EdSurge Articles

AI Can Help One of K-12’s Biggest Challenges: Middle School Reading

Dacia Toll — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For years, the United States has treated its reading crisis as an early grades problem. This narrow focus misses the bigger challenge: the “comprehension wall” that many students hit in middle school.

As students move into middle school, they no longer focus on learning to read. They must understand what they are reading. Right now, they struggle to do so: Only 30% of eighth graders were proficient in reading in 2024, the lowest level in 30 years.

I witnessed this problem firsthand as a principal and school network leader. We invested significant time in the early grades teaching and reinforcing phonics, phonemic awareness and fluency. The work paid off, as students made strong gains through fourth grade. Then, in fifth grade, performance dropped as texts became more complex and writing demands increased.

That is when many students hit the “comprehension wall.” They can decode the words on the page, but meaning breaks down when a passage uses complex sentences, sophisticated vocabulary, old-fashioned language, hidden meaning or unfamiliar subject matter.

The consequences are hard to miss. Students who cannot deeply engage with text can fall behind not only in English language arts, but science, social studies, math and every subject that depends on reading to learn. Their confidence can erode, with many choosing to hide their confusion rather than ask for help.

The diverse needs that exist in almost every middle school classroom make the challenge harder. Some students struggle to decode, some can read the words but lack the vocabulary or background knowledge to understand the meaning, and some read far above grade level and need to be challenged.

The problem is not a lack of educator commitment. It is a lack of scalable support.

Opportunities and Challenges

I am generally skeptical of the artificial intelligence (AI) hype in education, especially of suggestions that technology can replace teachers, strong curriculum or the critical relationships that often power learning. But middle school reading is one area where carefully designed AI-supported tools can help if they are built to strengthen instruction rather than shortcut it.

The opportunity lies in custom-built literacy tools, based on the science of reading, that use AI to diagnose student needs precisely, provide timely feedback and help teachers differentiate support without lowering expectations.

The opportunity is not to hand students a generic chatbot and hope comprehension improves. The Brookings Institution found that AI can either enrich or diminish student learning depending on how it is used, and recommended schools use tools that “teach, not tell.”

Schools can use AI to create better support for the reading work educators already know students need: a higher volume of reading, more precise diagnosis, timely feedback, opportunities to revise their thinking and ways to access grade-level texts when the work is difficult.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers is reading assessment. In middle school, assessment often focuses on whether students have mastered a standard. But reading comprehension is not a simple sequence of discrete skills. A student may understand the main idea in one unit and struggle with that same standard in the next because the texts are more complex, the vocabulary is less familiar or the background knowledge demands are higher.

Educators need a more nuanced picture of what students need. Instead of relying only on stand-alone assessments, well-designed AI tools can analyze students’ everyday work, identify text-specific and longitudinal patterns and give teachers clearer visibility into where comprehension is breaking down.

AI can also help with differentiation. For example, students could read a complex nonfiction article in class and work in pairs to unpack its meaning; but if they struggle, AI asks a just-right follow-up question. They are redirected to a specific sentence or paragraph to reread. They can access a vocabulary definition or brief background knowledge. They have a chance to revise after feedback that pushes them back into the text rather than away from it.

One teacher often cannot provide this level of individual support in real time to 26 students with different needs. There can be a greater impact on struggling readers, who are too often removed from rigorous learning and complex texts altogether, and are given watered-down materials instead of better access points. Over time, the achievement gap becomes not just a reading gap, but also a knowledge gap.

Early results are promising. In one large urban district in Texas and another very diverse district in Tennessee, middle schools using an AI-supported literacy model saw significantly stronger year-over-year growth on state reading assessments than comparable schools that did not use the model.

These examples suggest AI-supported literacy intervention can help educators provide more responsive support at-scale when aligned with strong instruction, grade-level content, teacher support and consistent implementation.

If AI becomes a shortcut, novelty, or substitute for high-quality instruction, it will fail students. If it is used mainly to help students complete assignments faster, it will weaken the habits students need to build: reading closely, asking questions, explaining their thinking and revising their ideas.

Ask Before You Act

The best way to improve student reading achievement is still to read a lot, and we should look for tools that support a higher volume of reading with increasingly complex texts.

In the last decade, schools have taken a crucial step and replaced incoherent, homegrown materials with vetted curricula that systematically build knowledge and vocabulary, expose students to complex grade-level texts and spiral essential reading habits.

Before adopting AI-supported reading tools, educators and district leaders should ask hard questions, such as:

Does the tool reinforce or detract from high-quality curricular materials? Does the tool keep students engaged with grade-level text or does it lower the bar?
Does it require students to return to the text, explain their thinking and revise their responses?
Does it give teachers visibility into where students are struggling?
Does it support discussion, writing and teacher-led instruction or does it isolate students on screens? Does the tool lead to more students doing more reading, writing and thinking?
Does it help students build reading stamina and a love of reading?

These questions matter because the goal is not to make reading easier by removing the cognitive work. The goal is to make rigorous reading more accessible so more students can participate in that work.

We cannot continue treating middle school reading challenges as an inevitable byproduct of earlier gaps. Nor can we assume that students who reached adolescence without strong literacy foundations are beyond meaningful intervention.

For middle school students who have spent too long being told that reading is something they should have already mastered, that support could make all the difference.

Student Artists Wrestle with AI’s Promise and Peril

David Weldon — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

With the launch of ChatGPT four years ago, the graduating class of 2026 is the first to have full exposure to generative artificial intelligence. Many high school students in the United States have considerable experience using AI — and mixed feelings about its growing role in everyday life. They may take advantage of AI benefits, but some fear where the technology could take us in the future.

That concern was on clear display at the Me, Myself, and AI art show at the America’s Youth AI Festival, which took place last month in Boston. The three-day event gathered student leaders, educators and school system leaders from across the country to discuss acceptable AI use in the classroom and how it is influencing students' lives. The festival was hosted by Day of AI, MIT RAISE, The School Superintendents Association and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute.

The event featured two contests: AI for a Better World and an art competition. Four students (last names withheld) shared the spotlight as winners of the 2026 Me, Myself, and AI art competition. Their work reflected AI’s influence in their communities today and what they think AI may look like in 50 years. Annie, an 11th grader from the Barbara Keel Art School and Auburn High School in Alabama, exemplified the worry on the minds of many students with her two-part winning entry titled “Which Way We Run.”

Depicting AI’s Evolving Influence

Annie’s two pieces illustrate how AI is already affecting human life and what could happen to humans if we continue to rely on it for trivial needs every day. “The first piece represents my current community and focuses on how AI is beginning to integrate into everyday life,” she says. “The buildings are bright and colorful, symbolizing liveliness, creativity and emotion — all human qualities. In the center, two people are running, representing different stages of human interaction with AI-driven technology.”

In addition to Annie, the competition winners included 11th-grader Evangelina from the Essex County Newark Tech school in Newark, New Jersey, for “A Free Venezuela”; 11th-grader Juliette from the Rye Country Day School in Rye, New York, for “A Self-Portrait Across Time”; and 9th-grader Wendi from the Atlanta Contemporary Chinese Academy in Decatur, Georgia, for “Community Today as Meandering in Divide, Community in 50 Years as Yearning into Time.”

The Me, Myself, and AI art competition grew out of a curriculum developed by the MIT Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE) initiative, explains Jeffrey Riley, executive director of Day of AI. The ideas debuted in a high school summer program in 2024 and later expanded into Day of AI’s five-lesson AI and the Creative Arts Curriculum, which was released in January 2025 for students ages 8 and up.

The lessons invite students to examine the relationship between AI and creativity by analyzing AI-generated artwork, discussing questions of authorship and originality and creating art of their own. Winning entries were selected through a multi-reviewer evaluation process similar to those used in college admissions or scholarship competitions, Riley says.

“Judges evaluated submissions holistically, considering creativity, originality, evidence of process, thoughtful use of AI and the authenticity of each student’s personal voice,” Riley explains. “The emphasis was never on creating the most impressive AI-generated image but on how effectively students used creativity and, where appropriate, AI, to communicate their ideas.”

The Growing Impact of AI on Art and Media

Riley predicts AI will become a standard part of many artists’ creative workflows, much like digital design software, cameras or animation tools are today. It has the potential to make creative exploration more accessible, he says, helping people prototype ideas, explore new styles and bring concepts to life more quickly.

“AI will shape how young people live, learn, create and connect,” explains Cynthia Breazeal, director of MIT RAISE and co-founder of Day of AI. “What is so powerful about Me, Myself, and AI is that it gives students the opportunity to reflect on that future in a deeply personal and imaginative way.”

Annie says she was attracted to this competition because of its themes in connecting art, AI and humanity. She saw it as a forum to share and learn what her generation thinks of AI, its ethical concerns and the implications it has for art, especially with the current contention surrounding AI-generated images.

“The use of AI to create media is not appropriate in corporate models that exploit the work of artists without consent,” Annie says. “Instead, if any artist believes that AI is integral to a project they want to create, they should look toward models that are trained on open-source data or ethically sourced media. Additionally, even with ethical models, AI’s large environmental footprint means we should be mindful of what we ask it to do.”

Encouraging Lessons from the Competition

Riley says that what impressed the judging team most was how thoughtful students were in their decision-making and how candid they were about their feelings toward AI. Rather than simply using AI because it was available, many carefully considered when it strengthened their creative vision and when it did not. Some intentionally limited or even chose not to use AI for portions of their projects because they wanted certain elements to remain entirely their own.

“One of the biggest lessons we took away was that young people are far more thoughtful about AI than they’re often given credit for,” Riley says. “Students didn’t see AI as simply ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Instead, they expressed a wide range of perspectives based on their own experiences using the technology.”

The competition also reinforced the importance of giving students authentic, hands-on opportunities to wrestle with these questions rather than simply teaching them about AI in the abstract.

“These insights will continue to shape curricula and learning experiences as we help students develop the critical thinking, creativity and ethical decision-making skills they’ll need in an AI-driven world,” Riley explains. “Our goal has never been to encourage or discourage AI use but rather to empower young people to make informed, intentional choices about how they use these technologies.”

Protecting Student Cognition in the Age of AI

Melinda Medina — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Have you considered that the greatest risk of artificial intelligence might not be plagiarism, but the quiet erosion of students’ ability to think for themselves?

“How does Kate Chopin use irony to challenge the reader’s understanding of freedom?” I ask while standing in front of my 11th-grade English class.

Normally, this is the point where students flip through the text, underline a few lines, exchange ideas with classmates and slowly begin constructing an answer. Instead, their eyes stare back at me. Shoulders shrug.

“I don’t know,” one student says.

Then another follows with a response I’ve begun hearing more frequently.

“I use ChatGPT. How am I supposed to know that?”

The room becomes quiet again. Not because students are thinking; many aren’t even trying to. And that’s the problem.

I’ve taught English and special education in New York City for 13 years. Throughout my career, I’ve worked with students whose disabilities affect their reading and writing ability, executive functioning, attention span and language processing. I’ve spent years designing lessons that help students access learning without taking away the cognitive work required to truly engage in the learning.

My role has never been to lower expectations but to remove barriers while preserving rigor. Students have always struggled. That’s part of learning. But lately, I’m seeing something different. They aren’t just struggling with literature. They’re struggling with thinking itself.

