Google sits at the center of the school day for millions of students, serving not just as a search engine but as a hub for sharing documents and turning in homework. An announcement this month signaled that the company intends for artificial intelligence to be part of that ecosystem, whether parents like it or not.
Many parents do not. "Parents are angry," said Jodi Carreon, a Southern California mother who runs the advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens. "They're very angry." Carreon, whose group is part of a parent-led movement pushing for limits on classroom technology, said she was initially excited when she read that Google was letting schools switch off AI features for students.
That excitement faded quickly. Even as districts including Los Angeles Unified, Seattle Public Schools and New York City Public Schools recently agreed to classroom bans on AI, Google declined to follow suit. The company said schools that do not want AI Overviews appearing in student searches will lose access to Google Search entirely. Even advocates for less technology in schools acknowledge that losing the ability to look something up on Google would create real problems for teachers.
The backlash has reached the political arena. In a post on X, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani accused Google of using "its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools," and Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts wrote to the company's CEO demanding a reversal of the policy.
Tracy Pizzo, who spent more than a decade at Google focused on education and ethical AI standards before leaving in 2022, called the move baffling, particularly at a moment when young people's use of AI is under intense scrutiny. Her theory connects the policy to two recent court cases in Washington, D.C., in which Google was sued by major online publishers claiming AI Overviews hurt their businesses. Their antitrust argument depended on convincing the court that AI Overviews was a separate product from Search.
"The judge decided that Search and AI are an integrated product," Pizzo said, and the cases were dismissed. "Now if Google were to provide an off switch for schools only, that's evidence that they can be separated. And that undermines the win they just had in court." Antitrust experts consulted by NPR were not fully convinced by the theory, but they did not dismiss it either.
Asked for comment, Google pointed to its original announcement, in which it said, "Our goal is simple: provide school leaders the control and confidence to use AI products in classrooms as they see fit." The company declined to answer additional questions about any link between the announcement and the antitrust litigation.
The policy lands amid broader criticism of Google's AI offerings for young users. Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that evaluates how teens interact with technology, recently gave AI Overviews an "unacceptable risk" rating, citing unsafe content and false information. A day after the announcement, parents in North Carolina sued Google after its Gemini chatbot helped their 13-year-old daughter plan her suicide and funeral on a school-issued Chromebook.
Even longtime allies are uneasy. Hank Thiele, an Illinois superintendent who has worked with Google Classroom for nearly two decades, said the company has always been a great partner but warned the decision "may have caused a lot of damage in the trust that Google has built in education." His all-high-school district is still working out its own approach to AI. Thiele believes Google will eventually listen to feedback but mishandled the message: "Google should have just plainly said, 'Our bad.' That would have been the appropriate response to a school." What he called the "AI or nothing" approach, he said, did not land well.
NPR noted that Google is a financial supporter of the network.
