The person behind every Baseline Review.

Hector

Hector is a bilingual (English / Spanish) education technology consultant working across the United States, Colombia, and Spain. He founded Togno to address the gap in K–12 AI governance that state DOEs and EdTech vendors aren't filling: a school-side, school-owned program that turns AI policy from a board-meeting deliverable into operational practice.

Thirty years of working where education and technology meet. Long enough to have watched several waves of technology arrive in schools — the computer lab, the interactive board, the one-to-one device, the phone in every pocket, the platform that promised to change everything. Long enough to have noticed that the pattern almost never changes, and that one thing underneath it never changes either: a child, a teacher, and something worth understanding between them. Every wave has been judged, in the end, by what it did to that.

The technology arrives first. Teachers absorb it, adapt around it, make it work with whatever time they have — which is generally time taken from somewhere else, usually from themselves. The guidance comes later, normally after something has gone wrong, and by then the practice is already set and the rules are retrofitted onto it. Schools spent a decade doing that with social media. Nobody chose it; it happened one term at a time, while everyone was busy teaching.

And it cost twice over. There was the harm everyone remembers. But there was also a real educational idea in there — about connection, about collaboration, about a student having something to say and somewhere beyond the classroom wall to say it — and most schools ended up blocking the whole thing, because by the time they acted, blocking was the only instrument they had left. That is the part that gets forgotten. Ungoverned adoption does not only produce harm. It burns the benefit along with it, and the students who most needed the benefit are rarely the ones who were harmed.

AI is arriving faster than any of them, it is harder to see, and its failures cut closer to the bone. A detector that wrongly accuses a child who writes in a second language, and teaches that child that being different reads as being dishonest. A tutor so willing to answer that it removes the difficulty a student was about to overcome — and difficulty is not an obstacle to learning, it is the place where learning lives. A synthetic image of a real child, made by someone who never met them. None of that is misuse. It is what the technology does when nobody has decided what it is for.

But the other half is just as real, and it is the reason this work is worth doing at all. A teacher who gets an evening back and spends it with the three students she has been worried about since September. A child who finally understands something because it was explained a fourth way, patiently, without an audience — and shame has always been the quietest obstacle to learning there is. A family reading a school report in their own language for the first time, and discovering they were always meant to be part of the conversation. Teaching every child according to how that child learns has been education's unkept promise for a century, not for lack of will but for lack of hours. Some of those hours are now, genuinely, available.

None of that replaces a teacher, and it should not try to. The relationship between someone who knows something and someone who wants to understand it is not a process to be optimised; it is the thing school is for. The best a technology can do is protect the time and attention that relationship needs, and then get out of the way. Judged by that standard, some uses of AI are worth defending and others are not — and a school that has never made the distinction will end up living with both.

So the goal was never to keep AI out of schools. It is to make sure that this time the school is in a position to keep what works, and to say clearly why. Governing AI well is not what slows a school down; it is what lets it move without having to stop later. Done properly, this is not a compliance exercise at all. It is a school deciding, deliberately and in its own words, what it wants technology to do for its children — and being able to protect that decision.

That is the whole reason AIP exists, and why it insists on measuring before advising. Schools do not need another warning about AI. They need to know where they actually stand, in their own building, with their own tools — and they need it while there is still time to decide rather than react.

Thirty years is where the tools, the judgement and the experience come from. The conviction comes from having seen how this ends when nobody gets ahead of it.

— Hector signs every Baseline Review. Every deliverable. Every recommendation.