AI in Education and the Illusion of Teacher Empowerment

Is AI endangering the teaching profession?

Written by Marite P Irvine

The growing use of AI for teacher support

I was saddened to hear that my daughter learned about a teacher who uses AI to write student evaluations, including using it for the “personal” comments at the end of each report card. This confirmed the trend of growing uses of AI among educators. A 2025 Digital Education Council Survey revealed that 61% of teachers now use AI to assist them, especially for teaching materials (DEC, 2025). This anecdote, however, signals a shift in delegating even reflective and personalized teacher tasks to AI!

Deeper ways of engaging with AI feel inevitable given its integration into more aspects of education. As a helpful support for teacher tasks, reports are pouring in: technology providers and K-12 pilot partner schools say teachers rely on AI for lesson planning, content creation, test creation, and school communiques. Agentic AI (chatbots and virtual assistants), are also being tested to provide real time feedback for both learners and educators. The hope, of course, is that these platforms will help address learning deficits and inefficient systems that weigh teachers down, especially in Basic Education.

The efficiency of AI in Education: treatment or trap?

The promise of efficiency is even more enticing when it is framed as “teacher empowerment.” DepEd QC schools reportedly save 10 to 22.5 hours per week on “administrative” tasks through AI integration (Microsoft Source Philippines, 2025), freeing up time for teachers who work 52 hour weeks (IDInsight, 2024). Whether this extra time empowers teachers to “enhance the learning experience” remains to be seen. A leading pilot of teacherless classrooms, the Alpha School in the U.S., may give a clue. Its 2-hour K-12 academic curriculum is entirely and efficiently tutored by AI so students can spend their remaining hours working on practical projects. Here, traditional teachers have been reskilled as “guides” and motivational coaches, largely freed of their pedagogical responsibilities. Is this what teacher empowerment looks like? Perhaps.

But, as AI experts and researchers know now, these experiments ( on our teachers and studentsL the lab rats), don’t come without costs. A key watch out is to fall for AI’s “Efficiency Trap.” Technologist and futurist Jason Snyder writes how AI is ushering in an age when optimization has replaced wisdom as the highest good; that what began as a search for intelligence has become a cult of efficiency where metrics reign over mission (Snyder, 2025).

We glean from the literature how AI platforms can direct teachers towards automation and away from personal authorship (Snyder, 2025), to quantifiable metrics and away from holistic understanding (Pai, 2024), to digital nudging vs. nurturing intrinsic motivation to learn (Nallur, 2025).

As the push for wider and deeper adoption of AI intensifies, it’s important to examine: what are teachers giving up in the name of efficiency and “empowerment?”

The risk of slipping from dependency to deprofessionalization

While studies around AI dependency and cognitive offloading for students abound, concerns are growing around similar effects for teachers. This, of course, carries worrying implications for the practice and profession.

One research report suggests that teachers who become deeply immersed in AI-supported tasks like lesson planning, content generation, or administrative activities, are more likely to develop an AI addiction (Du, et al., 2025). The International Task Force on Teachers for Education takes this further by warning how over-reliance could lead to losing skills paramount to quality education and teaching, such as assessing and evaluating students’ learning progress and tailoring education to the needs of learners (UNESCO, 2025).

As teachers contend with AI use, these self-learning technologies become even more powerful and agentic. Their speed of development is gradually outpacing and outperforming teacher skills in learning delivery, diagnosis and discernment. In this scenario where teachers are playing catch up, it’s tempting to further deepen AI integration to compensate for the lag. A potential consequence of this may be the diminishing role of teachers and the personal ways they enrich learning, especially in adapting to diverse students and environments (UNESCO, 2025).

Philippine teachers, on the backfoot, are at greater risk

We can see that the conditions that make AI efficiencies appealing also accelerate its harms. After all, when you have to manage overcrowded classrooms with limited resources and support (EdCom, 2024), the promise of instant lesson plans or automated grading isn't just attractive, it’s a lifeline. Without sufficient professional training “at the speed of change,” however, Filipino teachers won’t be able to engage with these AI platforms critically and proactively.

Indeed, under pressure, any solution that promises to ease teacher load will be embraced even with known risks to the profession. AI integration in education is a given at this point and problematizing it delays modernizing the system. This path of least critique and resistance is a dangerous one to take for the future of Filipino educators and, ultimately, learners. It’s more than personally tailored student evaluations that may be lost in the name of AI. Without a real vision for Human-First AI integration that preserves teacher agency and discernment, what promises empowerment may lead to deprofessionalization and devaluation.

What if?

What if in the future, AI takes the lead in learning delivery while human educators are relegated to being their assistants?

Reference

Digital Education Council. (2025). Digital Education Council Global AI Faculty Survey 2025. Digital Education Council. https://www.digitaleducationcouncil.com/post/digital-education-council-global-ai-faculty-survey

Du, Y., Tang, M., Jia, K., Wang, C., & Zou, B. (2025). Are Teachers Addicted to AI? Analysing Factors Influencing Dependence on Generative AI Through the I-PACE Model. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 42(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcal.70174

IDinsight. (2024). Providing evidence-based recommendations to improve Philippine education. IDinsight. https://www.idinsight.org/project/providing-evidence-based-recommendations-to-improve-philippine-education/

International Task Force on Teachers for Education. (n.d.). Promoting and protecting teacher agency in the age of artificial intelligence [Position Paper]. https://teachertaskforce.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/1149_25_Promoting%20and%20Protecting%20Teacher%20Agency_FINAL_3Sep.pdf

Pai, G. (2024). Using Formative Assessment and Feedback from Student Response Systems (SRS) to Revise Statistics Instruction and Promote Student Growth for All. Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 33(1), 16-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2024.2321241

Parker, B. D. (2024). Considering the Impact of AI on the Professional Status of Teaching. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 97(6), 223-236. https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2024.2441805

Snyder, J. (2025). The Efficiency Trap: How AI’s Dark Enlightenment Is Rewriting Reality. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonsnyder/2025/11/10/the-efficiency-trap-how-ais-dark-enlightenment-is-rewriting-reality/

Source Philippines. (2025). DepEd QC Empower Teachers, Improve Learning with AI Integration. Microsoft Source Asia. https://news.microsoft.com/source/asia/2025/07/17/deped-qc-empower-teachers-improve-learning-with-ai-integration/#:~:text=Teachers%20reported%20saving%20between%2010,worksheet%20preparation%2C%20and%20school%20communications.

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