Microsoft lets U.S. school districts lock AI tools against student-data training

Microsoft will let every U.S. school district add a set of AI privacy terms to existing contracts from 1 November, after a deal announced on 9 September with the American Federation of Teachers and New York City’s United Federation of Teachers.

The ten terms are written to be enforced as contract language, not as a press promise. Student and educator data will not be used to train models, except in a narrow safety case. Data cannot be sold, used for advertising or used to build other products. Companion features “designed to foster emotional attachment or dependency” are banned, as is any design meant to keep a student on a task longer than the work requires. High-risk decisions need a human review. Families are supposed to get a plain-language account of how the tools work. Districts keep control over how data is kept and deleted.

AFT president Randi Weingarten called the pact the first of its kind and said “no one else, including the federal government, has stepped up to do the real work.” UFT president Michael Mulgrew said the union’s gravest worry was that student records and teacher work would be monetised. Microsoft vice chair Brad Smith said the company would extend the terms nationwide. Coverage this week by the Associated Press treated the deal as the industry answer to a school-year backlash.

That backlash is already in force in the two largest districts. New York City and Los Angeles announced one-year pauses on many student AI tools so they can write their own rules. Parents and some teachers have pushed against screens as well as against models. A separate Washington class action, filed 14 August as A.W. v. Microsoft, claims the company collected educational records, behaviour, health and telemetry such as scroll and click speed from Windows, Edge, Minecraft Education and Microsoft 365 Education without consent required under COPPA for children under 13. The complaint says those profiles were used for product work and for generative models. Microsoft has not treated that suit as settled by the AFT text.

The November add-on is the practical test. A district that signs it does not have to reopen its whole Microsoft agreement. That is how the company hopes to spread the terms faster than a statute. It is also how a district that never reads the add-on will keep the old terms. The AFT cannot force a superintendent to attach the pages.

What the text does not do is bind Google, Meta, OpenAI or the smaller classroom startups. Weingarten wants an industry standard. For now the standard is a Microsoft clause. Districts that run Chromebooks or third-party tutors will still need their own paper. Federal and most state legislatures have not written a school-AI statute with the same teeth.

The companion ban is the clause that will show up first in product meetings. Classroom chatbots that greet a child by name and ask how they feel sit close to the banned design. A tool that only marks a paragraph and stops is easier to defend. Human review for high-risk decisions will matter in discipline and special-education files, where a model summary can move a child if no adult reads the source.

Smith’s nationwide offer is a bet that districts will take a contract they can enforce over a wait for Congress. The class action in Washington is a bet that past collection already broke the law. Both files will run through the school year. The add-on date is 1 November. That is when the paper, if attached, starts to bind.