This isn’t because artificial intelligence suddenly makes students less capable. National reading data show persistent declines in literacy achievement, while writing research consistently finds that adolescents struggle most with analytical and evidence-based writing, which are essential tasks that cultivate critical thinking. AI didn’t create those challenges, but it happened to arrive at exactly the moment those foundational skills became even more fragile.

If we’re not intentional about encouraging students to think, AI risks becoming a substitute for the very cognitive work students most need to practice.

When AI Becomes the Brain Instead of the Thought Partner

A student is absent. I send the assignment home. The next morning, it comes back looking nothing like the work I watched that same student produce in class. The vocabulary is sophisticated. The literary analysis flows effortlessly. Complex symbolism appears, even though the student struggled the day before to identify the protagonist’s motivation.

Then, I administer an in-class assessment.

With pencil and paper, many of those same students struggle to organize ideas, support claims with textual evidence, or sustain a multi-paragraph response. The discrepancy isn’t simply about cheating. It raises a more fundamental question: Whose thinking is actually being measured?

Researchers describe this phenomenon as cognitive offloading, the tendency to rely on external tools to reduce mental effort. To be fair, humans have always done this. We use calculators for arithmetic, GPS for navigation, and calendars to remember appointments because those tools free cognitive space for more complex tasks.

Reading, writing and critical thinking, however, serve a different purpose. The assignment isn’t merely the product; it is the practice. Every annotation, rough draft, revision and discussion strengthens the cognitive muscles students rely on to analyze, reason and synthesize information and make judgments independently.

Researchers are beginning to examine what happens when generative AI assumes more of those “human” responsibilities. A 2024 study by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University found that workers who relied more heavily on generative AI reported less critical evaluation and independent reasoning at work. Although the study focused on adults rather than K-12 students, it raises important questions for education. If adults become less likely to critically evaluate information when AI consistently performs the thinking for them, what might that mean for adolescents whose reasoning skills are still developing?

I use AI almost every day. It helps me brainstorm, challenge my thinking, locate research and consider perspectives I might have overlooked. But AI never replaces my judgment. I still evaluate the evidence, make the decisions, and write the final product.

That’s the difference between AI as a learning partner and AI as a learning replacement.

The Evidence Extends Beyond My Classroom

What I’m observing in my classroom isn’t happening in isolation.

According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 30% of eighth graders performed at or above the “Proficient” level in reading, while one-third scored “Below Basic.” Reading achievement remains below pre-pandemic levels, meaning many students are entering high school with diminished comprehension, vocabulary, and analytical reading skills.

Those numbers matter because reading comprehension underpins every academic discipline. When students struggle to interpret complex texts, evaluate evidence, or construct meaning independently, the temptation to let AI do that cognitive work becomes even greater.

Higher education is reporting similar concerns. Faculty increasingly describe incoming students as less prepared to read complex texts independently, construct evidence-based arguments, and sustain analytical writing.

This summer, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano made headlines after noticing students earned an average score of nearly 96% on a take-home midterm, far above the course’s historical averages. Suspecting that many students had relied on generative AI rather than demonstrating their own understanding, Serrano replaced the traditional take-home final with a proctored, in-person exam. The average score fell to under 49%. This exposed an uncomfortable reality: Polished work completed outside the classroom does not always reflect what students can independently explain, analyze, or apply.

While this happened in a college, it is not far from what K-12 educators are experiencing in their own classrooms. This incident at Brown should signal to K-12 teachers and leaders that we are responsible for ensuring students succeed beyond graduation in postsecondary settings like college, career training programs, military service, or the workforce.

If our students arrive at their postsecondary environments unable to think critically, independently explain, or defend their own thinking, we must engage in introspective work and ask ourselves a difficult question: Did we, as K-12 educators, properly prepare our students for the next phases of their lives and the intellectual demands that await them?

AI is not responsible for this; we are. And we should welcome the challenge to push ourselves as educators to be intentional in our teaching and designing of learning experiences that will help develop our students’ ability to engage in higher-order thinking, resilience, and cognitive stamina before they step onto a college campus or other postsecondary environments.

Schools themselves are beginning to recalibrate their relationship with technology.

Across the country, districts have expanded handwritten assignments, paper-based assessments, technology-free instructional blocks, and restrictions on personal devices after educators reported improvements in attention, discussion quality, and independent reasoning. Even within my own school community, students are expected to put their phones into locked pouches for the school day.

Ironically, while many schools have implemented phone-free policies to reduce distractions, students often spend the remainder of the day learning almost exclusively through laptops and tablets.

Perhaps the issue isn’t technology itself, but how much thinking we ask students to surrender to it. And maybe a question to consider: Did we move too fast integrating AI technology into our school communities, and are we still learning about it?

What This Looks Like in My Classroom

Over the past year, I have realized it is imperative that my students learn about artificial intelligence alongside digital citizenship, including the importance of using AI safely and ethically. As their educator, I want them to understand that AI is meant to support their learning and become their thought partner, not be the primary thinker and creator.

Before opening a computer, let alone an AI tool, they annotate texts independently, discuss ideas with classmates, gather evidence, and develop an original claim. They wrestle with uncertainty because productive struggle isn’t a barrier to learning; it’s the mechanism through which learning occurs. Only after students have established their own thinking do I invite AI into the conversation.

Instead of asking AI to complete an assignment, students use it to generate counterarguments, identify gaps in reasoning, suggest additional textual evidence, or offer alternative interpretations. They compare AI-generated responses with their own, critique each response’s strengths and limitations, and decide what strengthens their work. The final decision always belongs to the student, as does the ability to think critically about the information they are assessing.

I’ve also begun intentionally reintroducing practices many classrooms have quietly abandoned, not because they’re nostalgic, but because they build cognitive endurance. Students complete handwritten brainstorming, annotate printed texts, participate in technology-free discussions, and periodically write entirely without devices. These are pro-thinking activities, not anti-AI activities.

I also establish intentional boundaries around technology. Not every lesson requires AI or needs a screen. Some learning experiences that I develop are technology-free because students deserve opportunities to wrestle with ideas before technology enters the conversation.

So far, the transition hasn’t been seamless.

Students initially resisted and became frustrated when I would say “no” to them getting a laptop to engage in the assignment and instead required handwritten planning before digital drafting. I often ask them to develop an argument in my ELA class before consulting AI. They had become accustomed to immediate answers and gratification, where productive struggle felt uncomfortable for them.

That feeling of discomfort isn’t always evidence that learning isn’t happening. Often, it’s evidence that it is. It’s what I often felt as I struggled with my math classes in high school and spent hours looking at formulas that my brain couldn’t compute. But the harder I studied, the easier things became.

Over time, I watched the same experience occur with my students. They became more willing to defend their reasoning because they knew those ideas belonged to them. They asked deeper questions. They worked with their peers and revised more thoughtfully. They self-assessed before they jumped to AI to evaluate their thinking. But most importantly, they began trusting their own thinking again.

From Digital Citizenship to Cognitive Citizenship

Digital citizenship should also include what I think of as cognitive citizenship: understanding when technology strengthens their thinking and when it quietly replaces it. That means teaching students to interrogate AI rather than accept its responses at face value.

I encourage students to ask:

Is this response accurate?
What evidence supports this claim?
What perspectives are missing?
Does this actually answer my question?
Would I have reached the same conclusion on my own?

These questions shift students from passive consumers to active evaluators. AI becomes another perspective instead of an unquestioned authority.

The Future Depends on What We Choose to Preserve

It’s important to keep in mind that education exists to cultivate thinkers and develop growing minds capable of questioning, evaluating and creating answers.

The future of education isn’t choosing between old-school instruction and new-school innovation. It’s knowing when each best serves students. Some of our oldest instructional practices, like handwritten drafting, discussion, annotation, sustained reading, and productive struggle remain some of the strongest builders of cognition. Rather than abandoning them, we should pair them with AI in ways that amplify, rather than replace, human learning.

Because while AI can generate an essay, it cannot wrestle with uncertainty, defend an argument to its peers, or discover an idea through persistence. Those moments remain uniquely and beautifully human. And those are exactly the moments educators must continue to protect.

Can a Letter From Washington Actually Change How Schools Buy Technology?

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Department of Education has just released its first major guidance on classroom technology in years, urging states and districts to focus on outcomes rather than logins or screen time. The letter draws a firm line between recreational and instructional screen use, and it leaves the actual rulemaking entirely up to states and districts. On this episode of This Week with EdSurge, Ira Apfel sits down with Digital Promise president and CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and outcomes-based contracting expert Brittany Miller to unpack what the guidance actually changes and what it still leaves unresolved. Both guests welcome the letter, but neither is convinced it accomplishes enough.

Jean-Claude Brizard

As president and CEO of Digital Promise, Jean-Claude Brizard has watched federal guidance play out across hundreds of school systems, and he does not think this letter goes far enough. He welcomes the emphasis on outcomes, but he argues the guidance leaves practitioners without enough direct support and worries that state by state inconsistency could widen gaps between districts. He also draws an unexpected comparison between the pushback edtech is getting and a very different public health debate.

Brittany Miller

Brittany Miller spends her days inside the contracts this guidance is speaking to. As a leader at the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, she sees the letter as validation of work already underway in ten states, and she is far less concerned about the lack of federal specifics than Brizard is. Her focus is on what actually changes once a district and a vendor sit down to write the fine print, and on who ends up carrying the risk when that fine print gets tested.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode:

Department of Education Issues Long-Awaited Edtech Guidance for States and Districts

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

As Male Teachers Vanish From the Classroom, Schools Look for Ways to Bring Them Back

Ed Finkel — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Men account for about 23% of elementary and secondary teachers in public schools, down from 30% in 1988, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. This statistic prompted the Male Educator Network & Policy Institute (MEN), the American Institute for Boys and Men and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to survey male teachers about what attracts them to the profession — and what keeps them there.

Why Men Become Teachers

MEN recently released the results of an online survey of 145 practicing male teachers, which precedes a more comprehensive report to be released in the fall. The survey revealed that 78% of participants went into the profession to make a difference in children’s lives, and 74% said education can make the world a better place. Among men who worked with children when they were teenagers, 75% agreed that experience influenced them to become a teacher.

Many survey participants said others encouraged them to join the profession: 86% said a former teacher encouraged them, and 60% had a male teacher encourage them. Of those who were encouraged by a male teacher, 69% found this to be a “very” or “extremely” effective recruitment strategy. Although only 25% encountered recruitment specifically targeted toward men, 72% said it helped to convince them to join the profession.

Curtis Valentine, founder and president of MEN, says these results underscore the importance of male mentorship. “We see men in the profession as a good place to start [recruiting] — to speak highly of education to your students, to speak firsthand about what it means to be a teacher,” he explains. “[It’s also important] for communities and families to give young boys opportunities to get involved in the lives of those younger than them as camp counselors or as babysitters.”

Jeffrey Bradbury, a middle school digital media educator in Connecticut who began his career as a music teacher and orchestra leader, says that his elementary and high school orchestra teachers were major influences. “I always say I wouldn’t have the life I have without those two,” he notes. And he hopes to pay it forward to his male students. “I try to find a couple from the herd each year and push them in the right direction,” he adds.

More than half of the survey participants agreed that financial aid or loan forgiveness specific to the major (55%) and mentorship from other men during student teaching (52%) was or would have been helpful during the recruitment process. Many also cited various job perks as reasons for entering the profession: 72% valued a work schedule compatible with their family and personal life, 68% cited reliable income and benefits, and 60% expected job security and a steady career path.

