This year, the United States hit a milestone nobody asked for: more measles cases than any year since 1991, six decades after a vaccine was first developed. Fear and misinformation convinced families to walk away from settled science. Children paid the price.

I bring this up not to talk about vaccines, but to talk about literacy.

On July 15, Lynn Vasquez of the New Mexico Public Education Department met with lawmakers alongside Mark Angel, CEO of Amira Learning, to defend the use of the company’s AI-powered literacy screener in public schools across the state. New Mexico has been under a court order since 2018 to improve outcomes for its most underserved students, and officials turned to Amira in 2025 to help improve reading proficiency.

The software lets teachers “listen” to 5- and 6-year-olds as they read aloud, catching the hesitations, substitutions and decoding errors that reveal struggle but are easy to miss. It allows educators to intervene early and more accurately, delivering on the promise of the science of reading. The state initially required districts to administer the Amira Reading Assessment to K-2 students at the beginning, middle and end of the school year.

Meanwhile, parents in cities including Santa Fe and Albuquerque have organized in opposition to the tool, urging their districts to opt out of participation – an option now available across the state. Their objection isn't with reading assessments, but with data privacy fears and a growing discomfort with anything called AI.

In September, that argument stopped being local. New York City, the largest school system in the country, announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI for roughly 600,000 students in 2-K through eighth grade. Days later, Los Angeles pulled generative AI from every student’s district device. Both policies target generative tools like chatbots. Amira isn’t one of them: it listens to a child read aloud and flags where they stumble. But once “AI” becomes the enemy, a reading screener lands in the same bucket as ChatGPT. 

Whatever you think of these policies, the reasoning coming out of New York and Los Angeles will be quoted in state capitals for the next year, New Mexico's included.

The same machinery turns in both stories: settled science on one side, fear and misinformation on the other, children holding the bill. I have seen this movie. I know how it ends, and who pays.

I spent 15 years as a Google executive championing classroom technology, and I've been called a techno-optimist more than once. Most education technology has not earned your trust: schools have been sold engagement dressed up as learning, apps that babysit rather than teach.

Classroom technology demands skepticism that sorts products without evidence from the rare ones with it. Yet when skepticism stops sorting and starts banning, it becomes panic. Fear in education carries real costs. In New Mexico, it is tallied in third graders who can't read.

Politics have derailed settled reading science before. In 2000, the National Reading Panel reviewed the research and found that children learn to read best with explicit, systematic instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness. Washington funded that science through Reading First, then killed the program after the Education Department’s inspector general found officials had steered schools toward favored products. Emily Hanford's 2022 podcast, "Sold a Story," forced a reckoning. As of November 2024, more than 40 states have passed science of reading laws.

A Costly Experiment

New Mexico cannot afford to run the same experiment. The state’s fourth graders post the lowest reading scores in the nation. According to a study commissioned by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, children not reading on grade level by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school. In New Mexico, that's not a statistic. It's a pipeline, and everybody knows which kids are in it.

The state's own numbers show the technology is working. In July, the NMPED shared a report with lawmakers that revealed the impact of Amira during the previous school year. The screener flagged 16.7% of first graders, roughly one in six, as showing signs of dyslexia, in line with national estimates. Under the previous computer-based screener, the figure reached 45%. Nearly half the state's six-year-olds carried a label they didn’t deserve, often because their first language wasn't English, and the old test couldn't tell the difference.

Fewer false positives means intervention dollars reach children who actually need them: a machine enabling judgment, not replacing it.

Of course, critics raise legitimate questions. Thirty-five New Mexico lawmakers sent a letter to the state’s education department wanting to know what happens to children's voice recordings. Los Alamos and Santa Fe paused the screener over parent concerns that Amira was training its products with the recordings for commercial use. 

Any parent can fairly ask about data privacy or whether the tool struggles with kids who have accents or speech differences – and how that’s being addressed. AI speech-recognition tools sometimes fail to accurately assess speakers who have accent or speech differences because they were not specifically trained to recognize different accents. Those challenges deserve vendor testing and public answers, not a shrug.

But I was that kid. I grew up in Hell's Kitchen, raised on welfare by a single mother from Argentina. English was something I assembled at school, piece by piece. The analog status quo sorted kids like me quietly, by teacher impression, by gut feel: no audit trail, no accuracy study and no appeals process.

Human judgment has biases, too, but you can measure a machine's error rate and fix it. You cannot audit a hunch. If the tool mislabels children with accents, prove it and demand the fix. That's governance; pulling the tool just hides the bias where nobody can see it.

Uneven Stakes

The stakes are not evenly distributed. Some families organizing opt-outs may have the books, tutors and confidence to work the system. The children that New Mexico is failing have a screener, and may have nothing else. A kindergartner cannot opt herself back in at 16, when the problem nobody caught becomes a life problem everybody can see.

By all means, govern. Write the rules of procurement. Tell parents in plain language what gets recorded, how long it’s kept and who can use it. Demand the data of the software’s accuracy and throw out every product that can't produce it.

Albuquerque shows what that could look like. This school year, the district kept the screener, communicated with parents about the rationale for voice recordings and opted to store recordings for a shorter time period.

Every state is now going to be asked whether it wants what New York and Los Angeles want. New Mexico's problem is not AI. It's that most of its children aren't reading proficiently. Solve that one first. 

Jaime Casap spent 15 years as Chief Education Evangelist at Google, advising school systems and education leaders on classroom innovation and technology policy. Raised by a single mother in Hell’s Kitchen, he is the co-author of "Our First Talk About Poverty."