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Idaho AI Classroom
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AI ImpactImpact on Society9-12.AII.IS.5

Who Decides, Who Pays

11–1250 minutes90 minutes (extend seminar and writing)

Standard quoted exactly

Evaluate how human choices in using, designing, deploying, and regulating AI technologies have risks, benefits, and long-term impacts.

Student-friendly learning targets

  • I can evaluate human choices at four stages — using, designing, deploying, and regulating — with risks, benefits, and long-term impacts for each.
  • I can show that a school-board acceptable-use policy, this Idaho standards document, and unsettled state or federal bills are all human choices, not the will of an algorithm.
  • I can name who benefits and who pays when a district, a company, or a legislature chooses.

Essential questions

  1. If humans choose at every stage, why do people still say the algorithm decided?
  2. Who has standing to use, design, deploy, or regulate AI in an Idaho school, and who pays when the choice fails?
  3. What long-term impact should a board or a legislature be judged on, beyond this year’s convenience?

Objectives

  1. Evaluate one concrete choice in each of the four verbs: using, designing, deploying, regulating.
  2. Annotate a school-board acceptable-use policy (or a sample AUP if the local one is thin) for AI-relevant human decisions.
  3. Place this Idaho 9–12 AI standards document as a state-level human choice that still leaves curriculum to LEAs.
  4. Describe federal and state legislative uncertainty without inventing a bill as passed.
  5. Write a recommendation that names a decision-maker, a payer, a risk, a benefit, and a long-term impact.

Key vocabulary

Use
A person’s or a classroom’s choice to apply a tool to a task, including the choice not to.
Design
Choices about architecture, data, defaults, and whose error is tolerated before a product ships.
Deployment
Putting a system into a real setting (a clinic, a factory, a student information system) with a budget, a vendor, and a staff who must live with it.
Regulation
Rules with public authority: statute, administrative rule, court holding, or a board policy that binds a school.
Acceptable-use policy (AUP)
A local board-adopted rule for how school technology may be used; in Idaho, local boards hold substantial control.
LEA
Local education agency: a district or charter responsible for curriculum and policy under state standards.
Long-term impact
Effects that outlast a contract cycle: habits of thinking, labor markets, water and power, civic trust, student records that persist.
Accountability
A named human or institution that can be questioned, voted out, sued, or required to repair harm.

Teacher background

The standard is a map of human verbs: using, designing, deploying, regulating. Each verb has risks, benefits, and long-term impacts. Students should leave unable to hide behind the algorithm. An Idaho student who pastes a prompt is using. An engineer who sets a default to train on public posts is designing. A superintendent who buys a detector is deploying. A board that writes an acceptable-use policy, a state that publishes these AI content standards, and a legislature that cannot agree on a statute are regulating — or failing to. Local control matters here. Idaho LEAs choose curriculum even when the Department publishes standards; this document is not a required product. Federal bills on AI have been proposed, altered, and stalled; students should say uncertainty when the law is uncertain. Money is part of evaluation: who pays for licenses, for grid upgrades, for labeling labor, for a false accusation from a detector, for a data-center incentive. Use a real AUP if the district has one; otherwise a clearly labeled sample. Print excerpts of this standards document (the Role of Standards page is perfect). Do not lobby for a party. Civic tone: power is specific. Offline fallback: paper AUP, paper standards excerpts, a fictional but realistic board agenda item. FERPA belongs in the AUP conversation because student records are often what vendors want to process.

Materials and prep

Materials

  • Four-verb evaluation grid: Use / Design / Deploy / Regulate, with Risk, Benefit, Long-term impact, Who decides, Who pays.
  • Excerpts: local or sample AUP; Idaho AI standards Role of Standards and one AII standard; a dated news brief on a state or federal AI bill that has not settled.
  • Fictional board agenda item: purchase of an AI writing detector, or a data-sharing addendum with a vendor.
  • Accountability cards: student, teacher, principal, superintendent, school board, vendor, legislature, Congress, governor, county commission.
  • Offline fallback: all documents printed. No live tracking of bills required during the period.

Before class

  • Request the current AUP and approved-tools list from administration. Redact nothing that is already public; do not add student names.
  • Print Role of Standards (standards do not dictate how to teach; LEAs decide resources).
  • If a live board meeting is upcoming, assign optional observation; never require political attendance.
  • Block plan: mock board hearing (seminar) and a written recommendation with costs (writing).

Instructional sequence

The algorithm did it

5 min
  1. Students rewrite three dodges: The detector flagged him. The model trained on her art. The filter blocked the site. Each rewrite must name a human verb and a role.
  2. Share one strong rewrite.
  3. Write the four verbs on the board. Tell students the standard requires evaluating all four, with risks, benefits, and long-term impacts.
  4. Promise that uncertainty about bills is an acceptable academic answer if dated.

Four verbs, local to federal

10 min
  1. Using: a teacher allows a district chatbot for outlines; a student uses a consumer app on a phone. Different choosers, different FERPA exposure.
  2. Designing: default logging, training-data choices (EP.3–4), whose accent the recognizer hears (EP.2).
  3. Deploying: a district contract, a clinic note system, a factory defect model (IS.2). Budget, training for staff, and who is on call when it fails.
  4. Regulating: board AUP; this standards document; Idaho statute if any; federal uncertainty. Local control means a board cannot blame Boise for an AUP it did not write, and a teacher cannot blame the algorithm for a syllabus they assigned.
  5. Who pays: licenses, teacher time, false-positive hours, ratepayers, unpaid creators, students whose thinking atrophies.

