Sunanna Chand: Teachers matter more than technology

The hardest part of AI in education isn’t picking a tool. It’s deciding what kind of learning we want to protect, elevate, and scale.

On this episode of aiEDU Studios, we dive straight into that question with Sunanna Chand, executive director of The Reinvention Lab at Teach For America.

Sunanna has a clear stance on edtech: focus on talent over technology. Instead of imagining rows of students plugged into personalized dashboards, she explains how strategic, lightweight AI use can help teachers spark curiosity while still building durable skills and making school feel meaningful again.

We talk about what it really takes to change a sprawling K‑12 system (millions of students, thousands of districts, countless constraints) and why organizations with trust and reach matter. Sunanna offers a dual mandate to improve outcomes now while prototyping the models we will need in 5-10 years as AI automates routine tasks. That work means grappling with equity and access, acknowledging that for some students the phone is the Internet, and refusing to let premium AI become a quiet advantage for the privileged.

Of course, it also means drawing clear lines between healthy shortcuts and harmful ones — writing is still thinking, and judgment can’t be outsourced.

If you care about teacher prestige, student agency, durable skills, and using AI without losing our humanity, this conversation is for you.

Learn about about Sunanna Chand and The Reinvention Lab at Teach For America:

• https://reinventionlab.org/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunannachand/

aiEDU: The AI Education Project

• aiEDU.org
• linkedin.com/company/aiedu/