Backed by $400,000 in funding from Google.org, Genesee Valley BOCES, a New York state organization supporting 22 school districts through shared services and instructional leadership, today called for “a fundamental reset in how schools respond to artificial intelligence (AI).... The real challenge is not AI itself, but the systems education built long before it,” according to an announcement.

“The emergence of generative AI has laid bare pre-existing issues around how we assign and assess student work, how we grade and communicate learning, and how we address technological change in our schools,” Dr. Christopher Harris, director of the School Library System for Genesee Valley BOCES, told SLJ in an email.

In December, Genesee Valley BOCES convened a group of international education, technology, and assessment policy experts in Rochester, NY, as part of its teachingabout.ai initiative. The meeting resulted in “The Rochester Provocations,” a set of statements that aim to reframe the national conversation around AI in education.

“The provocations conclude with two critical points,” project lead Harris told SLJ. “First that the real crisis we face is how we make productive use of this opportunity for innovative change in education. If we are being honest, I think most leaders in schools know that our assessment and grading practices need to change. The research is clear, and has been for decades. AI both forces this change, and provides an opportunity for us to be agents of change rather than victims. Second, and most important, is the clear conclusion that avoiding this is simply not an option.”

The eight “Rochester Provocations” are:

1. There is no AI problem: Education itself is a wicked problem; assuming there is an AI-in-education problem risks us thinking there is an AI solution.
2. We can be agents of validity or victims of cheating: We cannot control cheating and focusing on it will lead to an adversarial relationship with students; where we have agency is in how we engage students with more meaningful tasks that lead to an accurate understanding of student learning.
3. Our assessments were broken before AI: We need to rethink how we understand and implement assessment including an emphasis on developing and implementing valid assessments in pre-service teacher programs.
4. There is no such thing as AI-proof: Be it assessments, careers, or anything else, the ubiquity of AI and pace of growth means AI-proof is a problematically alluring impossibility.
5. Most things a human teacher can do, AI can mimic: If we cannot identify and prioritize what human teachers bring to the classroom, we risk replacement. We must research the impact of human ingenuity, creativity, and relationships.
6. Teachers must have permission to compromise, diverge, and iterate: Schools must develop a supportive and collaborative culture where teachers are empowered and expected to seek better solutions to the wicked problem we face.
7. The real AI crisis is how we take advantage of the opportunity: There will not be a perfect solution, but we (students, teachers, institutions, society) have an opportunity to explore innovative changes to what we do.
8. Avoidance of AI in education is not an option: AI is unavoidable and a failure to address harm reduction feeds into the ongoing public health emergency created by the intentional design of algorithms to extract capital from humans.

“The provocations are grounded in the idea that technological change is ecological, not incremental,” according to the announcement. “They begin with the idea that new technologies reshape entire systems in ways that cannot be isolated or reversed. From this lens, AI is not an add-on to existing educational models but a force that challenges assumptions about long-held educational practices.”

Genesee Valley BOCES hopes that outputs from its December meeting, including “The Rochester Provocations,” can inform future reports, professional learning resources, and open educational materials to help educators and policymakers navigate AI’s impact on PreK–12 education. Additional materials are freely available on https://teachingabout.ai