About half of the candidates running for Chicago's Board of Education have signed a pledge promising to limit artificial intelligence tools, screen time, and biometric data collection in Chicago Public Schools classrooms — while the other half, including two sitting board members, have stayed silent or declined to sign. The split comes just months before the November election, which will be the first in Chicago history to seat all 21 board members by popular vote rather than mayoral appointment.
A Pledge Born From Parent Frustration
The Human-Centered Education Pledge was organized by the advocacy group Illinois Families for Public Schools, which asked Chicago school board candidates to commit to a set of restrictions on classroom technology, according to Axios. The pledge calls for a three-year moratorium on generative AI use, limits on screen time in all grades, a ban on one-to-one digital device use before third grade, and the appointment of a chief privacy officer tasked with ensuring student privacy is fully protected at all times. It also prohibits the collection of biometric information, though it carves out an exception allowing such data collection when needed to fulfill access laws for students with disabilities.
Candidates who have signed the pledge include Che “Rhymefest” Smith and Jessica Biggs, and the report notes that Chicago Teachers Union-backed candidates were among those who signed on. Victor Henderson said he will not sign the pledge, telling Axios that CPS should move carefully, transparently, and responsibly on AI rather than committing to blanket restrictions. Two other candidates, Jennifer Custer and Sendhil Revuluri, did not respond when Axios reached out with questions about the pledge. Custer previously won a tight race for a District 1 board seat in the 2024 election.
Parent Group Alleges an Opaque Gemini Rollout
Cassie Creswell, tied to Illinois Families for Public Schools, said kindergartners in CPS are already using an AI literacy tutor that records their speech, and she said the district is on the verge of putting an AI chatbot onto every high school student's Chromebook that can do their homework for them. She called for clear protective policies covering technology's role in schools, screen time, generative AI use, and student data collection. The group has separately criticized a rollout of Google Gemini to CPS high schoolers as opaque, according to background reporting tied to a WBEZ segment referenced in coverage of the pledge effort.
CPS spokesperson Mary Ann Fergus pushed back, saying the claims about the district installing AI chatbots for high schoolers are inaccurate and highly misleading, and the district maintains it is not installing AI chatbots for high school students' use. CPS explains its approach to artificial intelligence in an internal AI guidebook, and the district has said elementary students in grades K-8 use Amira Learning, an evidence-based AI-supported reading tutoring platform, only as a supplemental resource. Amira Learning is used in many CPS elementary schools and operates within the district's existing online policies, which separately block unapproved third-party AI tools from the network.
State Guidance Leaves the Hard Calls to Local Boards
The dispute over the pledge is unfolding against a backdrop of new state policy. Public Act 104-0399, signed into law in August 2025, required the Illinois State Board of Education to publish comprehensive statewide K-12 AI guidelines by July 1, 2026, according to AI Law Tracker. ISBE met that deadline with a 400-page guide that stresses the importance of human relationships in teaching and learning and states that schools serve academic, developmental, and civic purposes concurrently, framing AI as a means to inform teaching rather than an end in itself, as reported by the Quincy Herald-Whig. The guide requires deliberate, context-sensitive, and locally determined purposes for informed AI use, and notably does not call for a moratorium on generative AI use — leaving that kind of restriction up to individual districts and their boards to decide.
That gap between state guidance and local authority is precisely what is fueling the pledge campaign. Because ISBE left binding operational rules to local school boards, groups like Illinois Families for Public Schools are turning to candidate commitments as their main lever for change ahead of a board that, for the first time, will answer directly to voters rather than the mayor. A 2026 Brookings Institution report reviewing more than 400 research articles concluded that the current risks of generative AI in children's education overshadow its benefits, a finding cited by pledge supporters as evidence for caution, according to the Brookings Institution.
A Historic Election With High Stakes for Tech Policy
The November election marks the culmination of Chicago's transition away from nearly three decades of direct mayoral control over schools, a shift that began in 1995, as Chalkbeat Chicago has reported. The newly elected 21-member board will hold binding authority over district technology policies, vendor contracts, and student data privacy — authority that previously rested largely with mayoral appointees. That stakes-raising context has also collided with a messier reality on the ballot: petition signature challenges have targeted 28 of the 51 candidates running for board seats, and as many as 17 races could end up with only a single candidate, according to Hoodline's earlier reporting on the ballot fights.
The debate also echoes restrictions taking hold elsewhere in Chicago education. The University of Chicago Law School banned first-year students from using laptops, phones, and tablets during class this year to preserve core analytical reasoning before introducing generative AI tools later in the program, a policy Hoodline covered in its report on the screen restrictions. Separately, Illinois lawmakers considered Senate Bill 416 during this year's legislative session, a measure that would restrict automated AI grading tools requiring professional teacher judgment and mandate explicit school board approval for classroom AI software, according to the Illinois Association of School Boards. Whether that kind of statewide restriction ever passes, the fight over Chicago's own pledge suggests the more immediate battle over classroom AI will be decided board seat by board seat this November.
