Microsoft and the AFT put ten school AI rules into district contracts

Microsoft, the American Federation of Teachers and New York City’s United Federation of Teachers announced on 9 September a National AI Safety and Privacy Standard that school districts can write into their Microsoft contracts from 1 November. The ten terms are meant to be enforceable without a full renegotiation. AFT president Randi Weingarten, UFT president Michael Mulgrew and Microsoft vice chair Brad Smith presented the deal in New York.

The core promises are specific. Student and educator data will not be used to train AI models, except in a narrow safety-and-security case. The data will not be sold, used for advertising, or used for product development. Schools keep control of how data is used, kept and deleted. Microsoft says it will not track students. High-risk decisions that use AI must have a human review. Families must get a plain-language account of how the tools work. AI companions, and any feature “designed to foster emotional attachment or dependency,” are out. So are features built to keep a student in a product longer than the task requires.

The timing is not abstract. New York City and Los Angeles, the two largest U.S. districts, have each put a one-year brake on many student AI tools while they write their own rules. A class action filed in Washington state on 14 August, A.W. v. Microsoft, accuses the company of collecting educational records, behavioural data, attendance, health information and telemetry such as scroll and keystroke speed from Windows, Edge, Minecraft Education and Microsoft 365 Education without parental consent required under COPPA, and of using some of that material to train generative models. Microsoft has not treated that complaint as the basis for the AFT text. The complaint is the background noise the unions can point to.

Weingarten said no one else, including the federal government, had done the work. Smith said Microsoft’s job is to put the tools in a form teachers, children and parents can trust. Mulgrew said the “gravest concern” was monetising student data and teachers’ work with students. Josh Golin of the child-safety group Fairplay called the terms meaningful and incomplete. They do not decide whether AI belongs in a classroom, or at what age. They only bind Microsoft, and only in districts that add the rider.

That last point is the mechanism. A national statute on school AI does not exist. State rules are uneven. A contract rider that a superintendent can attach to an existing 365 licence is faster than a legislature. It is also narrower. Google, Meta, OpenAI and the smaller classroom startups are not parties. If those firms keep training on student prompts, a district that locked Microsoft and left the others open has bought a partial fence.

From November the test is adoption. Large districts that already paused AI have a reason to sign, because the rider gives them a document to show parents. Small districts that live inside Microsoft 365 by default have a reason too, because the cost of adding the terms is supposed to be zero. The test after that is audit. A promise not to train on student data is only as good as the logging a district can demand when a parent asks what a child typed into a Copilot sidebar last Tuesday.

The unions have handed districts a clause. They have not handed them a curriculum, an age floor, or a second vendor’s signature. Those three gaps are now the story that other companies will be asked to answer.