The seventeen-year-old Senate

Ninety-eight high schoolers spent a late-July weekend in a full-scale replica of the U.S. Senate chamber at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, doing what the actual Senate has not managed to do: they drafted AI rules for the nation’s schools, fought them through subcommittee, and passed the thing 82 to 16. They called it the Students First Act. It isn’t law. It will still travel, though, because AASA, the school superintendents association, is sending the text to ten thousand school leaders, most of whom are writing AI policy right now with no federal guidance at all.

I clicked expecting a story about digital natives writing themselves a permission slip. Wrong. They banned AI on every graded test. AI-assisted writing is off the table until after eighth grade, and even then a teacher can require you to defend your work out loud. A detector flagging your paper isn’t grounds for accusation by itself; a human has to investigate first. And when they debated school chatbots and what happens when a struggling kid confides in one, they voted that the machine must alert an adult, privacy concerns and all, because some of them had thought hard about the worst night of a classmate’s life.

The reason they gave for all this caution is the part that should give us all pause: social media. They watched adults fumble the last technology handoff, from the crash-test-dummy seat, and decided that this time the seventeen-year-olds would write the brakes themselves. A junior from Mississippi put it better than most of the expert testimony I’ve read: kids left alone with this thing won’t use it as a tool, “they’re gonna use it as a brain.”

Meanwhile the real Senate convened this Congress with an average age of 63.9 years, about one year shy of Medicare. I don’t think the fix is anywhere near as simple as swapping old for young, and apparently the kids don’t either, since their own bill orders schools to teach them AI literacy. That’s a strange thing to demand if you were born understanding the technology. Something more interesting is going on with who should write the rules for things that change faster than a career, and I haven’t worked it all out yet. Working on it.