The Bionic Educator: The Potential of Generative AI to Enhance the Legal Literacy of Teachers and School Leaders

Abstract

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has rapidly emerged as a powerful tool, yet its role in supporting teachers’ and school leaders’ legal literacy remains underexplored. This study examines whether GenAI can enhance educators’ understanding of education law—a longstanding area of need—by assessing the performance of 13 contemporary large language models (LLMs) on an existing survey of school law knowledge. Results indicate that current LLMs substantially and significantly outperform practicing educators and school leaders in their knowledge of education law. Top models achieved over 90% accuracy compared to administrators’ 59% and teachers’ 40%. These findings highlight GenAI's capacity to serve as an accessible legal resource for educators but also reveal persistent limitations, including occasional inaccuracies and potential challenges with nuanced legal reasoning. To conceptualize how educators might effectively integrate GenAI into decision-making, we apply three metaphors: “centaurs,” who strategically divide tasks between human and machine; “cyborgs,” who seamlessly integrate AI into their cognitive processes; and “clones,” where AI wholly replaces human expertise. Drawing on the metaphor of the cyborg, we propose the “bionic educator” as an ideal model—an educator who works symbiotically with AI to enhance legal understanding while retaining agency in decision-making.