How Male Teachers Are Treated

When men enter the teaching profession, many don’t feel welcomed or like they can be their authentic selves, Valentine says. “Those who do push through feel left out or feel like they’re marginalized,” he adds. “How do we build brotherhood around teachers, especially men, who are underrepresented in many districts? How do we build community across districts, across states and across the country?”

MEN has launched chapters on college campuses to help build that community of male education students. Some say they’re the only male education students in their schools, Valentine notes. That minority status continues once they get their degrees and head out into the working world, he says. “When you get into a school building, stereotypes abound that men have to push up against,” he explains. “Do you teach gym? Are you more disciplinary and less nurturing? Can you teach early childhood?”

Tim Needles, a technology integration specialist at Smithtown Central School in New York and a former art and STEAM teacher, says that he is used to female-dominated environments but hadn’t realized how much the percentage of male teachers has declined. “There’s obviously a general teacher shortage,” he says. “The occupation is just not as secure as it once was.... The job has also become way more politicized than it used to be.”

From early in his 27-year career, Needles, winner of a 2024 ISTE “Making It Happen” award, recalls an “old boys’ club” in which many men were recruited upward into leadership, which he theorizes might have been “one of the alluring factors” in past decades that kept some males in the profession. But he doesn’t want to resurrect that dynamic.

“I was never included in that, but I did see it,” he admits. “Now, things have become more democratic. I celebrate female leadership, but it’s interesting, when you look at the data, how many fewer men there are.”

Why Recruiting and Retaining Male Teachers Is Difficult

Economic factors make some young teachers hesitant to remain in the profession, observes Bradbury, whose wife is also a teacher. “In many households, one person is a teacher, but not both,” he notes.

Cole Turner, director of teaching and learning at Concordia International School in Hanoi, Vietnam, has known men who left the profession for higher pay or prestige. He says having men involved in districts’ recruiting processes would help.

“[It could help] to show better pathways for advancement, if that’s something that would potentially hold somebody back — if they’re not seeing the big payoff further down the line,” he reasons. “If there’s a little more intentionality around recruiting online in places where males tend to go more, whether it’s sports-oriented or something like that, it could be a way to attract more men.”

As someone who helped set up the new teacher orientation in a previous district, Bradbury also believes proper welcoming is vital for any teacher, but especially those in the minority. “Whenever [new male] teachers walk into the building, I’ll always say, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ Setting up a system with a buddy or a mentor is vitally important,” he believes.

The ability to serve and be recognized as professionals is important to male teachers, argues Michael Harvey, director of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning at Lytton High School in Gisborne, New Zealand.

“It’s definitely not the money. The money is OK in New Zealand, but it’s not amazing,” he says. “The idea of serving my community, I see that as being important. . . . And also, it’s the professionalism: the idea of keeping teacher agency at the heart. You’re in control of your classroom rather than government edicts around how to teach.”

Benefits of Male Teachers

According to research analyzed by The Hechinger Report, a teacher's gender does not meaningfully alter academic or behavioral outcomes for young students. But many believe male teachers provide students vital mentorship — a role that is deeply rewarding for the men themselves. Atlanta-based education consultant James Campbell, who taught history for nearly 20 years, remembers a coach and math teacher who had a particularly positive influence on his life. “I wanted to be that person who filled the gap for students who might be struggling, as people did for me,” he recalls.

Campbell felt a calling to be a role model for the boys in his classes, and says parents appreciated “that this person cares about my child, and they’re going to help my child be successful.” He recalls parents over the years who expressed gratitude to him, saying, “It’s good to have a man in the classroom space.”

At one school, Campbell was the only Black male teaching a core subject area, and one colleague said to him, “It’s important that our students see a Black man in a position of authority, as a teacher,” he notes. “Schools need to make sure they’re generating some type of belonging, and you’re not just hiring someone so you’ve ‘got one of them,’” Campbell adds. But he advises male teachers to make sure they’re not fitting the “drill sergeant” stereotype.

“We’re not going to get respect just because we’re men,” he says.

EdSurge Welcomes Top Journalists and Educators to Advisory Board

EdSurge Staff — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

EdSurge announced six new members to its Advisory Board, among them a mix of experienced journalists and education leaders.

Todd Frankel, Patrick Harris II, Nneka McGee, Ramona Schindelheim, Avery Thrush and Manoush Zomorodi have joined the board, each bringing a wealth of experience and expertise. The board will serve as a vital resource for the EdSurge newsroom, offering strategic insights and industry perspectives across all areas of coverage.

“Partnering with such a talented, versatile group of journalists and educators is a huge win for EdSurge and our readers,” says Sarah McKibben, EdSurge Editor-in-Chief. “With their unmatched expertise, this board brings both national perspective and deep classroom understanding to our newsroom. They will help us tackle pressing challenges like AI policy while ensuring our early childhood and K-12 coverage remains relevant, cutting-edge, and grounded in real-world impact.”

Designed to maximize impact while respecting members’ time, the board acts as a strategic, high-level advisory body. In accordance with the Institute for Nonprofit News standards, board members provide strategic guidance while holding no editorial influence or veto power on published content.

Meet the Advisory Board

Todd Frankel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Washington Post. The D.C. native has previously worked at newspapers in Missouri, Washington, West Virginia, Kentucky.

Frankel brings award-winning journalism experience to the board, particularly in the role of business and economics in all areas of life. He anchored the lead story in a series that won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coverage of the AR-15 rifle's role in mass shootings and American culture.

Patrick Harris II is a storyteller and educator on a mission to ensure humanity is centered in the future of education. A former middle school teacher and dean of students in metro Detroit, Harris was named a 30 under 30 Honoree from the International Literacy Association in 2021 and an EdSurge Voices for Change Fellow in 2022-23. His book focusing on new educators, “The First Five: A Love Letter to Teachers,” was named a finalist for Best Professional Audiobook by the Audies. Harris is currently a doctoral student studying popular culture at Michigan State University.

Having previously written for EdSurge, Harris hopes to use his new involvement as a board member to support EdSurge’s efforts to highlight student and teacher innovation.

“I deeply respect the work of EdSurge and its commitment to editorial independence,” Harris says. “I deeply appreciate the care EdSurge has for teachers and educators and how it comes through the compelling stories they report on and uplift.”

Nneka McGee is an educator and researcher who taught middle school mathematics and served as a district administrator. As part of her doctoral studies, McGee completed research on the impact of artificial intelligence in K-12 learning environments.

Most recently, McGee served as project lead and principal co-author of “Responsible Assessment in the AI Era” and “AI + Learning Differences: Designing for a Future with No Boundaries,” published by Stanford Accelerator for Learning. Her latest work, “AI for Young Learners: Balancing Tech Use with Authentic, Off-Screen Experiences,” was released as a jump start guide by the International Society for Transforming Education in early 2026.

“I understand the importance of offering informative content that helps create a better understanding of an ever-changing landscape. The EdSurge Advisory Board provides an opportunity to be part of the conversation,” McGee says.

Ramona Schindelheim is an award-winning journalist and storyteller covering the future of work and pathways to economic mobility. She is a Top Voice on LinkedIn and her monthly newsletter, The Future of Work(ers), features reporting and interviews on the programs, initiatives and people helping American workers prepare for and find quality jobs and economic mobility. Ramona has worked in national and local news, including at ABC, CBS, NBC, CNBC and The Wall Street Journal.

Schindelheim brings unique perspective and expertise on work readiness and the need for educators to meet the moment. She decided to join the board “to help shape the narrative around the future of work and the role education must play in preparing learners and workers for the changing economy.”

Avery Thrush is an education policy analyst and writer, currently working as a LEE Fellow at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. After spending her early career as a sixth-grade science teacher, Thrush has led community organizing efforts and contributed to state-level policy initiatives related to artificial intelligence in education, school funding and strengthening career-connected education. She was selected as a 2022-23 EdSurge Voices of Change Fellow.

Thrush brings versatile expertise in the education field, from rural and Appalachian education to public schools as engines of democracy. She joins the board with the hope of elevating the voices and expertise of students and teachers, since they are the closest to the challenges facing education today.

Manoush Zomorodi is an award-winning journalist, author, and host of NPR’s “TED Radio Hour,” whose work explores how technology is changing the way we think, work, learn and live. Her latest book, “Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being,” grew out of a groundbreaking NPR–Columbia University public health project involving more than 20,000 participants.

She is also the author of “Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self,” and her TED talks on the attention economy and the physical effects of technology on our bodies have been viewed more than 7 million times. Zomorodi hosts NPR’s “Body Electric” podcast, a six-part series on the physical toll of digital life and how to reclaim our bodies. A 2025 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center resident, Zomorodi has won two Gracie Awards and a Webby Award and was named one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business.”

Zomorodi brings her expertise in the effect of media and tech on behavior and health to EdSurge’s edtech coverage.

“I respect the work of the group and its readers immensely and want to support them [as they] figure out this next chapter for education and tech,” Zomorodi says.

Department of Education Issues Long-Awaited Edtech Guidance for States and Districts

EdSurge Staff — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The U.S. Department of Education today issued new guidance about educational technology usage in the classroom but left rulemaking to states and school districts.

Edtech should ensure that “technology use is purposeful, instructionally sound, and contributing to measurable student outcomes,” writes Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education Kirsten Baesler in the Dear Colleague Letter. “Responsible design is the floor. Not only do we need to know if the tool works, but if it works; why does it work, for whom does it work, and under what conditions.”

Industry observers welcomed the guidance, noting that it addresses a growing concern among educators that edtech too often fails to include verifiable evidence around learning outcomes.

“It is heartening to see the Department of Education emphasize that responsible design and product certification is merely the ‘floor,’” says Jean-Claude Brizard, president and chief executive officer of Digital Promise.

“For too long, successful edtech adoption has sometimes been measured by access, log-ins, or frequency of use,” adds Helen Crompton, executive director for the Research Institute of Digital Innovation in Learning.

Guidance for States and Districts

The letter encourages states and districts to:

Distinguish between “recreational” and “instructional” technology
Evaluate edtech on outcomes and instructional value, not just screen time
Incorporate evidence of effectiveness into procurement, especially products that have conducted randomized controlled trials (RCTs)
Establish edtech implementation and outcome reviews
Support efforts to help educators “integrate technology effectively into instruction”

The department’s guidance praised Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan and Texas for “exploring contracting models” that rely more on “performance measures” and less on “product adoption or usage metrics.”

“The key to effectively implementing the guidance is to avoid defining ‘evidence’ too narrowly,” explains Crompton. “Independent evaluation is important, but an RCT is not the only meaningful form of evidence. The same technology can produce very different results depending on the teacher, subject, age group, amount of training, and how it is integrated into instruction.”

Guidance for Edtech Vendors

Meanwhile, the department encourages edtech providers to:

Design products that support “high-quality instruction and meaningful student engagement with teacher and parent input”
Incorporate evidence of effectiveness through independent evaluation and RCTs
Minimize unnecessary screen exposure while maximizing instructional value in design
Support educators with implementation resources and professional learning
Continuously improve products using classroom evidence, parent feedback, and student academic outcomes

“Vendors should view this guidance as both a clear call to raise standards and an invitation to partner with the field in a deeper way,” says Brizard. “Moving beyond basic engagement or usage metrics gives developers a real opportunity to demonstrate meaningful learning outcomes.”

