The High Cost of Quiet Classrooms (Shael Polakow-Suransky)

The following article appeared in The New York Times, June 8, 2026. Mr. Polakow-Suransky is President of the Bank Street College of Education in New York City Last year, I visited a seventh-grade math classroom in a public school in the Bronx. Twenty students sat bent over laptops, working with an A.I. tutor on story problems about converting fractions to decimals. A teacher moved around the room, checking a dashboard that tracked how many tries each student needed to reach the right answer. On the surface, the classroom was working. Students were engaged, and most of them, eventually, were getting to the right answers. When I looked closely, though, many of the students were lost. They didn’t understand fractions conceptually. Each time one of them made a mistake, the A.I. tutor backed up and suggested another step, but it never identified the underlying gap in understanding. The teacher could not see it either. Her dashboard showed which students were stuck, but not why. The core…