Do Something Great, Not Big:

Rethinking AI, Education, and Community

I am writing this week from a strange in between place. On one side are the headlines about artificial intelligence (AI) and education, the money moving through markets, and parents fighting for their children’s curriculum. On the other side is one quiet afternoon in a living room that reset my whole heart. All of it, I am realizing, belongs in the same conversation. Underneath the noise about innovation and disruption is the same old question we keep dodging: What does it mean to care for the whole child, the whole human, and the whole community in a world that keeps asking us to move faster than our spirits can handle?

The global rush to “transform” education

If you zoom out, education systems around the world are in a new rush to transform. Artificial intelligence is being folded into digital transformation plans, ministers are talking about future ready skills, and universities are scrambling to prove their degrees still matter in a world obsessed with employability and microcredentials.

On paper, some of this sounds promising. There are more flexible pathways, different ways to show what you know, and tools that might help teachers differentiate and reach students who have been historically left behind. But as soon as you look from the perspective of actual children and educators, the pace of technological adoption and policy change feels out of sync with the pace of human development. Children are not pilot programs. Educators are not just users in a product roadmap. Communities are not simply markets waiting to be captured.

This disconnect shows up in how we talk about change. Policy documents lean heavily on competitiveness and productivity, far more than on joy, belonging, or identity. AI is presented as a solution searching for a problem, instead of a tool that should be accountable to human determined goals. We keep optimizing for the system without asking whether the system itself is still worthy of our children.

AI in NYC: Power Without Deep Roots

When you zoom back in to New York City, you can see this tension up close. The city has begun rolling out guidelines for how AI can and cannot be used in schools. Teachers are being told when it is okay to use AI to plan lessons or draft materials, and where hard lines exist around grading or discipline. There are pilot projects, platforms, training sessions, and playbooks that aim to show we are staying on the cutting edge.

Yet, if you listen carefully to parents and advocates, another story comes forward. Local coverage, including reporting that amplified the concerns of NYC parents and organizers, captured a long public meeting where parents, students, and educators testified about the city’s AI guidance. Over and over, parents described feeling like the guidelines were written for the system, not for their children. The traffic light model for acceptable AI use seemed to focus on the convenience and liability of adults while skipping deeper questions about how constant AI access might shape children’s brains, attention, curiosity, and mental health.

Advocates from groups like Parents for AI Caution and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy have been blunt. They argue that the current policy is good at listing what staff can do with AI, but weak on what students are being exposed to, what data is being collected, and how those exposures will affect learning over time. Their core question is simple and piercing: Has any of this been designed with a real understanding of child development, or are we once again experimenting on kids because the tools arrived before the guardrails?

At this point, I keep coming back to three very different, but aligned, voices. Parent advocate Kelly Clancy, founder of Parents for AI Caution here in New York, has warned that the city’s AI guidance may lay a thin floor for privacy without wrestling with how constant AI access could alter children’s learning and mental health. Scholars like Dr. Ruha Benjamin have shown how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, can quietly harden old inequities if they are not designed and governed with race, power, and community in mind. And educators like Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, who writes about racial literacy and the ‘archaeology of self,’ remind me that any conversation about innovation has to start with human beings and their stories, not just tools and metrics.

So, on one side, you have a city eager to position itself as innovative, responsive, and future focused, led by officials who are under real pressure to do something about AI. On the other side, you have parents practicing a different kind of leadership, asking grounded, heart level questions: Will my child still learn to write in their own voice? What happens to their imagination if an algorithm is always just one prompt away? How will this change the relationship between my child and their teachers?

Those questions are not anti technology. They are pro child. And they lead naturally into another layer of this story: the way markets are shaping what counts as “good” education.

Markets, Metrics, and the Missing Whole Child

If the policy world is moving quickly, the market is moving even faster. This past week, major stock indices continued climbing, powered in large part by AI enthusiasm and by investor confidence that AI related companies will drive the next cycle of growth. Analysts are also openly describing AI in education as a booming space, with money flowing into tutoring bots, grading tools, predictive analytics, and platforms that promise personalization at scale. That matters, because it reminds us that AI in schools is not only a pedagogical question. It is also a market story.

Against that backdrop, the education market is humming in a very specific key. Investment is stabilizing around AI powered tools and platforms that fit neatly into this growth narrative. Investors are looking for products that promise personalization at scale, efficient assessment, and workforce alignment. Policymakers echo these priorities when they talk about return on investment in higher education and skills gaps in K-12, and too often leadership in these spaces is measured by how quickly they can chase the market instead of how bravely they can stand with children and communities.

Money, in other words, is moving fast toward whatever can be measured quickly and sold widely. Learning platforms, tutoring bots, data dashboards, and microcredential systems are easy to present in a pitch deck or a quarterly report. By contrast, it is much harder to attract capital for community based mentoring, culturally sustaining pedagogy, or long term investments in trust and relationship building, even though those are often the very things that keep young people alive and hopeful.

This is where the idea of an “insane audit” of the whole child, whole human, and whole community keeps coming back for me. When we hear the word “audit,” many of us immediately picture more data points, more checklists, and more rubrics. That is exactly what educators and families do not need. They are already drowning in evaluation mechanisms that rarely capture what actually matters.

But if we redefine “audit,” it could mean something much more humane. It could mean a fierce inventory of whether our systems honor the dignity, complexity, and humanity of the people inside them. A set of questions like: What stories do our students get to tell about themselves? Who feels safe walking into this building every day? Where do families see themselves in the decisions being made? How do we measure success beyond test scores and college admissions?

These are not line items on a spreadsheet. They are relational, cultural, and political questions. And they reveal something the markets do not like to admit: What matters most in education is often exactly what is hardest to scale or quantify.