In addition, states and school districts should expect edtech providers to:

Publish independent evaluations of student learning outcomes “whenever feasible”
Share effective classroom practice lessons
Provide information about product capabilities, limitations, and performance

Screen Time in Focus

The guidance pays special attention to device screen time and draws a distinction between “educational value rather than screen exposure alone.” Noting that edtech increases learning opportunities for rural students, students with disabilities, and home-bound students, Baesler writes that edtech “should not be evaluated solely by the amount of time students spend using it.”

“The guidance rightly shifts the national conversation away from a reductive debate over screen time and puts the focus where it belongs: instructional value, real classroom and school context, and evidence of impact,” Brizard says.

Adds Crompton, “This distinction is particularly important for rural students, students with disabilities, and others for whom technology may provide access to learning opportunities that would otherwise not be available.”

Laissez-Faire Federal Approach

Notably, the education department’s guidance declined to offer new rules; instead, it expressly delegated implementation to states and districts – an approach that not everyone agrees with. “I would like to see a national floor, but not necessarily a national ceiling,” Crompton says. “There are some expectations that should not depend on which state a student happens to live in. Student privacy, accessibility, transparency, responsible use of student data, and basic protections around the use of educational technologies are examples where greater national consistency is valuable.”

“When technology rules vary wildly, we inadvertently widen equity gaps — leaving some students prepared for college and modern careers while others fall behind,” adds Brizard.

Ultimately, schools should start with the learning need and the outcomes when evaluating edtech. “Educators should feel validated in demanding that technology serve their pedagogical goals, not the other way around,” says Brizard.

Read the full guidance.

Assignments, Invoices, and the AI Fix

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On This Week with EdSurge, two guests look past the classroom to find where artificial intelligence quietly adds up. One traces the cost of AI to the assignment page, the other to the electricity bill. Together they raise a question few schools have fully worked through, what an AI-first future actually costs, and who ends up paying for it.

Could Rethinking the Assignment Outsmart AI?

Michael Hernandez had spent years teaching educators how to redesign their assignments through his book, his workshops, and his conference sessions. He wanted to reach more teachers than he could ever sit with in person, so he decided to build something that could do some of that work for him. There was one problem. Michael had not written a line of code since high school, so he turned to a method called vibe coding, describing what he wanted in plain language and letting AI build it. What came out of that process, and what it taught him about the traits every assignment needs, is where the conversation starts.

What Is the Real Price Tag on School AI?

Mi Aniefuna took a different route into the AI conversation, one that starts far from the classroom. His reporting follows the technology back to the data centers that power it and the costs that come with them. Districts weighing an AI rollout are often thinking about curriculum and instruction. Mi wanted to know whether they were also thinking about the invoice, and what happens to a budget once the bill starts to grow with every use.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

I Used AI to Build AI-Resistant Assignments by Michael Hernandez

Can Schools Afford an AI-First Future? by Mi Aniefuna

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

The Case Against the Classroom Cellphone Crackdown

Dan Clark — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2025, my home state of Missouri passed a law, Senate Bill 68, that prohibits students from possessing any electronic communication device from the start of the school day until the end of the school day.

“It’s simple — cell phones have no place in Missouri classrooms,” Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe posted on X, formerly Twitter.

It has become a concerning cycle in education: When any new technology becomes prevalent in our kids’ world — from TV to video games, and computers to the rise of AI — policymakers’ first instinct is to ban the technology rather than attempt to understand it.

A complete cellphone ban is a missed opportunity. Educators have heard and can easily understand many of the reasons a ban on cellphones makes sense in our classrooms. But as a middle school civics teacher in Missouri looking to engage students in real-life stories concerning media literacy, politics, and advocacy, the recent laws enacted to completely ban smartphones from school buildings are concerning. We may just be taking a tool away from our students instead of using it to help them connect with the broader world around them.

I believe there is room, and perhaps even benefits, in thinking more critically about how and when these new tools, including smartphones, could be used in the classroom to provide real and relatable learning opportunities.

Hanging on the Telephone

I first want to admit that my opinion here may be unpopular, especially among my fellow teachers. It is very easy to understand the reasoning behind the bans and crackdowns on phones in classrooms.

The first and most obvious reason is the potential for distraction phones provide. I will be the first to admit that I become distracted by an errant notification, a social media post, or even the same clip from a favorite TV show for the millionth time on my phone. Many of the apps on our phones are designed to hijack our attention, and children and teenagers are the most vulnerable to this.

Second, a phone is, by definition, a communication device. The rise of issues such as cyberbullying and inappropriate digital content makes using these devices more complicated in the classroom than, say, using a Chromebook or an iPad.

Growing up, as I did, in a time when the best cellphone could play the super-simple game Snake, I admit the sheer power and scope of what smartphones can do today is shocking. This is especially true for those writing technology policy. Our media also presents the theory that the proliferation of smartphones among young people has negatively affected mental health and attention spans.

However, one thing missing from many of these conclusions is the idea that it is not the tool itself, but the content consumed, that has an impact. What if we took the time to show students how this tool could be used to build positive connections, create new and exciting ways to express themselves, and connect with information in ways never seen before? This past year, I got to experience how the absence of this technology could affect the authenticity of learning.

Living in the Real World

Like every Missouri school after the new cellphone ban law passed, my school immediately clamped down on phones in the building. We already had our own general school rule about no phones, but this year, the consequences and enforcement were more intense and closely monitored.

We told the students, “Sorry, it’s against the law now,” and went on with our lives. However, at the beginning of this past year, I began teaching a new, yearlong program called Youth 2 Lead. In this program, my eighth-grade students were tasked with identifying and selecting a problem in their community; conducting outreach to community members, citizens, elected officials, and policymakers; and ultimately taking action to address the issue.

When I asked students how they thought they could best reach people and make their voices heard, they invariably said the best way was through social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Here is where I first felt that the full-on phone ban in my state maybe wasn’t as simple as I first believed. I now had to teach students to “be authentic, use your voice and your resources to make a change in your community,” while simultaneously telling them, “don’t use the tool you are most comfortable with — which would likely be the most powerful tool in your arsenal.”

As our project progressed, we identified an issue and wanted to survey our community. Again, I asked, “How do we collect the opinions of those in our community we don’t know?”

We came up with two options: create a social media account, or create a survey and either spread it online or use public data to mail postcards and wait for replies. We went with option No. 2 — not because we thought it was the best, but because the limitations of our classroom technology made the first choice impossible. Again, we were forced to concede authenticity in our learning for policy.

Finally, toward the end of our project, after working all year to develop a plan, two very determined students said, “Mr. Clark, none of this matters if no one knows we are doing it. We have to have a social media presence.” I shared their concern.

Yes, we could put it on our school’s Facebook page and newsletter, but that is only seen by our own small community. These kids had worked hard, and they wanted everyone to see their passion and results. So I said, “Well, what if I make my own Instagram account, you tell me what you want on it, and I will upload things in my free time?” They were deflated.

Sure, that would work — and is what we ended up doing — but they wanted to own it, wanted to make it work, and had a much better sense of how to do it than I ever would.

Because of a policy made by non-educators in government, my students and I were not able to have the flexibility and tools to show off our best creativity. Why can’t I, as a teacher, choose when and how technology is used in my classroom, especially if I believe it will enhance learning?

Doom or Destiny

So if I am arguing that a phone ban is not the best solution, what should be done? There are many other ideas that could be implemented to provide both students and teachers with flexibility and to refute the one-size-fits-all solution of a statewide ban.

We have seen companies such as Yondr step in to create products that students can use to store their phones when not needed. These protective pouches can be unlocked by the teacher when needed and locked again at other times, helping eliminate distractions.

Schools can implement turn-in systems where students turn in their phones at the start of class and retrieve them after. Most importantly, in my opinion, schools can and should take a more active role in teaching digital citizenship and literacy — not just from an academic standpoint, but as a key learning standard for kids growing up in a digital world.

Many people argue that we should go back to teaching cursive to all students. I’d argue that our kids will be using smartphones a million times more often than writing in cursive.

Like it or not, our students are part of a technological system more advanced and connected than we would have dreamed of at their age. The very device we are so afraid of is also the one they will most likely do a vast amount of their future work on.

Yet, we are telling them in school that it has no value. However, when our students have the freedom and trust to engage with the world and especially technology authentically, we can be a part of showing them how to use these tools for good. For instance, our Youth 2 Lead campaign eventually led to interactions with our city council member, who interviewed our students for social media.

Do phones cause distraction? Yes, absolutely. But I’ve also had to tell many students to stop reading during class because it distracted them from learning, and I’m not banning books anytime soon. Kids are kids; they will find a way to distract themselves no matter what.

I think the bigger issue is our fear of a changing world getting in the way of our duty to help guide our students into that world. We can use digital citizenship lessons, technology classes, and creative behavior management to uplift and encourage students to use technology appropriately. If we constantly downplay the importance of the powerful technological tools that are central to their experience, we aren’t helping — we are becoming a distraction.

Early Childhood Educators Are Leveling Up at Community Colleges

Jamaal Abdul-Alim — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) revamped its childcare rules in 2019 to require educators to earn more credentials, Aida Rodriguez decided to pursue her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. When it was time to choose a school, she chose the less common path.

Rodriguez earned her bachelor’s degree in 2022 from North Seattle College, becoming one of about 16,000 students who earn a bachelor’s degree from a community college each year, according to the Community College Baccalaureate Association (CCBA). That makes up less than 1% of all bachelor’s degree recipients.

With help from the DCYF’s Early Achievers scholarship, which covers up to $9,000 in tuition and books for bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education, Rodriguez feels the payoff for her community college-issued bachelor’s degree was “for sure” worth it.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for my bachelor’s degree and the connections that I made networking in the early childhood education field,” Rodriguez says. She is currently a professional development specialist at The Imagine Institute, a nonprofit in Washington that helps people start their own family home childcare business.

Later this fall, Rodriguez is slated to serve as an adjunct at her college alma mater, leading a cohort of early care providers who are pursuing their education in Spanish.

Employers See Little Difference

Rodriguez may not be the only one who sees the value in community college degrees. A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that employers view job candidates who get bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education from a community college about the same as those who hold traditional baccalaureate degrees.

The researchers compared callbacks for fictitious job applications from early childhood educators who earned their bachelor's degrees at community colleges and traditional four-year institutions. When reviewing the warmth of the messages that employers left, the researchers found that employers “generally” view community college bachelor’s degree applicants “similarly” to traditional four-year institution bachelor’s degree holders.

“We find no evidence that employers systematically discount [community college baccalaureate] degrees relative to traditional bachelor’s degrees,” the study states.

The researchers explained that this finding could represent community college baccalaureate degrees as a more accessible and affordable way for students to earn those four-year degrees without having to transfer to a four-year university.

Since 2024, the number of community colleges that offer a baccalaureate has increased from 187 to 214, according to a report that the CCBA issued in May. Likewise, the report found that the number of community college baccalaureate programs rose from 678 to 763.

Establishing which route is less expensive — community college or a four-year college — can be difficult, the researchers noted, because “sticker-price comparisons substantially overstate the affordability advantage” of community college baccalaureate programs.

The cost of earning the degrees affects students through both personal expense and earning potential. This is especially the case, the researchers wrote, in a labor market that is “both extremely tight and highly constrained by salary budgets,” in which employers may prefer candidates with community college baccalaureate degrees because they have “comparable credentials at a lower expected cost.”

