35 New Mexico Lawmakers Urge Education Department to Add Independent Testing and Parental Consent for Amira AI Literacy Tool

A bipartisan group of 35 New Mexico state lawmakers sent a letter on Aug. 25 to Public Education Department Secretary Mariana Padilla, calling for greater transparency and additional independent testing to evaluate how accurately Amira, an AI literacy testing tool, measures students' reading proficiency. The tool has been required statewide for K-2 students since the 2025-26 school year, with students reading aloud to a digital avatar. Lawmakers said Amira has collected thousands of student voice recordings and has access to names, genders, birthdays, locations and other sensitive information, and asked that parental consent be required before children use the tool.

This is a substantive change in the regulatory and adoption conditions for an AI literacy testing tool in a real school system: a statewide mandate has been relaxed to an opt-out model, with data retention and parental consent at the center of the dispute, directly affecting school procurement, deployment and compliance design. For education AI products, voice data collection, model training use and validation of assessment accuracy will face stricter scrutiny. Independent testing has not yet been conducted, and conclusions on assessment accuracy, model drift risk and data security remain unavailable. Districts gain the ability to opt out and must decide their own data retention policies, changing the default deployment model and compliance costs for AI assessment products. Lawmakers' demands for parental consent and independent validation make voice data collection and model training use a key review point in education AI procurement.