New Mexico's Amira Opt-Out — A Statewide Biometric-Privacy Backlash Against a Mandatory AI Reading Test

New Mexico's Public Education Department (PED) requires all kindergarten-through-second-grade students statewide to take Amira Learning's AI reading assessment three times a year, plus 30 or more minutes of weekly AI-guided tutoring, at an annual state cost of $2.7 million, of which $1.4 million funds the assessment component alone; Amira listens to children read aloud and analyses the recording to flag errors.

Leaders in Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Farmington, Roswell, Clayton and Turquoise Trail Charter School argued that a child's voice is biometric data and objected to a third-party vendor retaining recordings that could be used to train commercial AI models, as well as to documented accuracy gaps for students with speech disabilities or accents.

Days before the 2025-26 school year, PED responded with an opt-out policy: districts can use Amira without the voice-recording feature, revert to paper-based testing, or choose an alternative assessment, and can request deletion of voice recordings daily, weekly, monthly or at year-end instead of the prior default schedule.

Six districts, including Santa Fe and Los Alamos, opted out of the voice-recording feature over these biometric-privacy and accuracy concerns.

A May 2026 Legislative Education Study Committee brief found New Mexico still lacks statewide AI-procurement standards, AI-specific student data-privacy rules, or a formal evaluation process for education AI tools, meaning the opt-out resolved this one dispute without closing the underlying governance gap.