Julie Ferin, executive director at the National Association of Community College Teacher Education Programs, says the findings raise important questions about how employers understand credentials within a field shaped by persistent shortages, low wages, high turnover and varied educational requirements.

“For the field, the study reinforces the importance of helping employers understand community college bachelor’s degrees, the preparation behind them, and the workforce needs they address,” Ferin says. “It also points to the value of studying outcomes beyond initial employer contact, including hiring, compensation, advancement, and retention.”

Despite questions about the costs and payoffs, proponents of community college bachelor’s degree programs say the findings bolster their cause.

“Part of the philosophy or mission behind the community college baccalaureate degree is it gives students the opportunity to get additional education often times at the same institution where they started their educational journey and located close to where they live,” says Cheryl Calhoun, president and CEO of the CCBA. The association supports community colleges that “build and sustain high-value, career-focused baccalaureate degrees.”

“It’s a more accessible opportunity for them,” Calhoun says.

Leveling Up for Early Childhood Educators

For early childhood educators, Calhoun says, the bachelor’s degree is a way to “level up” and become master teachers or directors.

“They need more than just a two-year degree or just a certificate,” Calhoun says. “They need the additional skills that they gain from that degree,” she says, listing supervisory and management skills as skills students would acquire with a bachelor’s versus an associate degree.

Rodriguez says she chose to get her early childhood education degree at North Seattle Community College because the school’s cohort model — in which students go through the program together rather than individually — “really resonated” with her.

“A lot of the time you learn more from your peers than you do from the actual content,” Rodriguez says, noting that “people actually working in the field” enriches the learning experience.

Now that Rodriguez is on the teaching side, she uses the insight she gathered from her peers to educate the childcare teachers of the future.

“One of the things I tell my students in class is, I learn from them as much as they might be learning from my content, and they will learn from one another based on their lived experiences [and] their cultural perspective[s],” she says.

College Admissions Testing is Returning to Mixed Reactions

David Weldon — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Several leading colleges and universities are reinstating SAT or ACT scores as part of their admissions requirements after years of being "test blind" (not looking at standardized test scores, even if submitted). The move has revived the debate over the fairness and value of such testing.

Institutions initially removed the test score requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since testing centers were shutting down, many students didn’t have access to testing or test preparation, so dropping the requirement seemed only fair. When schools eliminated their standardized testing requirement, they either went “test optional” or “test blind” (also called “test free”).

Dartmouth College, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are leading the reinstatement trend, each arguing that requiring test scores helps them spot deserving hidden talent in underfunded high schools. These schools also say they can better assess student readiness with standardized test scores than with grade point averages alone.

Columbia University will become the final Ivy League school to bring back testing requirements for the 2027–28 admissions cycle. Meanwhile, more than 1,300 faculty at the University of California have signed letters asking that test requirements be reinstated in that system.

College Board is tracking the full list of colleges and universities now requiring SAT or ACT test scores with student applications.

Impacts of Dropping Test Score Requirements

Schools have often complained about the impact of dropping test score requirements on admissions quality.

College faculty members have expressed concern that an increasing number of students are arriving on campus unprepared for college-level coursework. They have to teach the basics to some students who, they believe, should never have been admitted, says independent educational consultant Laurie Kopp Weingarten, president of One-Stop College Counseling.

“We’ve seen too many students enroll without the foundational skills needed to succeed in college-level coursework,” explains Kevin Krebs, founder of the college admissions consulting firm HelloCollege, who has over 20 years of experience advising students on what they can do to improve their chances of college acceptance. “That’s difficult for students, who can quickly become overwhelmed, and for faculty, who are often forced to spend more time filling academic gaps while still trying to deliver the curriculum. Ultimately, it can contribute to lower retention as students struggle to keep up.”

Immediate Impacts of Closing Testing Centers

After dropping test score requirements, many schools discovered that going “test optional” made their applicant pools bigger and their admission rates lower.

“That looks great on a press release. Once you’ve enjoyed that, going back is a hard sell internally,” says John Morganelli Jr., director of college admissions at Ivy Tutors Network and former director of admissions at Cornell University.

Application volume rose sharply at selective schools, Morganelli says. But removing test scores added more weight to the other parts of the application: essays, activities, letters of recommendation, course rigor. While that sounds democratic, the parts of the application that replaced the test score are the parts most sensitive to who has access to good resources. “I don’t think that trade was as equitable as it was advertised to be,” he explains.

Rising application rates and falling admission rates made highly selective schools look more competitive than ever. In addition, the average SAT or ACT scores for each school soared with the “test optional” choice because only high scorers submitted, discouraging many students from submitting applications.

“From the college point of view, without test scores, colleges had one less common measure for comparing applicants from schools with different grading scales, course offerings, and levels of grade inflation,” Weingarten explains. “Some were more comfortable with that than others. That’s why some colleges will remain 'test free' or 'test optional' while others will return to requiring test scores.”

The Value of Standardized Tests

Reinstating SAT and ACT test score requirements aids student applicants in another important area — securing scholarships.

That is a hope of Annie Bao, a high school senior at Auburn High School in Auburn, Alabama. Bao has taken the ACT test and plans to apply to several colleges and universities. Alabama allows every student to take the ACT test for free, ensuring that college-bound students have at least one test score to include with their application.

Still, Bao understands the debate over the full value of such testing.

“I do not believe standardized tests completely represent a student’s readiness for college,” Bao says. “However, they do provide useful information as part of a student’s academic profile, such as their ability to reason quickly, solve problems, and adapt under time constraints while responding to a variety of questions.”

Svetlana Kekutiia agrees. As regional director of admissions at online high school Crimson Global Academy, she says highly selective universities have an enormous amount of information to evaluate, and more credible academic data generally allows them to make better-informed decisions. A standardized test can provide useful evidence of academic readiness, particularly when interpreted alongside school context, curriculum rigor and grades.

Asking the Right Question

According to Marsha Familaro Enright, president and program director at Reliance College in Chicago, the “test optional” debate has been framed poorly.

“The question isn’t ‘are these tests predictive?’ They predict first-year grades reasonably well. The question is ‘predictive of what?’” Enright asks. “They don’t predict whether someone can think independently, hold an argument together or change their mind when the evidence shifts. Those are the capacities employers and graduate programs keep saying are missing, and no bubble sheet has ever measured them.”

Enright says an SAT score tells her how a student performs alone, against a clock, on questions with exactly one right answer. Almost nothing she asks of a student resembles that. She believes that schools reinstating the test score requirement are optimizing for a metric they can defend publicly — not necessarily for the students they say they want.

“I’d add that, for a small institution, the tradeoff looks completely different than for a large one,” Enright explains. “When you admit a small cohort, you can afford to actually get to know applicants. A score is a rationing device for schools with more applications than they can read. That’s a legitimate operational problem, but we should be honest that it’s an administrative solution, not a pedagogical one.”

Benefits of Reinstating Test Score Requirements

Reinstatement of test score requirements, supporters argue, should pay immediate dividends. Krebs says standardized tests provide admissions offices with a common benchmark across thousands of high schools and can help identify high-achieving students whose transcripts alone may not tell the full story. Strong scores also remain an important factor in merit scholarship decisions at many institutions and third-party scholarship providers.

Testing has never been a completely level playing field, Krebs says. Students from under-resourced schools often have less access to quality preparation, so scores should be considered alongside coursework, essays recommendations and personal context.

In addition, Krebs says the biggest mistake he sees students and families make is assuming that “test optional” means test irrelevant.

“Many selective colleges have remained test optional in name, while a majority of admitted students still submit scores,” Krebs notes. “Families should pay attention to enrollment data rather than the label alone.”

Reinstating the test score requirement can also address the stress among students who couldn’t decide if they should submit their scores in a test optional scenario.

“As an IECA member [Independent Educational Consultants Association], I had to spend time with each applicant deciding whether to submit,” Weingarten explains. “When students asked admission officers directly, they would often receive a response such as, ‘If you feel your score represents your ability, then submit.’ Students didn’t know what to do with that answer. With ‘test required,’ that stress, and how to possibly ‘game’ the system, disappears.”

Test Scores as a Part, Not the Whole

As schools reinstate SAT and ACT test requirements, they are focused on treating test scores as one piece of a holistic admissions process rather than a sole measurement for admission. The goal is to use both testing and holistic review together in a way that provides meaningful context.

“It’s important that colleges continue to use a standardized test as one data point among many, and not make decisions solely based on test scores — which they don’t do,” Weingarten explains. “It should never outweigh four years of classroom performance, but it can help confirm that a student’s transcript accurately reflects their academic preparation.”

This is where holistic reviews are important, where colleges consider test scores as one part of the application while also considering grades, extracurricular activities, community service, essays, and other accomplishments, student Bao says.

“The objective should not be to identify students who are simply good at taking the SAT. It should be to build the clearest possible picture of a student’s academic potential,” Kekutiia explains.

On AI Policy, Students Have Plenty to Say

David Weldon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Adults from seemingly every corner of society are weighing in on artificial intelligence policies in the classroom. But what do students have to say about it?

A recent event offered some clues, as student leaders from around the nation proposed a set of national guidelines for the use of AI in schools at the America’s Youth AI Festival in Boston. The three-day event brought together student leaders, educators, and school system leaders from across the country to discuss acceptable AI use in schools.

The event was hosted by Day of AI, MIT RAISE, The School Superintendents Association (AASA) and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute. The festival concluded with “student senators” from across the country debating a first-of-its-kind national AI policy for K-12 classrooms.

At the end of three hours of lively debate, student senators framed a multi-faceted bill that will be presented to the 10,000 member-districts in the AASA for further discussion and debate. Transparency, literacy and security were among its key provisions, and the goal is that the student-created regulations will inspire adult leaders to act in similar fashion.

“We hope the STUDENTS First Act becomes a practical starting point for policymakers, school systems, educators and families, rather than a finished piece of legislation to be adopted word for word,” says Dan Rae, head of business development and strategy for Day of AI. “In the coming weeks and months, our combined team plans to share the policy with school leaders nationwide, gathering feedback through webinars and other discussions, and giving students opportunities to continue refining and advocating for their recommendations.”

Jeffrey C. Riley, executive director of Day of AI and former Massachusetts commissioner of elementary and secondary education, and Sarah Yezzi, chief education officer at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, were the facilitators of the debate. Student and educator representatives from Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine and Massachusetts participated, offering perspectives on both the opportunities and challenges artificial intelligence presents in today’s classrooms.

The Need for Student Involvement

The students identified a number of areas of concern for young people using AI: academic integrity and cheating; compromised learning and critical thinking; and threats to privacy, security and mental health. Students were concerned about AI being used to create false images or deepfakes of themselves or classmates that could then circulate rapidly online or within the school community. They agreed these are areas that need regulation.

“Several emphasized the importance of expanding equitable access to AI tools and resources, particularly for students who may lack support outside of school,” Yezzi explains. “Others raised concerns about overreliance on AI, the need to preserve critical thinking skills, and the importance of teaching students how to use AI effectively through strong prompting and digital literacy. Participants also discussed the need for thoughtful policies and infrastructure to support responsible implementation in schools.”

As federal and state lawmakers address the call for tighter regulations around artificial intelligence, the student leaders hope that their policy adoptions will help shape clear and consistent AI policies that reflect the experiences and priorities of students themselves.

