Parents Push Back Over New Mexico's Mandatory 'Amira' AI Reading Tests for Children

New Mexico schools are required to use an AI-powered reading assessment called 'Amira' with children as young as five, and parents and teachers are increasingly unhappy about it.

The programme records children's voices, assesses their reading aloud and is also used as a dyslexia screener. It has been used in kindergarten through second grade classrooms since the 2025–26 school year, although a growing number of districts have since opted out.

Some school leaders say they were never given a clear explanation of how those recordings are stored or used before the state introduced the tool. Others say the technology is producing scores that may reflect children's speech patterns rather than their actual reading ability.

Voices Recorded, Rules Written After the Fact

Jennifer Guy, superintendent of Los Alamos Public Schools, raised the alarm in a letter to the New Mexico Public Education Department dated 31 July.

She wrote that families were asking where the recordings were stored, who could access them and whether they were being used to refine the vendor's AI models, adding that 'our families are asking questions we cannot fully answer'.

'A child's voice is effectively biometric data,' Guy wrote, adding that parents were right to feel uneasy about a third-party system collecting children's voices as part of a state-mandated assessment.

Amira Learning's chief executive, Mark Angel, responded in an August letter to lawmakers stating that the company 'does not and will not ever sell student data' and does not use New Mexico children's recordings to build products for other clients.

The New Mexico Public Education Department has since agreed that recordings will be deleted monthly unless a district requests otherwise, while districts can seek approval to opt out of Amira entirely. Amira Learning says it complies with all applicable data protection laws and that its contracts with states include strict data privacy provisions.

They Don't Actually Understand Me

For some families, concerns about the programme emerged before those changes were introduced. Sally DeRadke, a mother of three Albuquerque Public Schools pupils, wrote in a Santa Fe New Mexican op-ed that her family only learned Amira was being used when her young children came home describing it.

'Amira is like a new teacher but they don't actually understand me,' she quoted one of her children saying, adding that another told her, 'I don't like reading anymore.'

Amy Roble, superintendent of Maxwell Municipal Schools, told an August board meeting that staff believed some scores reflected children's speech patterns rather than their actual reading ability, particularly for pupils with speech delays or disabilities.

'We aren't in control of their server,' she said, referring to the infrastructure hosting children's assessment data. The district later sought and received approval to opt out of the programme.

The State Admitted It Lacks AI Rules for Schools

A May 2026 policy brief from the state's Legislative Education Study Committee found that New Mexico lacks AI-specific procurement standards, AI-specific student-data privacy rules and a formal process for evaluating whether education AI tools such as Amira are working effectively.

New Mexico spends $2.7 million a year on the programme, according to the policy brief.

A department-run poll found just 8 per cent of teachers and administrators had no major concerns about Amira, though the department said the poll was part of state training and not representative.

The Public Education Department maintains that the tool is working, with spokesperson Janelle Taylor García saying in an early-August statement that data shows Amira supports improved academic outcomes.

New Mexico is not alone. Amira is required for reading assessments in Idaho and New Mexico and is authorised for use in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma and Texas, meaning similar disputes over consent, data retention and scoring accuracy could surface well beyond one state.

For parents in any state where Amira is used, the dispute in New Mexico is a reminder to ask schools directly what AI tools are recording, how long that data is kept and what happens when a machine gets a child's score wrong.