Teaching an election is like walking a tightrope. A student can now ask a chatbot about any candidate and get an answer in seconds, and a teacher who says the wrong thing can get a call from a parent. In this episode, two conversations examine how schools are helping young people weigh the facts and make up their own minds without being told who to vote for.
Can a Chatbot Make Better Voters?
Elise Blum, assistant head of school for TK-12 programming at TVT Community Day School in Irvine, California, answered a voter hotline as a recent college graduate in 1994. Today she leads school-wide AI policy and serves on the board of Vote Smart, the organization behind that hotline. She argues that a faster answer does not make anyone better informed, especially students. She and Kyle Dell, executive director of Vote Smart, explain why the hotline’s student interns were trained to keep supplying facts instead of explaining what a claim meant. Dell describes the two years his team spent building Civic Sage, a chatbot that answers questions about candidates using only Vote Smart’s research, and what it does when a student asks whether a candidate is “”good”” on an issue. Blum says questions like this are where teachers come in.
How Did Teachers Handle the Midterms?
Journalist April Rubin reported on how teachers from fifth grade through high school treated the midterms as a live civics lab. She starts with a UNICEF USA and Harris Poll survey in which 63% of young people say their opinion does not matter to elected officials, even as the share of eligible young voters planning to vote in state elections is up 15 points since 2024. Then she walks through what she saw in classrooms: a New York City teacher who assigns each student an out-of-state race to research, an Iowa teacher whose eighth graders asked right away whether each candidate was a Democrat or a Republican after the party labels came off, and an Illinois teacher who uses redistricting fights to teach politics as a contest for power. She also explains why media literacy belongs in any civics class, since many teens get their news on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
A Sponsored Conversation With ConnectED
This episode includes a sponsored conversation with ConnectED, a free platform that helps teachers take on contentious topics in the classroom. Avi Posen, vice president of ConnectED, talks with Ira about what happens when a heated news story reaches students before first period, and why the goal is to help students understand each other rather than agree. To learn more about how to bring ConnectED to your classroom, visit connecteducation.org.
Stories Mentioned in This Episode
-
AI, Elections and the Making of an Informed Electorate by Elise Blum
-
How Teachers Are Turning the Midterms Into a Nonpartisan Civics Lesson by April Rubin
This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.