Experiencing the Wide Range of AI Policies

Among the school leaders participating was Molly Kensy, principal of Tech High School, in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She attended with two student leaders: senior Jiech Jeich and junior Bihmanji Acho. All three were looking to learn how AI policies are developed in other communities and share their recommendations.

“Our students were able to represent our state and school district. We were able to share our current district and state work around AI,” Kensy explains. “As an administrator, I have been able to network and learn from other states about what they are focusing on regarding AI literacy and supporting educators through this rapid change.”

Acho says he wished he had more time to speak with fellow senators, as everyone had unique perspectives on the task at hand. His role on this committee was to amend, strike, and debate policies throughout the bill, especially with his fellow administrative senators.

“Everyone I spoke to was essentially on the same page; we need AI policy now,” Acho says. “We all just had different ways we wanted to go about it. Some knew more about how it affected children. Some looked more into the environmental impact. Some even had knowledge on AI accuracy rates. We all had our vast knowledge, but throughout the conference we were able to conjoin our knowledge from different scopes to aid one another in our policymaking.”

Using a Senate Format for Effective Exchanges

The Kennedy Institute team designed the AI policy debate program to resemble a Senate session, allowing students to discuss, debate and vote on their policy proposals for the use of AI in K-12 schools. Students worked in subcommittees, produced and voted on amendments, and engaged in floor debate. The final debate on Sunday was followed by a roll call vote.

The students brought their own experiences with AI usage to the debate and discussed a range of ways in which their schools are approaching policy. Some communities are drafting or have adopted policies, many have uneven access to AI tools and unclear guidance, and some schools have banned the use of AI altogether.

A majority of student senators acknowledged that the bill is not perfect, but it is an important first step in AI regulation, Yezzi explains. The conversation was less about the pros and cons of AI itself, and more about the pros and cons of different methods of regulation and how far to go.

Riley emphasized that students should play a leading role in shaping how AI is used in education, describing the initiative as an opportunity to better understand how young people view AI and how it can be implemented responsibly.

“For decades, we’ve treated technology in education like a silver bullet, believing that if we just put a laptop in every student’s hands, learning would transform. It never did,” Riley says. “AI is different. It gives us the ability to personalize and differentiate learning for every student in ways that were never before possible.”

Recommendations That Garnered Strong Support

Acho and Jiech say some debated proposals got especially strong support among student senators.

“The first recommendation that caught my ear was proportional funding for every district, with a baseline minimum to limit economic disparities with AI. This amendment got a lot of my support,” Jiech says.

In the student section of the bill, student senators were tasked with finding the age at which schools should start integrating AI into classrooms. They decided that students should not use AI independently before ninth grade.

In a third recommendation, it was decided that students should also begin AI literacy in grades K-5. That was a point that Kensy also stressed, saying schools must learn to be adaptive as they develop thoughtful ways to educate young people and support educators as rapid change is happening.

“The last recommendation that stood out to me was a provision outlining federal funding,” Acho says. “This was one of the rare moments throughout the debating and brainstorming where I saw other senators thinking about accessibility. Their provision made various clauses in the bill a real possibility for underfunded and underprivileged communities.”

A ‘Not Perfect’ Bill Emerges

At the end of the debate, the bill was passed through the student senate, which Jiech calls “a really great stepping stone as we continue to navigate our way through this very new technology.”

The majority of the students acknowledged the need for more guidelines for the use of AI, citing personal safety, data privacy and environmental impact as areas that need to be regulated. Several students focused on the potential of AI tools and the need for the U.S. to be competitive in the global economy, though there was a sense that there should be guardrails.

They also saw the potential benefits of AI for brainstorming, research and self-directed learning, Yezzi explains. Most of the students did not want to prohibit AI usage as a whole or inhibit technological innovation. But they want to see AI responsibly incorporated into education for themselves and future students as the technology develops.

Rae explains that one of the biggest surprises was how strongly the students emphasized protecting authentic learning while still allowing thoughtful uses of AI. The bill would prohibit students from using AI to produce written or artistic assignments, while allowing older students to use it — with teacher permission and disclosure — for activities such as brainstorming, studying and editing their own work.

The students also notably emphasized fairness and due process: schools should not rely solely on AI-detection software, and students accused of misuse should have access to human review and an appeals process.

“We weren’t necessarily surprised by the students’ thoughtfulness and level of nuance, but we definitely appreciated their ability to adroitly navigate difficult tensions inherent in these questions,” Rae says.

Supporting Early Childhood Educators

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every early educator was once new to the field, and every young child will eventually encounter artificial intelligence somewhere in their life. On This Week with EdSurge, two guests examine what the adults responsible for those youngest learners actually need in order to do their jobs well. Nicol Russell, chief academic officer at Teaching Strategies, has spent 20 years watching where that support breaks down. Dr. Nneka McGee, founder of Muon Global, has spent her time studying what happens when the newest technology meets the youngest students.

Treating Early Educators Like Professionals

Russell built her career as a teacher, a center director, and a state administrator in Arizona, and she has watched talented educators leave the field for reasons that had little to do with the children in front of them. Her latest piece for EdSurge opens with a teacher who stayed for fifteen years, and through that story asks a harder question about who gets treated as disposable and who gets treated as a professional making a career choice. She also points to new research connecting teacher retention to how curriculum, assessment, and coaching work together, or fail to.

AI Literacy That Starts With a Conversation

McGee caught up with our team at ISTELive in Orlando, fresh off a session where she asked a room full of educators to sculpt Play-Doh robots. She has spent years studying how artificial intelligence shows up, or does not show up, in early childhood classrooms, and she argues that adults are not quite having the right conversation about screens. Her approach treats five year olds as capable of understanding the tools already sitting in their homes, as long as the introduction starts with people instead of devices.

Listen to the Episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

We Talk About Whole Children. What About Whole Educators? by Nicol Russell

AI for Young Learners (Jump Start Guide) by Nneka McGee

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

The K-12 Silo Won’t Survive AI — But Our Relationships Might

Beth Yirga — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Have you ever been in a room where the energy was palpable, only to have the air leave the room in an instant? I found myself in that type of room this year, right when AI entered a conversation about designing a program focused on career exploration and social-emotional learning.

Last August, our community was happy to learn that we won the Delaware Pathways Middle Grades Grant (DPMG) for $150,000. Our team’s objective was clear: to create an equity-centered bridge between middle school and high school that would guide our students to explore careers, ground themselves in a sense of belonging, and develop the academic and social-emotional skills they will need to envision their future. Yet the mission before us was vastly different for this generation of students, as AI drastically changes modern industries and workforces in real time.

Over the next two months, my task was to lead the charge in gathering teachers, students, family members, administrators, board members and community partners. We knew that if we were to succeed, we had to be guided by the spirit of our school, even in the face of uncertainty.

The Question That Changed Everything

It was a rainy October morning when we convened at Freire Charter School, an inclusive social justice school based in Wilmington, Delaware, that serves students in grades 8 through 12 and is named after Paulo Freire, the Brazilian education philosopher.

Freire’s belief that education is a choice between maintaining conformity or acting as “the practice of freedom” guides our school’s core value that people, especially students, can critically transform their world. But first, we had to figure out how to do that in the face of such rapid technological change.

I was sitting at the long table in our conference room alongside a diverse team of lifelong learners, ranging from Generation Z to Baby Boomers and everyone in between. We all held unique vantage points — from former superintendent to eighth-grade class president to mompreneur — that were valuable to the discussion. Yet our lively conversation came to a halt when a student asked, “If AI will do everything, then what’s the point of learning for us?”

The room instantly went silent, and that silence became our catalyst for change.

Looking Beyond the Silo

The consensus following our first meeting in October was that we had to learn for ourselves what various industries were facing from the rise of AI, and that if we stayed inside the traditional K-12 education silo, we would never find the answers we needed. So, I left the building — not physically forever, but intellectually and professionally — to seek conversations with people working in sectors already grappling with AI’s impact through technology, higher education, science, workforce development and entrepreneurship.

That journey led me to the Women Who Code Summit in New York. Surrounded by hundreds of women and gender-diverse professionals working at the forefront of technological innovation, I was the only educator in all of the conversations I entered.

Standing in a room filled with software engineers, executives and founders, I asked a simple question: “What should schools be doing right now to prepare students for an AI-centered future?” The responses surprised me.

Technology executives, engineers and innovators shared the same concerns educators were voicing back in Wilmington. They worried about workforce shifts, ethical implications and what it means to be human in an increasingly automated world. Most importantly, they wanted to help.

The reality is that the challenges facing today’s students are too complex for any single sector to solve independently. This reality is especially true for students from historically under-resourced communities.

Examining Access to Relationships

Research consistently shows that access to social capital, mentorship networks, and career exposure plays a significant role in educational and economic outcomes. A study in the Journal of Youth & Adolescence cited that “strong relationships are critical for emerging adults’ postsecondary success, and that strong workforce and education support programs that provide access to this type of social capital are one avenue for facilitating success.”

Yet these opportunities are often distributed inequitably. Students from economically developed communities frequently benefit from professional networks and career-connected learning experiences that are unavailable to many low-income students, students of color and first-generation college-bound students. Under the eligibility criteria for federal programs such as Title I, Title IV, and Title V, more than 47% of our student body is classified as economically disadvantaged.

As a first-generation college graduate raised in America by working-class Ethiopian immigrants, I experienced the educational inequities my students currently face in a pre-AI world. In either era, when educational inequity is discussed, the focus is often on curriculum, assessment and funding. Those conversations matter; however, we must also examine access to relationships.

Who gets exposure to professionals? Who sees themselves reflected in future careers? Who has opportunities to imagine possibilities beyond what they currently know? These questions are at the heart of the work we are building through Freire Wilmington’s eighth-grade academy.

Designing for Human Connection

As a DPMG grant recipient, our program must align with Delaware’s Middle Grades Career and Technical Education exploration standards, which build upon essential human skills: empathy, belonging, identity development, culturally responsive instruction and career exploration. We asked students what it looks like for us to practice being human every day, and they shared: being outside more, connecting with nature, using their hands to create, helping others in real time and teaching each other.

As a planning team, we began to envision school days with daily outdoor hikes and morning meetings, incorporating Teen CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) certifications, visiting various high schools and colleges, attending an opera, heading down to Legislative Hall at the Delaware State Capitol and more. The goal is not simply to prepare students for jobs. It is to help students develop healthy self-images, meaningful community connections and confidence in their ability to navigate future opportunities.

Our students, alongside our educators, parents, board members and school administrators, are creating opportunities to explore who they are becoming before they are asked to make critical decisions about high school pathways and postsecondary plans in an AI-driven world.

Preparing students for this AI-driven future is not primarily about teaching them to use tools. It’s about incorporating AI into our everyday lives while strengthening the human capacities that technology will never be able to replace:

Curiosity.

Collaboration.

Critical thinking.

Ethical decision-making.

Empathy.

Adaptability.

Community-building.

These are the durable skills that will matter regardless of how technology evolves.

Radical Possibility in the Classroom

Black feminist traditions have long taught that collective liberation depends on community, imagination and shared responsibility. This is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice rooted in how people survive, resist and build futures together.