Mother’s Day as Organizing, Not Just Marketing

That tension between care and commerce is not limited to education. In many ways, it also lives inside the history of Mother’s Day itself. On the surface, Mother’s Day can feel like a day of cards, flowers, reservations, and the performance of gratitude. But the history of Mother’s Day tells a far more radical story, one that connects directly to how we think about education and policy today.

Long before it became an official national holiday, women like Ann Jarvis were organizing Mother’s Work Days in the 19th century, bringing women together to improve health and sanitation in their communities after the Civil War. Other activists, like Julia Ward Howe, called for a Mother’s Day for Peace, a day when mothers across nations would refuse to accept their sons being sent to war without protest. Mother’s Day began as organizing, public health, and peace making. It was a political act of collective care.

Over time, as the holiday spread and was formalized, commercial interests moved in. Florists, card companies, and retailers recognized the emotional power of the day and turned it into a business model. A day rooted in women gathering to resist the worst outcomes of politics and war became one of the biggest sales moments of the year.

If that arc sounds familiar, it is because we see it in education, too. Genuine concern for children becomes a market for products. Collective organizing by parents and educators becomes a branding opportunity for solutions. Moments that should invite reflection and solidarity get flattened into a push to buy the right thing at the right time.

Seen in that light, NYC mothers, grandmothers, and caregivers testifying about AI in schools are standing in the same lineage as Ann Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe. Women, again, organizing in the name of children’s wellbeing. Women insisting that their kids are not test subjects or data points. Women who know that loving a child in public means asking hard questions about power, policy, and profit.

And this is where my week shifts from public hearings and history lessons to one particular living room.

The Grace of Community and the Power of Another Mother

In the middle of all of this big thinking, I found myself sitting in the home of a friend’s mom who is rooted in a community that lives out a different kind of economy: an economy of grace. I went there carrying the weight of headlines and deadlines, and I left feeling held by something older and wiser than any policy memo.

We spent time doing what community does at its best. We reset. We reimagined. We talked about pivots, not as failures, but as necessary acts of survival and creativity. Together, we reminded each other that it is always okay to change course when the current path no longer aligns with our values or our health.

Then I sat with his mother. Just sat. No agenda, no performance, no timer running in the background. We eased into a wandering conversation that moved from family stories, to neighborhood history, to what is happening in schools now. Somewhere in that gentle wandering, she began to share more of her story, her herstory, as an educator and a mother.

She told me about her students over the years: the ones who came back to say thank you, the ones whose faces she still carries, and the ones she met standing in all four corners of whatever space they were in, whenever they needed a different kind of attention. She talked about the quiet choices she made in classrooms, school buildings, and hallways, the times she fought for a child who did not have anyone else in their corner, and the way she tried to see the whole human in front of her rather than just a score or a behavior chart.

Then, almost in passing, she gave me a line I have not been able to shake: “Do something great, not big.”

Great, not big. It was her way of naming what she had tried to live. She never chased a fancy title, a massive platform, or a viral moment. But she had been practicing a deep, quiet kind of leadership for years: sitting with children in their grief, celebrating their small wins, challenging them when they were shrinking themselves, and telling them the truth about their brilliance and their responsibilities. Her impact is not measured in the number of people she reached, but in the depth with which she touched the ones she did.

I left her house with a heart full of stories. Joyous moments she shared as an educator. Glimpses of pain she transformed into purpose. A sense of how much quiet labor it takes to hold up a community. In that afternoon, she became another mother to me, not because she replaced my own, who was only a few miles away, but because she extended that lineage of mothers who show up with wisdom, advocacy, and steady care.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Standing at the intersection of all these threads, the global AI agendas, the NYC policies, the surging markets, the history of Mother’s Day as organizing, and the intimate wisdom of another mother, the question becomes: What now?

One place to begin is by giving ourselves permission to reset. We are allowed to pivot our thinking about education, about technology, and about what success means. We are allowed to say that our metrics are too small for our children, and that our policies are too thin for their souls. We are allowed to insist that AI in classrooms be accountable not just to efficiency, but to human flourishing.

From there, we can choose to listen more carefully to the people whose lives are most deeply touched by these decisions. Students, of course. But also parents and caregivers who see the long arc of their children’s growth. Educators who have spent decades in classrooms. Community elders who remember how we got here. We honor the mothers and other mothers who organize, testify, write letters, sit in meetings, and keep loving children in a world that does not always love them back.

And finally, we recommit to doing something great, not big. That is another way of saying we recommit to everyday leadership. Great might be a parent asking one more question at a school meeting instead of staying silent. Great might be a teacher slowing down to really listen to a student who seems checked out instead of just marking them absent in spirit. Great might be a policymaker insisting on community forums before signing off on a new AI initiative. Great might be you, this week, choosing one relationship to nurture more intentionally.

This Mother’s Day, I found myself held not by a perfect plan for fixing education, but by an imperfect, beautiful web of women and communities who keep showing up. Some of them are my family by blood. Some are my family by choice. Some I met for a few hours on a couch, trading stories, laughter, and quiet understanding. All of them remind me that there is always room for mothers, in the broadest sense: mothers who come with wisdom, advocacy, and generous care.

In a world that chases big, they keep choosing great. That is the kind of education revolution I want to be part of.

So I want to leave you with this: In a moment when artificial intelligence is racing into our classrooms, markets are busy monetizing our fears and hopes, and policies are being written faster than most of us can read them, what might it mean for you to practice your own form of leadership, to choose “great, not big,” in your own sphere of influence? Maybe it is one conversation you initiate, one decision you slow down, or one young person you decide to see more clearly. As you move through this week, where do you feel called to practice that kind of steady, generous care in the places you learn, work, or love?