RAIL

RESPONSIBLE AI IN LEARNING

Stay Safe. Stay Ahead. 

What’s New

RAIL IN GLOBAL NEWS

With RAIL—the Responsible AI in Learning endorsements pioneered by Middle States—you can safely navigate the complexities of AI in education, ensuring safety, ethical leadership, and innovation.

What is RAIL?

RAIL is a comprehensive implementation framework for AI in schools and systems. It’s like accreditation for the adoption of AI—and it comes from Middle States, the world’s trusted school accreditor since 1887.

The first RAIL endorsement is in “AI Literacy, Safety, and Ethics.” Schools that pursue the RAIL endorsement from Middle States will earn a digital credential to signal their responsiveness to the most significant technology since the public Internet.

Throughout 2025 we will release additional endorsements to complete the full implementation framework.

Why do schools need RAIL?

We are only going to see more and faster AI over the next several years. RAIL enables you to adopt AI in your school safely, ethically, and innovatively. It provides a comprehensive framework, tools, and guided implementation—all customized to align with your institution's core values.

“AI literacy includes the knowledge and skills that enable humans to critically understand, use, and evaluate AI systems and tools to safely and ethically participate in an increasingly digital world.”

—Digital Promise, Revealing an AI Literacy Framework for Learners and Educators

A Quick Guide to

Understanding RAIL

  • RAIL is for savvy school leaders who want to lead the way on responsible AI in service of their faculty, staff, and students. The Middle States Association’s global presence means that schools from around the world will form RAIL’s forward-thinking community.

  • The first RAIL endorsement is in “AI Literacy, Safety, and Ethics.” Participants will walk away with:

    1. Change strategy. Every school leader knows that it’s easy to generate innovative ideas but hard to implement them. With the help of Middle States, you will develop a plan to lead and facilitate that change. As former school leaders, we have seen this movie before—many times!

    2. Guided access. The team at Middle States will guide you through our growing library of resources, templates, and examples related to the responsible use of AI in schools. We will be “on call” to ensure your success.

    3. New (or updated) mission-critical documents. These help to ensure the safe and ethical adoption of AI across your system. Examples of such documents are school governance statements, academic policies, and a Portrait of a Graduate.

    4. Marketing toolkit. Once you’ve earned the credential, you need to communicate its value and purpose. Middle States will ensure you have the right tools for that job.

    5. Superior professional development. RAIL involves a tremendous amount of learning-by-doing, with substantial feedback from Middle States. You can’t get that kind of professional learning from a workshop or webinar!

    6. “Software updates.” As the AI landscape continues to evolve, Middle States will update the endorsement framework so that participants can always Stay Safe. Stay Ahead.

    7. Credentials. You can display this Middle States-issued credential on your website, in your email signatures, and in other digital spaces. When viewers click on the credential, they will see evidence of your success.

  • The journey to earn the first RAIL endorsement in “AI Literacy, Safety, and Ethics” follows a few simple steps:

    • Use this diagnostic to see if you should apply. [Estimated time: 2 minutes]

    • RAIL costs $3000/year, but pays for itself many times over in terms of concrete value delivered. Read our FAQs to learn more.

  • RAIL is not just an accreditation-style endorsement, but also an implementation framework.

    It relies on the wisdom of Stewart Brand’s “pace layering” model, which reflects how complex, adaptive systems change (or resist change) over time.

    In line with Clayton Christensen’s Business Model Theory, we designed RAIL so that schools address AI at every layer. This means that they will have to shift resources, practices, and most of all priorities. To assist further, we are drawing on best practices from change management—for example, by requiring executive sponsorship, a change strategy, and an internal and external marketing plan.

Start Your Transformative AI Journey Today.

Apply Now.

Congrats to The RAIL Founding Schools For 2024-2025

Meet the visionary schools who took bold action early, ensuring their communities stay safe and ahead in the era of AI. These forward-thinking institutions are shaping the future of AI literacy, safety, and ethics in education.

Inspired by their leadership? Join the movement. Be part of a global network committed to great learning through the responsible adoption of AI.

Participating Countries A-Z

Australia

Bahrain

Bulgaria

Costa Rica

Dominican Republic

Egypt

France

Greece

Guatemala

India

Italy

Kazakhstan

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Kuwait

Latvia

Macedonia 

Nigeria

Pakistan

Panama

Puerto Rico

Portugal

Sierra Leone

South Korea

Spain

Taiwan

Tunisia

Uganda

United States

Venezuela

Zambia

  • "Part of why we even wanted to be part of RAIL was because we acknowledge the world we are living in. The challenges we're facing, and likely to face going forward. We wanted to be better prepared to serve the children more meaningfully."

    Naveen Mahesh, Co-Founder, Beyond 8

  • "I think while we are always in an AI world, the human interactions, the live interface that we had [with RAIL leaders] was the [experience] that was most powerful. "

    Raaji Naveen, Co-Founder, Beyond 8

  • “We are honored to have had the opportunity to participate in the RAIL Cohort and to be a part of the Founding Fifty. We have learned so much and benefited so much from this process. We are excited to improve our current documents, as you suggested, and to move forward in supporting our community in the responsible implementation of AI in education. We look forward to a continued relationship with the MSA RAIL program.”

    —Noreen Andrews, Assistant Principal Union Catholic High School, New Jersey

  • “We’re grateful for the continued support from MSA. MSA has been incredibly pro-active in navigating these challenging arenas. MSA continues to bring grassroots, high touch engagement in working with us. Having such effective collaboration has made all the difference in unpacking and designing the practical ways these technologies impact our students.”

    —Nate Chapman, Director Carlucci American International School, Portugal

  • “We look forward to building on this- and exploring opportunities for future collaboration via RAIL or other initiatives.”

    —Alan Wrafter, General Director Pan-American School, Costa Rica

Meet The MSA RAIL Global Advisory Team

Start Your Transformative AI Journey Today.

Apply Now.

Have a Question?

We want to hear from you. Feel free to use this form to send us an email to rail@msa-cess.org.