As Charlene Carruthers argues in “Unapologetic,” movements for liberation are sustained through disciplined collective care and the ongoing work of building relationships grounded in shared struggle and mutual responsibility. Author bell hooks extends this idea into educational spaces, reminding us that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy,” where learning can become a practice of freedom rather than compliance.

Both authors inform us that survival and progress emerge through connection, not isolation. The educational challenge before us is not simply how to teach students about AI. It is how to build ecosystems of support that help young people navigate uncertainty with confidence.

I am guiding our eighth-grade academy team to build stronger partnerships with employers, higher education institutions, community organizations and emerging industries so they show up in our classrooms to create pathways for connection. We need students engaged in authentic conversations, grappling with current problems and using their voices to contribute to the changes occurring in rapidly shifting fields. From CEOs to electricians to realtors to welders, our students will be able to ask real questions of the current workforce navigating this AI shift, and problem-solve alongside them.

Navigating Uncertainty Together

As we wrap up this summer learning from leaders in technology, science, higher education and workforce development, I am reminded that uncertainty does not have to produce fear. In our community, uncertainty inspired collaboration.

The future our students will inherit is still being written. Our responsibility is not to predict every technological change ahead, but to ensure that every young person — especially those historically excluded from opportunity — has the relationships, confidence, skills and sense of belonging necessary to shape that future themselves.

Whatever the future holds, our students and this work remind us that the most important technology in the classroom isn’t AI; it’s the human connection we build to navigate these uncertain times.

Reading Scores Continue to Drop for Many Middle Schoolers

David Weldon — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For the most part, public school students have made significant strides in returning to subject proficiency levels from before the pandemic, according to a new study by NWEA. But a disturbing exception is the lowest-achieving students in middle school, whose reading scores have suffered greatly.

The NWEA study finds that, not only have reading scores not stabilized for this group in the six years since the start of the pandemic, they continue to decline significantly. The study draws on data from the MAP Growth National Dashboard and contains test scores from more than 20 million K-8 students from 30,000 schools. NWEA looked at sixth grade reading scores from 2017 to 2025.

This trend is nothing short of “alarming,” says Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA. It raises a significant challenge to educators and state lawmakers on how to reverse the trend.

“The evidence presented here suggests that existing early-literacy reforms, though essential, are not sufficient to support students whose reading difficulties persist in upper elementary and middle school,” the NWEA study says. “Addressing these widening gaps will require state leaders to shift from isolated interventions toward coherent system-level approaches that align curriculum, assessment, instruction, and professional learning across the K-8 continuum.”

But while the NWEA study places emphasis on what lawmakers should do to ease the problem, a true fix ultimately comes down to curriculum, assessment, and intervention measures adopted at the district and individual school level.

Why Many Middle Schoolers Struggle

The lowest-achieving middle schoolers are still showing pandemic-era losses because the interventions that are driving recovery elsewhere — such as strong K-3 literacy reforms — were built to work at those specific ages, says Deanna Fogarty, vice president and head of reading science at structured literacy provider Wilson Language Training. Those gains are real and worth celebrating. But for students who reach fourth grade still needing support with such foundational skills as decoding and morphology, there isn’t yet an equivalent system waiting for them.

Standards, screening, and educator preparation for grades 4-8 haven’t caught up to what most schools have built for K-3, Fogarty says. So this isn’t a story about a new problem. It’s a reminder that the next stage of literacy reform needs to extend the same coherent approach into the middle grades.

Agreeing with that assessment is Gemar Mills, chief academic officer at College Achieve Public Schools, a public charter school network headquartered in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. He says the lowest-achieving students often keep slipping because their unfinished skills accumulate, while academic demands continue to rise.

“A student who enters middle school with weak decoding or fluency not only struggles in English. The student struggles to access science, history, mathematics word problems, and other subjects that rely on text,” Mills explains.

Schools often respond to low scores without diagnosing the source of the problem, Mills says. A student with weak decoding receives general comprehension practice. A student with a limited vocabulary receives more independent reading without enough direct instruction. The intervention does not match the need, and the gap grows.

“Students who need the strongest instruction also often experience the most fragmented instruction,” Mills adds. “They lose grade-level learning to attend remediation, move between disconnected programs, or receive intervention only after failure becomes severe. The issue is not a lack of ability. The issue is whether schools identify needs early, respond precisely, protect instructional time and maintain high expectations.”

Unique Middle School Intervention Challenges

Middle school reading intervention is uniquely hard because the gaps are longer term, the texts are more complex and responsibility becomes less clear, Mills explains. Students move through several classrooms, and each teacher might assume someone else is responsible for teaching reading.

In the early grades, schools build the foundation for reading. Students learn how sounds connect to letters and words as they develop fluency, vocabulary, knowledge and comprehension. In middle school, educators often have to repair parts of the foundation while students are already expected to read complex grade-level material. Mills says middle school intervention must therefore accomplish two goals at once: addressing unfinished skills, and preserving access to the knowledge and intellectual work that students need now.

Scheduling creates another challenge, Mills explains. Schools need protected intervention time without removing students from science, social studies, electives or other experiences contributing to their knowledge and engagement. They also need teachers trained to determine whether a student struggles with decoding, fluency, vocabulary, language comprehension, background knowledge or several areas at once.

Elementary-Level Foundations Are Key

One such school that builds a strong elementary foundation is Frederick Elementary in Frederick, Oklahoma. As a former seventh-grade English teacher, several factors contribute to the drop in reading proficiency for struggling students in middle school, according to Laura Yeager, principal at Frederick Elementary.

“First, students who struggle with basic decoding skills cannot create meaning from the more challenging texts that are required as students move into middle school,” Yeager explains. “Second, limited vocabulary creates a situation where students either skip words entirely, infer the wrong meaning, or break the flow of the reading if they choose to look up a word, which they usually do not.”

Students then lose pertinent information from the reading, whether it is informational text or narrative. This also leads to a third factor, which is that critical reading skills are lacking, says Yeager. Students are so used to instant information that they often accept it at face value. Critical reading requires stamina for reading and the ability to use higher-order thinking, which is not easily developed, and is hindered by instant information.

Students who are already behind going into middle school are no longer getting extra help in decoding words, phrases, and sentences, adds Danna Akin, reading specialist at Frederick Elementary. The work becomes more challenging, and these students begin to shut down with the struggles they encounter. They tend to get more and more behind because of the high frustration level they are experiencing.

Common ‘Get it Right’ Elements Among Schools

Getting school literacy right has many common elements regardless of the population or location of an individual school. Common elements in a reading program include instruction built around rich texts, complete books, vocabulary, knowledge, discussion and evidence-based writing.

Schools should use diagnostic assessments to identify why individual students may struggle, Mills says. Intervention should match each identified need, and occur during protected time. And it should supplement rigorous instruction, not replace it.

Teachers should receive ongoing training and coaching, Mills says. Leaders should visit classrooms, examine student work, review progress data, and respond when instruction fails to produce results.

The most common thread is disciplined execution, Mills explains. Schools close literacy gaps when every educator understands the plan, possesses the skills to execute the plan, and accepts responsibility for the results. Strong literacy outcomes do not happen by accident. Schools build them deliberately.

Steps Schools Can Take

Educators should also understand that, while technology has created valuable opportunities to support learners, it has also made it easier for students to rely on text-to-speech tools and other features that can unintentionally reduce reading proficiency, says Jennifer Nakamoto, science chair at online high school Crimson Global Academy.

“These tools have an important place, particularly as accommodations, but they should complement—not replace—the cognitive process of reading,” Nakamoto explains. “Students develop stronger comprehension when they actively decode, question, annotate, and reflect on what they are reading.”

First, for the most challenged students, Yeager says middle schools must screen for issues with basic decoding and multi-syllabic words and address them. Students who cannot decode accurately will consistently struggle with reading to find meaning and give up.

Second, structured vocabulary programs that explicitly teach Greek and Latin roots, affixes, and suffixes are needed and will help students with vocabulary, Yeager explains.

Third, educators should teach students how to engage with text. All students would benefit from direct instruction on how to use graphic organizers to help track information, ideas, and their own questions about what they are reading.

Yeager says one additional step would be to ensure students build their reading stamina. Giving students the opportunity for reading aloud, paired reading, and silent reading with appropriate grade-level texts will help build student attention and stamina which are necessary for the long passages used on state tests.

“Policy alone does not change outcomes — implementation does,” the NWEA study concludes. “Improving adolescent literacy will require transferring policy into classroom practice through high-quality instruction, targeted interventions, professional learning, and sustained support for educators. State initiatives … demonstrate a growing awareness of the adolescent literacy challenge and an increasing willingness among policymakers to act. These efforts represent important steps toward building the conditions necessary for meaningful and lasting improvement in literacy outcomes for older students.”

What Happens When AI Policy Meets a Real Classroom?

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every school district writing AI policy right now is making a bet about the future, often without much data behind it. On This Week with EdSurge, we look at that bet from two very different vantage points: one guest who spent a year studying policy from a distance, and another who helped write it from the inside.

Studying Policy From a Distance

Jody Britten spent the last year coding AI policy from more than 100 school districts across the country into a five-level framework, ranging from active promotion to outright prohibition. Her findings point to a system that leans cautious, and is often disconnected from the state guidance meant to inform it. What the numbers reveal about where most schools land might surprise you.

Building Policy From the Inside

Tambra Clark helped write her own district's AI governance policy in Birmingham from scratch, sitting on the very kind of committee Britten's research describes. What her committee discovered when they first sat down together says a lot about why so much AI policy in this country still has a long way to go.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

Study: The National AI Policy Landscape in K-12 Education by Jody Britten

Voices of Change Fellowship featuring Tambra Clark

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

The Library That Sparked a STEM Revolution for Our Students

Tambra Clark — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For years, as a library media specialist, I took great pride in my role as guardian of the 20,000 books in our library, meticulously cataloging and protecting our collection. But after dedicating nearly two decades to education, I came to a vital realization: The most important chapters in our school’s history weren’t on our bookshelves; they were waiting to be written by the students themselves.

I’ve seen firsthand how easily innovation can get reduced to a one-time event: a quick photo-op, a splashy press release, or the arrival of a new shipment of shiny devices. It’s frustrating because that approach never lasts; it’s a temporary buzz that leaves the core of our instructional ecosystem fundamentally unchanged. The real problem is that our students deserve more than a “device drop.” They need and deserve a long-term commitment that actually reshapes how they learn.

That shift in perspective is what drives my work today. I’ve moved from being a gatekeeper of static resources to someone who actively creates a dynamic, student-centered environment. It is no longer just about having resources; it’s about ensuring they become the backbone of a sustainable, future-ready classroom experience.

The Quiet Before the Storm

For the first 10 years of my career, my roles ranged from teaching third and fifth graders to serving as a school technology teacher and a sixth-grade pre-AP reading and math instructor. Following 10 years across multiple grade levels and content areas, I transitioned into the role of a library media specialist, which soon became my entire world. My days were defined by the ebb and flow of students coming in to check out books and learn the literacy skills necessary to develop knowledge.

Parents, community members, and even fellow educators often referred to me as “just a librarian,” and while I wore that title with pride, I was acutely aware of the silent burden we carried. The library was viewed as a traditional hub for books and nothing else, leaving our students tethered to the past while the world raced forward in technology and innovation. Our students possessed inherent brilliance, yet they were consistently overlooked by a STEM narrative that rarely considered our zip code.