Mark up the AUP

10 min
  1. Read the AUP excerpt together. Highlight sentences that are human choices about AI or that are silent where a choice is needed.
  2. Place each highlight on the four-verb grid. Silence is a choice to defer.
  3. Read two sentences from Role of Standards. Ask: who decided that this course exists, and who still decides the materials?
  4. Model a who pays line for a detector purchase: vendor revenue, student time on appeals, teacher hours, reputation of a falsely flagged senior.

Evaluate a deployment

12 min
  1. Students take the fictional (or real, if public) board agenda item and complete the four-verb grid.
  2. They must fill regulating with both the AUP and this standards document, plus one sentence on legislative uncertainty.
  3. They write a ten-line recommendation: decide, delay, or deny; name the payer; name a long-term impact (habits, records, trust, labor).
  4. No party slogans. If a student writes politicians should just… they must name a body and a mechanism.

Real-world examples

  • A board updating an AUP after GenAI became commonplace (link EP.1) — a local regulatory act.
  • A district deploying a detector without an appeals process — a deployment choice with student-cost impacts.
  • Idaho’s 9–12 AI standards as a state document that defines expectations but not a mandated curriculum package.
  • County siting and tax choices for data centers (EP.3) as regulation adjacent to AI, with ratepayers and irrigators among those who pay.
  • Unsettled federal and state AI bills: students cite last dated action and say not enacted if that is true.

Hands-on activity

Accountability map

8 min
  1. Groups lay accountability cards on the agenda item. They may stack cards (board plus vendor plus principal).
  2. Remove one card and ask who now pays. If the answer is no one, the map has failed.
  3. Report one long-term impact that would not show up in this year’s test scores.
  4. Collect grids and recommendations.

Discussion questions

  1. Where in this building is a human currently hiding behind the algorithm?
  2. Should student use, teacher design of assignments, district deployment, and board regulation be aligned, and who calls a conflict?
  3. If the legislature does nothing, is that a regulatory choice?
  4. Who should pay when a detector is wrong: the vendor, the board, or the student who lost time?
  5. What long-term impact are we accepting if we train seniors to treat fluent output as decided?

Differentiation

Support

  • Provide a completed Use row as a model; students complete Deploy and Regulate.
  • Sentence frames: The decision-maker is… The payer is… A long-term impact is…

Challenge

  • Draft a one-page AUP amendment a board could actually consider, with a fiscal note.
  • Compare this standards document to another state’s AI guidance, dated, without ranking as better — just different human choices.

Multilingual learners

  • Note language-access implications of AUP and of parent notices about tools (EP.2).
  • Allow the recommendation’s first draft in the student’s strongest language with the five required names in English (decider, payer, risk, benefit, impact).

IEP / 504

  • Large-print AUP. Oral recommendation recorded on a school device that does not leave the district.
  • Reduce to two verbs in depth (deploy and regulate) if needed, still naming who pays.

Assessment

Formative

  • Dodge-rewrite warmup.
  • AUP highlights during guided practice.

Summative

  • Four-verb grid plus ten-line recommendation scored on named humans, payers, and a long-term impact.
  • Block extension: mock board testimony (seminar) and a 400-word policy memo.

Success criteria

  • Uses all four verbs, or honestly marks one as not visible in the documents and says what is missing.
  • Cites the AUP and this standards document as human regulatory choices.
  • Names who decides and who pays; does not leave responsibility with the algorithm.

Responsible use, ethics, and privacy

Responsible use

This is a policy-analysis lesson, not a campaign. Students may disagree. They may not harvest classmates’ political affiliations. Use public documents. Offline print is sufficient. Do not submit student memos to a model for scoring.

Ethics

The ethical core of the standard is that benefits, risks, and long-term impacts attach to human choices. Treating software as the chooser is itself a choice that shields people with power. Students should practice naming those people without contempt and without hero-worship of industry or of bans.

Privacy

AUPs and vendor contracts often determine whether student work becomes a product input. FERPA requires care with education records; a board that deploys a tool without a data agreement is making a privacy choice. Class discussion uses public policy text, not real students’ flagged essays. Political opinions in memos are student work and should be stored like other assignments.

Reflection

  1. Where did you previously say the algorithm when you could have named a person or a board?
  2. Which payer did you not see until the accountability map?
  3. What long-term impact do you want this school’s AUP to take seriously?

Homework

Read the rest of the AUP (or sample) on paper. Write eight sentences: one human choice you found, one silence that functions as a choice, who currently pays, and one amendment you would testify for. Do not post the AUP to a public model.

Closing

Return to the three dodges from the warm-up and read student rewrites that name humans. Collect grids. Students should leave this subdomain knowing that using, designing, deploying, and regulating are things people do — and that people, not the algorithm, choose.

Extensions and cross-curricular links

Go further

  • 90-minute block: mock school-board hearing with public comment and a written motion (seminar and writing).
  • Optional attendance at a real board meeting; alternative is a recorded past meeting.
  • Trace one vendor contract’s data-use clause (public redacted version) for FERPA and training language.
  • Capstone: a senior letter to a specific body (board, legislature, county) that uses evidence from EP and IS, sent only if the student and family choose.
Government / civics
Local boards, LEAs, state standards, and federal legislative process, including inaction as a choice.
Economics
Who captures surplus, who pays externalities, fiscal notes on detector or license purchases.
Business / CTE
Procurement, vendors, and contract clauses as design-plus-deployment.
English
Policy memo genre: named actor, named cost, dated evidence.