Nearly 3 in 5 educators used AI tools during the 2025-26 school year. Of those, almost two-thirds said the technology gave them back time for the parts of teaching they actually care about: working one-on-one with students, giving real feedback, and helping kids through hard moments. Those numbers come from a Walton Family Foundation and Gallup survey released in October, and they represent a genuine shift in how teachers are working.
But underneath that headline is a gap worth paying close attention to. More than 60% of those same educators reported receiving no guidance on how to apply AI to student learning analysis, tutoring, or one-on-one instruction. Nearly 60% lacked any guidance on using AI for grading or feedback. This is not a small policy oversight. It is a professional development crisis happening in real time, while teachers are already integrating the tools into their classrooms.
The Time Dividend Is Real, But Unevenly Realized
The Walton Family Foundation and Gallup data offers a useful starting point: when teachers use AI, they tend to get time back. Fifty-one percent of AI-using educators said the technology freed up “somewhat more time” for meaningful teaching activities. The tasks they shed most easily were administrative: paperwork, planning templates, drafting communications.
That is encouraging. But the benefit depends heavily on how a teacher uses the tool, and that is exactly where the professional development gap bites. A teacher who has figured out how to use a chatbot to generate differentiated reading materials on demand gets something very different out of AI than one who uses it only to write parent emails. Both are technically “using AI.” Only one is getting a classroom dividend.
Compare this to where things stood just two years ago. A 2024 Rand Corporation survey found that only 18% of teachers used AI tools in their classrooms. Now adoption sits at roughly 60%. That growth happened largely without formal training, without district guidance, and in many cases without any institutional framework at all. Teachers figured it out on their own, which means the results are wildly inconsistent across schools and grade levels.
Who Is Actually Adopting, and What That Tells Us
One finding in the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup survey is easy to miss but worth sitting with. AI adoption ranked highest among educators ages 40 to 49, at 67%, followed by those in their 50s, at 63%. Younger teachers, often assumed to be early adopters, tracked closer to the overall average. Teachers 60 and older showed the lowest adoption rate, at 46%.
This tells a professional development story. Midcareer teachers, who often carry the heaviest administrative load, are finding the most value in AI’s ability to reduce friction. They have enough experience to know what wastes their time and enough motivation to try tools that might help. That is a useful insight for instructional coaches and PD designers: framing AI as a time-saving device for veteran teachers, not just a novelty for younger staff, may drive adoption more effectively.
It also suggests that professional development should not be designed around tech comfort levels alone. A 48-year-old teacher who adopted AI organically still may not know how to use it for formative assessment or to identify patterns in student learning data. Adoption and sophistication are not the same thing.
The Policy Divide Is Growing
At the student level, the picture is moving in the opposite direction. New York City Public Schools announced in September what it described as the nation’s most expansive AI moratorium for students, prohibiting student-facing AI tools for students from pre-K through 8th grade during the 2026-27 school year. The temporary ban covers roughly 600,000 students, two-thirds of the district’s enrollment.
No similar restrictions apply to teachers in that district, which creates an interesting classroom dynamic. A teacher can use AI to prepare materials, generate feedback drafts, or analyze assessment data, but cannot put that same technology directly in front of a student. That distinction matters, and it reflects a real tension that more districts will face: AI is useful as a professional tool and uncertain as a direct student-facing one.
For school leaders, this is a signal to be explicit about policy design. Blanket bans affect teachers and students equally and remove tools that have genuine value for educators. Targeted restrictions, ones that address specific risks around student use without eliminating teacher capacity, are harder to design but almost certainly more effective. Districts that are still drafting AI policy have an opportunity to learn from New York City’s approach before committing to something that may constrain teaching without meaningfully protecting students.
What the Professional Development Gap Actually Costs
The most direct implication of the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup survey is that teachers are navigating a major professional shift without institutional support. Over 60% reported no guidance on using AI to analyze student learning patterns or support individualized instruction. Nearly 60% had no guidance on AI for grading or feedback. Under 50% lacked guidance even on the most straightforward use case: creating assignments and class materials.
Think about what that means in practice. A teacher who has figured out how to generate a quiz using an AI chatbot may be saving 20 minutes a week. But a teacher who understands how to use AI to flag students who are struggling based on assignment patterns, or to generate differentiated feedback at scale, is doing something qualitatively different. The first use case is a convenience. The second changes how a teacher can serve students.
The guidance gap means most teachers are stuck in the convenience tier, not because the more sophisticated applications do not exist, but because no one has shown them how to get there.
This is not a criticism of teachers. It is a structural failure of professional development systems that have not kept up with adoption rates. When 60% of educators are using a tool and fewer than half of them have received any guidance on its most basic applications, something has gone wrong at the district or school level.
What Educators and Leaders Can Do Now
Schools do not need to wait for district-wide PD to close this gap. A few concrete starting points:
For teachers using AI independently: Go beyond the administrative tier. If you have only used AI to draft emails, write sub plans, or generate quiz questions, try a feedback-specific use case next. Ask the tool to generate personalized written feedback on a sample student paragraph, then compare it to what you would write. Note where it falls short. That calibration process is valuable professional development in itself.
For instructional coaches and department leads: Run a short AI skills inventory with your team. Ask teachers to name the three tasks they use AI for most. Then map those against the areas the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup data flagged: learning analysis, individualized instruction, grading feedback, and differentiation. The gaps will be visible quickly, and you can design targeted sessions around them rather than generic “AI 101” workshops that cover ground teachers have already covered on their own.
For administrators: AI policy cannot live only in the student use conversation. Teacher professional development needs an AI component now, not next year. That means dedicating PD time to it, identifying teachers who have developed strong AI practices and giving them time to share what they know, and being explicit about what the district does and does not want teachers doing with these tools.
For teachers in districts with student-facing restrictions: Understand what the policy covers. An AI moratorium for students does not mean AI is off the table for your own planning and preparation. Clarify with your administration exactly what the guardrails are so you can work confidently within them.
The Walton Family Foundation and Gallup data is ultimately optimistic: when teachers use AI, they tend to report meaningful time savings and higher satisfaction with how they spend their time in schools. Getting more educators to that outcome, and getting more of them to the more sophisticated tier of AI use, is a professional development problem. It is one schools can start solving this semester.
EdTech Institute covers technology in education so teachers can focus on what matters: their students.
EdTech Institute also builds free, classroom-ready tools for teachers at RazaEd.
Source: Educators who use AI say it frees up time to interact with students (K-12 Dive)