I Chair a Public Budget Committee. AI Is About to Make Data Literacy a Survival Skill.

Data literacy is a necessary skill

For two meetings a month, I sit in a room and help oversee a public school budget of just over $70 million. Real money, other people's money, tied to 3,150 kids and 550 people's jobs. It is about as far from a slick tech demo as you can get. Folding chairs, long agendas, public comment.

And it's the room that's made me most certain about where AI is taking all of us.

Here's what I've learned chairing that committee. A budget is an argument. Every number in it is someone's priority, translated into a figure and presented as if it were simply a fact. But it's more than that. A budget is a moral document. It's a community saying, in dollars, what and who it values. What we protect, what we cut, whose needs come first, whose can wait. You can read a town's conscience in a spreadsheet if you know how to look. So the stakes of getting the numbers right, and of people being able to read them honestly, were never just financial. They're about what kind of community we're choosing to be.

Most of the real work of oversight isn't math. It's asking where a number came from, what assumption is buried inside it, and what the chart on the screen is quietly leaving out. The people who can do that shape the outcome. The people who can't just nod along to whoever made the most confident slide.

I don't have to imagine what happens when they can't, because I already watch it happen. Every budget season, posts appear online about our schools' numbers. Someone takes a real figure and strips away the context that gave it meaning. Someone charts two things side by side that were never comparable. Someone frames a routine increase as a scandal, or a genuine problem as nothing, depending on the story they came in wanting to tell. The data gets twisted and manipulated to fit a personal narrative, and it spreads, because it's confident and it's simple and it confirms what someone already believed. This is not a future risk. It's a Thursday.

Now hand everyone in that fight an AI that can generate a flawless, persuasive, professional-looking chart for absolutely any position in about nine seconds.

That's the world we just walked into. Not a world with more lies in it, exactly. A world with more polish. It has never been easier to make a weak argument look authoritative, to dress up a cherry-picked number in a beautiful visualization, to produce something that looks like proof and functions like persuasion. The barrier to looking credible just dropped to zero, and it dropped for everyone, in every public meeting, in every community, all at once.

Here's the part that keeps me up at night, and it's not the technology. It's the gap.

Because the ability to make a convincing chart is now universal, but the ability to question one is not. That skill, reading data with a skeptical eye, asking "how do you know," noticing what's missing, is still rare, still unevenly distributed, and suddenly worth more than it has ever been. And when the power to persuade outruns the public's power to scrutinize, that's not a small problem. That's how communities get talked into things. That's how a budget passes, or fails, because it was presented well, not because it was right.

So I've come to believe data literacy isn't a corporate skill anymore, or a nice line on a professional development plan. It's civic infrastructure. It's how a community holds power accountable. In a town, in a school district, in a democracy, the ability of ordinary people to look at a number and ask a good question about it is quietly becoming one of the load-bearing skills of self-governance. When AI can manufacture certainty on demand, the people who can puncture false certainty are the ones keeping everyone honest.

I don't think the answer is to fear the tools or ban the charts. The answer is to raise the floor. To teach the skeptical question as widely as we can. To make "where did that come from" a normal, respectable, expected thing to ask in a public meeting instead of a rude one. The most valuable thing I can do from that folding chair isn't to be the smartest data person in the room. It's to model the questions, out loud, so that asking them becomes contagious, so the person who was afraid to look uninformed watches someone in charge ask the basic question and realizes they're allowed to ask it too.

That's the human part, and it's the whole thing for me. Data literacy sounds cold and technical. In practice it's deeply human. It's about giving people the confidence to trust their own judgment in the face of a slick presentation. It's about refusing to let anyone, including me, win an argument just because they had the better software. It's dignity, really. The dignity of not being managed by a chart you weren't equipped to question.

I spend my professional life making data trustworthy inside organizations. I spend a slice of my civic life sitting on the other side of the table, as one of the people a number is being presented to, and increasingly as one of the people a manipulated number is being weaponized against. AI is about to make all of that harder, and more important, at the same time. The through-line is identical. Make the numbers honest, and help people find the confidence to question the ones that aren't.

If AI is going to hand everyone the power to sound certain, then teaching people to ask good questions isn't optional anymore. When a budget is a moral document, being able to read it honestly might be the most important civic work there is.

For the people reading this who sit on boards, councils, committees, anywhere numbers get presented to a community: what's the one question you wish more people in the room knew to ask? Let's build the list together.

This post is my personal opinion only and should not be viewed as official communication from the Board of Education.