recording Children's Voice 

One of the biggest concerns expressed by New Mexico parents and educators concerns the student-reading sessions that Amira records.

"Our families are asking questions we cannot fully answer: Where are these voice recordings stored, and for how long? Who can access them? Are they used to train or refine the vendor's AI models? What safeguards protect them from breach or misuse?" wrote Jennifer Guy, superintendent of Los Alamos Public Schools, in a July 31 letter to the New Mexico PED. "A child's voice is effectively biometric data, and parents are rightly uneasy about it being collected and retained........

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