New Mexico officials, AI testing company defend program's use in schools - Santa Fe New Mexican

For months, state leaders have credited New Mexico's recent growth in reading scores to a push for a structured literacy approach to teaching.

But a state education official on Wednesday also gave a nod to another factor: the state's new required testing tool, which feeds the voices of students starting in kindergarten to an artificial intelligence testing and instruction software.

"A system of assessments in early literacy years [leads] to identification of learning needs, targeted interventions and ultimately stronger literacy outcomes," said Lynn Vasquez, senior manager of assessment, research, evaluation and accountability for the state Public Education Department. "But again, we're attributing that to a series of events, not just an assessment alone."

Vasquez appeared beside Mark Angel, CEO and founder of Amira Learning, on Wednesday in Taos to defend the state's selection and the benefits of the voice recognition AI teaching software to a legislative committee that raised the alarm about the technology and a lack of state guardrails a few months prior.

State and federal education officials argued use of the cutting-edge technology could be the antidote to a decadeslong educational decline — a particularly attractive prescription for New Mexico, which for years has languished at the bottom of nationwide education rankings.

But the presentation comes amid several New Mexico efforts to put the brakes on the rapidly expanding world of artificial intelligence contracts in K-12 education, including from an analysis on AI policy from the committee and a growing movement of parents wishing to opt their students out of the assessment.

'Who is Amira?'

Cassie Fleming is one of those roughly 45 parents who are mostly based in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

While she said Angel acted as expected as a representative for a large tech company in advertising his product, "I was really disappointed in the [state Public Education Department's] portion of the presentation," Fleming said.

Vasquez's defense of the technology "came across to me as being much more uncritically enthusiastic about the use of Amira than I felt a representative from the PED should have been in light of all the criticisms."

The technology has stirred controversy over reports of its difficulties in comprehending students with accents or speech differences, including from committee members Wednesday, but Fleming said her 7-year-old at Lew Wallace Elementary has neither, and still struggled.

Her daughter came home "devastated" after an assessment one day in the fall, saying that "Amira was not listening to her," she said.

Fleming, unaware of the new required testing software, was confused at first: "I'm like, 'Is someone bullying her? Who is Amira? ... Is she an older kid at this school?' ”

For one reason or another, the software didn't work for her daughter, and "we did not get any of this reliable data that Amira described today — for the whole first semester of my daughter's first grade year," Fleming said, also noting the broad concerns from her, fellow coalition members — and state lawmakers — of data privacy.

Privacy worries

The worry over privacy was shared by a school board member in Portland Public Schools last month, who noted that the contract includes multiple checked-off boxes indicating the company would have access to a plethora of student demographic features, including languages spoken, living situation, disability and migrant status, according to reporting.

Amira's chief operating officer, Amy Scholz, responded with a letter later that month saying the district had provided none of those metrics to the company, and that it would only be used for a research study that was never conducted, and would have required parental consent.

The company did not immediately respond to a question from the outlet, Willamette Week, about why those boxes were checked off.

One of those leading the Santa Fe effort is Ifeoma Ozoma, who said she became an advocate for caution around AI after "seeing it from inside" as a former policy lobbyist for Google and Facebook.

"The further technology develops, the more and more opportunities there is to be misused. And you see so many parents having backlash against photos of their kids. But this is another way of documenting data," she added, expressing doubt at the company's security capabilities amid a possible breach and how the for-profit tech company uses student data to improve its own models.

Albuquerque Democrat G. Andrés Romero, who chairs the House Education Committee, posed a similar question over privacy concerns to Angel.

"We never, ever release or share our data with anybody other than the licensing educational agencies that we work with," Angel replied. "We don't sell it."

The data sits in the company's "proprietary and private data center," is shared in a mix between individual states and their school districts — and is protected with "advanced encryption," Angel said.

He then spoke in generalities about the company's standard practice to delete student data at the end of the school year — and schools in Idaho where the data isn't stored at all.

"But we'll hold it or delete it at your discretion," Angel said, providing no detail on the company's treatment of data of students in New Mexico.

State-level policy gaps

The meeting came after committee analyst Saraí Ortiz authored a report in late May, noting the state's lack of statute governing contracts with artificial intelligence vendors had revealed "policy gaps" in the state's procurement code toward AI tools, and treatment of AI tools in education, adding "it is unclear what vetting processes and stakeholder input" the state Public Education Department used to implement Amira.

The report followed community colleges opening multimillion-dollar contracts to leverage their student data analytics through deals with AI companies, and as of the 2025-26 school year, the mandate from the state Public Education Department to require students from kindergarten to second grade take assessments using the technology.

The state Public Education Department began mandating the technology to test students in grades K-2 starting in the 2025-26 school year, after the artificial intelligence company merged with Istation, the state's previous assessment provider. The state agency crafted a piggyback contract with the merged companies, and took an extra step by funding districts to engage the technology in optional third grade assessments. Many districts also use the technology for instruction.

Vasquez, though, noted the state's assessment software would be up for a bid process soon, with testing vendors able to apply to replace Amira, starting in the 2027-28 school year. Any sooner and districts would not have ample time to adjust, she said.

The committee's report notes that, despite the state Public Education Department authoring guidelines for AI use in K-12 education in May 2025, it is "unclear how schools are addressing AI in education, or if schools are using these guidelines."

Benefits vs. risks?

The report also noted the dream of a better-than-ever instructional approach through using the cutting-edge technology might not be coming true yet. The report cites a January study from the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution that found the risks of artificial intelligence on children's development outweighed potential benefits.

Angel pointed, however, to research from Carnegie Mellon that the company says birthed its product — two studies featured on the company's website conducted in the year 2000 — that reported automated speech recognition program outperformed human teachers in most areas, with students using the virtual program outperforming their peers.

"When we saw the work that Carnegie Mellon had done … we saw how vastly superior it was to any kind of assessment or intelligent tutor that had previously existed," Angel said.

Rep. Joy Garratt, an Albuquerque Democrat, questioned the implication: "What I'm hearing from you, you feel like the Amira system, where the student is speaking into a mic, is more accurate in testing a child than a human teacher."

She pointed to her own classroom experience and a distrust of solely oral assessments to test proficiency — and hearing from teachers who reported needing to spend extra time to verify the technology's testing findings.

"I don't think that that's quite the way we would frame it," Angel replied. "... Is each of those teachers maybe more accurate in that circumstance than Amira? Maybe. But is Amira going to do the same thing for every one of the 50,000 students in New Mexico identically? Yes."

For Fleming, it's a dystopian thought.

"You have to learn to read," she said. "And I'm just so disheartened that we're outsourcing that to an AI program — to a screen."