Before Schools Buy More AI, Invest in Student Readiness

By: Richard Awni, Founder & Chairman, Family First Foundation

There’s a purchase order sitting on a superintendent’s desk right now for a new AI tool. There’s almost never one sitting next to it for teaching students how to use it.

That’s backwards, and it’s an easy mistake to make, because buying a tool feels like progress in a way that funding training doesn’t. A new platform is visible. A ribbon-cutting is visible. A structured readiness program that quietly changes how three hundred kids think doesn’t show up the same way in a board meeting slide, but it’s the part that actually determines whether the tool purchase pays off or just adds another unsupervised shortcut to the pile.

The Order of Operations Matters

Buy the tool first, and you get exactly what the RAND and CDT data already describe: broad, unstructured use, with training arriving late if it arrives at all. Invest in readiness first, and every tool you add afterward lands on top of students who already know how to use it well. Same budget, in some cases. Completely different outcome, in every case.

This Isn’t an Argument Against AI Tools. It’s an Argument About Sequence.

We’re not telling districts to slow down or wait. We’re telling them to flip the order: readiness first, tools second, not because tools are dangerous, but because a tool handed to an untrained student just becomes a faster way to skip the thinking, while the same tool handed to a trained one becomes a genuine accelerant.

The waitlist for districts is open now, and it’s built for exactly this: the readiness layer that should exist before the next tool purchase, not after.

This article may be shared or republished in full, with attribution to The Artificial Intelligence Institute and a link back to the original.