Nevada AI system reclassifies at-risk students, reducing funding to low-income schools
Nevada deployed an AI system to identify at-risk students for funding purposes, which reclassified approximately 205,000 students as no longer at-risk, resulting in reduced funding to low-income schools. School administrators report the system lacks transparency and appears to contradict actual student needs in the post-pandemic era.
What happened
Nevada adopted an AI system from Infinite Campus to identify at-risk students and allocate state funding. The system weighed dozens of factors including attendance and language spoken at home, moving away from the previous approach of treating all low-income students as at-risk.
The AI reclassified the number of at-risk students from over 270,000 in 2022 to less than 65,000, resulting in significant reductions in state funding to schools. At Somerset Academy's Stephanie Campus in Henderson, which has over 250 low-income students and about a dozen homeless students, not a single student was identified as at-risk under the new system.
Reported impact
Schools saw state money they relied on disappear and scrambled to slash programs and redo budgets. School leaders reported that the need for extra support among Nevada students has increased since the pandemic, contradicting the AI system's reduction in at-risk classifications.
Index analysis
The AI system appears to have applied a much higher bar for identifying at-risk students compared to the previous approach, despite the state having the most lopsided school funding of any state, with low-income districts having nearly 35 percent less money per pupil than wealthier ones.
Governance controls
The principal of Somerset Academy's Stephanie Campus stated they "still don't truly know how it works," suggesting limited transparency into the AI system's decision-making process. No other state currently relies solely on this machine learning system.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.