District leader insights: Dr. Tamekia Brown

The conversation about technology in K-12 schools has largely centered on access: how much screen time is appropriate, which platforms are safe, whether phones belong in classrooms at all. Dr. Tamekia Brown, an administrator in Waco ISD, thinks the more consequential question runs deeper than any of those: what is the technology actually doing to the learning?

It is a challenge playing out in districts across the country. As AI tools have become more accessible, students have begun using them to generate responses rather than develop their own thinking. The writing looks polished. The underlying competency is not being built. And whether anyone catches it depends entirely on whether the teacher in front of that student is equipped to recognize it.

Teachers who are savvy will quickly say, this is not your voice. Teachers who are not savvy say, “I’ve done a great job of teaching.”

Brown is not describing a failure of individual teachers. She is describing a gap in preparation that districts have an obligation to close. In Waco, that responsibility has taken a specific shape. The district’s chief of technology gathered all administrators in a room and started with their own work, not students’ work. He walked the group through a demonstration using a task every administrator already owned: drafting mid-year evaluation feedback for teachers. He loaded observation notes and lesson design examples into an AI tool and showed the group how to use it not to write the feedback, but to surface the right questions before the conversation happened. The AI became a thinking partner, helping administrators identify patterns in the data and arrive at the mid-year meeting better prepared to have a genuine, evidence-based dialogue with the teacher in front of them.

The strategy was deliberate. Before you can ask educators to use technology purposefully with students, you have to give them a reason to believe it is worth using at all. Modeling does that in a way that mandates never can. The chief of technology then asked each administrator to take that same experience back to their own staff. The cascade was intentional: district leadership to administrators, administrators to teachers, teachers to students.

People don’t know what they don’t know,” Brown says. “Modeling is how you change that.

That principle extends into how Brown thinks about instruction itself. Students begin with what she calls paper-pencil thinking, working through a task independently before any tools are introduced. Then AI enters not as a replacement for that thinking, but as a mirror held up against it. Students compare what they produced on their own against what the tool generates, examining the gap against a shared rubric. The comparison is the instruction.

Hopefully my product is better quality, because I’ve been able to identify the gap in what I’ve done, how it was enhanced, and now when I do it again, it will enhance what I’m able to do.

Brown acknowledges there is still distance to cover. “Our district is innovative in the sense that we’ve been open to the journey,” she says. “But there is still a way to go to get to scale.”

That gap between early adoption and system-wide change is one most district leaders will recognize. What Waco has worked out is where the responsibility sits. The question was never whether students would use the tools available to them. The question is whether districts are willing to build the conditions where technology makes students think harder, not less. That work starts with leadership, and it moves through every layer of the organization until it reaches the classroom. It does not happen any other way.

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About Dr. Tamekia Brown