Society often operates on an unspoken assumption that technological breakthroughs belong exclusively to affluent districts or established tech hubs. Because our community didn't fit that traditional mold, the narrative bypassed us, systematically starving our students of the advanced tools and platforms required to translate their raw potential into tangible innovation.

Everything changed for us when I had a conversation with Beth Sanders, then vice president of Ed Farm. The nonprofit organization, headquartered right here in Birmingham, launched a strategic partnership with Birmingham City Schools (BCS). Their goal was clear: to boost educational equity by closing digital skills gaps across our district and region. While the strategic partnership between Ed Farm and BCS had already been established since 2020, I learned that my space, the South Hampton K-8 library, had recently been chosen for a complete renovation.

Beth Sanders approached me with this incredible opportunity, knowing that this project would be the first of its kind in the state of Alabama. Our discussion became the catalyst for completely reimagining the space. In addition to the physical Ed Farm spaces, educators and students benefited from specialized fellowships. Together, these initiatives pushed us beyond the status quo, ensuring we prioritized sustainable, future-ready learning over superficial technology adoption.

Students were also invited into the design process, and for the most part, they led the way. I sat back and watched as they traded ideas about robotics, green screens, and iPads. Witnessing them design their own future before a single wire was plugged in proved we were creating something much bigger than a state-of-the-art library — we were creating the library of innovation.

Becoming an Architect of Possibility

In 2022, we finally cut the ribbon on the first official Ed Farm space at South Hampton K-8 School, “The Library of Innovation.” Balloons were tethered to the doorways, camera crews maneuvered for the perfect angle, and city officials were buzzing with the promise of a new era. It was one of those “pinch-me” moments, seeing the last couple of years of dreaming and planning finally take physical shape for our kids. But when the local city council members, edtech partners, and school board officials headed home, the real, gritty, unglamorous labor of building capacity began. My mission shifted from being a keeper of books to an architect of possibility.

By moving past traditional keyboarding to teach coding, website architecture, and engineering principles, I equipped students to interrogate their environment and engineer solutions to the challenges they encounter in their own neighborhoods. Instead of just learning how to use software, they began leveraging creative programming workflows to design AI and Internet of Things-driven systems, such as functional tornado warning models, to address severe weather threats right here at home. Seeing them build these concepts proved that this space was doing exactly what it was meant to do: transforming students from passive digital consumers into true architects of possibility.

Over the course of the next year, the library had transformed into a dynamic laboratory. The hum of 3D printers bringing custom keychains and game remote holders to life became our soundtrack. The sharp whir of drone propellers slicing through the air replaced the static silence of the past. The intense, focused chatter of a student-led podcast recording of “Bulldog Talk on the Edge” became the new student voice. We purposefully curated this environment to break the traditional mold, challenging the students to completely redefine their expectations of the space and of themselves.

Defying the Narrative: From Participation to Mastery

In an urban environment, the STEM narrative is often restricted and expectations are frequently capped. This cap does not exist because of a lack of student capability but rather because of a systemic failure in how society views innovation. The narrative feels capped because the broader educational system frequently assumes urban students only need to learn how to participate in the digital world as consumers, rather than being equipped with the sophisticated coding environments and engineering principles required to master it as creators.

From the first day the library reopened, I watched the confidence of our students bloom. As they mastered the new tools, this newfound confidence translated into tangible success, resulting in a series of competition wins and vital funding for our school. They took that confidence and applied it to real-world problems.

During the 2024-2025 school year, they won the ALTEC Challenge for the “Hygiene Hub,” a vending machine solution for personal care products paired with a custom community app they coded.

Next, we won $12,000 in Samsung technology representing the state of Alabama in the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow competition with an upcycling machine designed to turn old clothes into hygiene products.

The momentum continued when three of our seventh-grade students won the Alabama state title in the eCYBERMISSION competition, earning $500 in savings bonds each for their innovation. This all happened in the span of one school year, cementing the fact that our students weren't just playing with STEM. They had become experts in their domain.

However, the ultimate validation of our shift came this past school year. In April, our students rose to become national finalists in Samsung Solve for Tomorrow, standing out as one of only 10 schools in the entire nation. They secured $50,000 in Samsung technology. The experience offered so much more: My students flew to Washington, D.C., and stayed on Capitol Hill to pitch an early-warning system for tornadoes they created for The Washington Post. Their presence on that stage, pitching for the $100,000 grand prize, was proof that their innovation belonged in the highest arenas of influence.

Redefining Excellence

How does a library, once defined by shelves of paper, become an incubator for national-stage innovation? It happens when you stop viewing technology as a product and start viewing it as a catalyst for human agency.

The gap between buying tech and building capacity is bridged by leadership that refuses to let the innovation end when the ribbon is cut. It is bridged by mentors who show students that their zip code does not dictate their capacity to lead. When you provide students with the right tools, these students don’t just keep up; they excel.

In the span of one year, my students transformed what it means to be a student in Birmingham City Schools. We proved that when students in urban, underserved neighborhoods are given the resources to match their ingenuity, the results are world-changing.

This library is no longer just a place to check out books; it is where students can rewrite their own narratives. The ribbons may be gone, but the ecosystem we built remains a living, breathing playground of innovation. We didn’t just join the STEM conversation; we changed it.

Teachers Forge Ahead on Integrating AI

Ed Finkel — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

New findings from Turnitin highlight the growing leadership role of teachers integrating artificial intelligence into the classroom, the demand for education-specific AI solutions, and the importance of guiding students toward using AI as a tool for learning rather than a substitute for thinking.

Based on data gathered during the first half of 2026 and an analysis of how students use the Turnitin Clarity AI writing transparency tool, the “Learning Integrity Insights Report Q2” revealed 48% of respondents reported that teachers and administrators take primary responsibility for AI implementation at their schools and districts, far more than do technology leaders (17%) and cross-functional committees (16%).

Educators say they found parallels from the data with their schools’ and districts’ initiatives and results to date. “We are always having to respond to determine, when new technologies come out, what are we going to implement, what are we not going to implement, and how and what will work well,” says Matt Moyer, principal at Rupert Elementary School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. “Schools are in different places. How do we respond? How do we best position ourselves? How do we work with our staff to get them up to speed?”

The findings were “heartening” to Antero Garcia, president of the National Council of Teachers of English, which earlier this year released an “ELA AI Framework and Feedback Form” to provide guidance on integrating AI into the classroom and when and how to opt out. “Some [teachers] are excited and want to explore the possibilities,” he says. “Some are not and rightfully have concerns. Students get the best learning opportunities when teachers are in control of what’s happening in their classrooms.”

Tim Needles, technology integration specialist at Smithtown (New York) Central School District, says he’s observed that administrators are more cautious with AI due to the social and political pitfalls, whereas teachers and department heads understand the need in a more direct way. As an adjunct professor at a couple of colleges, he wasn’t surprised at the finding that usage is more disparate in higher education because “the higher ed world, with AI, is a little bit like the Wild West now,” he says. “The policy is never the same anywhere.”

Moyer cautions that while teachers taking leadership is not a bad thing in and of itself, if school leadership is completely hands-off, that could lead to “disjointed implementation for a district,” he says. “You’d better get on top of this and have a plan as to what you’re doing and not doing with this. That’s an important point for people in my position as principals to understand.”

Education-Specific AI Needs

The Turnitin report also revealed that educators don’t see AI as worth the investment unless it has the flexibility to meet teaching needs, reflects how they design assignments by providing customization, provides transparency into how students are using it, and either saves them time or provides concrete benefits such as the ability to scaffold various types of assignments in a way that supports student learning.

Needles says AI tools have come a long way but still have a great distance to travel, and he takes new training nearly every year to understand their evolution and be able to lead his district in implementing the tools. In 2 or 3 years, “You’ll see a bit of a more consistent usage,” he predicts. “We haven’t even reached the tipping point with AI yet. It’s interesting to see the really high usage in secondary. The big through line is that teachers need education-specific AI.”

Perla Lujan, head of the social science department at the Prepa Anahuac private high school network in Mexico City, says her school uses Turnitin’s products, integrated into Schoology. But it’s challenging to keep up with the content of curriculum and preparing students for end-of-semester testing while also keeping up with AI tools and technology. “We do have these tools,” she says. “As was mentioned in the report — and I totally agree — all of us are worried about the use of AI, and how we can accurately detect that in our students.”

Bellwether Education Partners has heard similar testimony about the need for education-specific tools in conversations with principals, says senior analyst Marisa Mission, noting that her organization has published research on how AI is changing learning and AI use in schools.

“They typically produce better outputs,” Mission says of education-specific AI tools. “They align with better teaching practices that are simpler for educators to use. Not everyone has the time, capacity and training to take advantage of the most advanced AI models and frontier platforms. Meeting educators where they’re at matters.”

U.S. Students Offloading More Brainpower

The Turnitin data showed that higher education students in the U.S. were turning over their writing to AI — with 19% of submissions measured as more than 80% AI-generated — at roughly double the rate of peers in the United Kingdom (10%) and Australia (10%). But at the K-12 level, only 5% to 6% of papers reached that threshold in all three countries.

Michael Harvey, director of teaching and learning at Lytton High School in Gisborne, New Zealand, finds the international comparisons useful, although he notes that New Zealand’s results are likely very different from Australia’s given that the latter makes decisions at the state level, like the U.S., while New Zealand has a national education ministry. “I quite like the idea that the report has moved on to when and why students are using [AI], not whether,” he says. “It seems like a lot of students are using it for feedback.”

Student Desire for Feedback

The Turnitin data also reveal that students are most likely to ask for AI feedback during the drafting stage of an assignment (43%) vs. other points along the way such as proofreading (18%), getting started (11%) or researching (6%). Nearly three-quarters of those asking for drafting help (72%) wanted feedback like, “Am I aligned with the rubric?” or “How can I improve my paper?”

Moyer is concerned about whether students fully understand how to ask for feedback. “Prompts like, ‘Is my paper good?,’ aren’t going to help anyone,” he says, because they don’t produce specific enough answers. “Students don’t really know how to use this tool, even though they think they do.”

Meanwhile, Needles wonders whether the best and brightest students are the most afraid to use AI because they’re afraid of appearing like they cheated — and yet they will need to know how to use it to participate in the workforce of the future. “There are responsible ways to use it, especially in organizing your structure, in the early stages of writing,” he says.

Math Terrified Me When I Was a Student. That Made Me a Better Teacher.

Brenna Kirkpatrick — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I was in third grade when I started to fear math. Division and fractions gave me the worst anxiety. Every day when my teacher asked for my math homework, I’d say, “I put it on your desk,” knowing full well I hadn’t done it.

My siblings had no problem with math, but it was so hard for me that I wondered if I had a learning disability.

In college, I decided to become a teacher after discovering my love for working with kids at a daycare center. I began my first year teaching in the fall of 2024. I felt excited to teach fourth grade, but I also worried I wouldn’t understand all the math content I was supposed to teach and that I’d pass on my math anxiety to my students.

Honesty Creates Connection

When the fourth-grade teaching team met prior to the start of the 2024-25 school year, I confessed to my colleagues, who were all math whizzes, that I wasn’t very good at math and that it scared me. Instead of making me feel silly or stupid, they were so gracious and supportive. They said, “We’ve got you,” and they did.

As it turned out, we were all nervous because our district was rolling out a new curriculum. As we looked through the materials, I found it comforting to know that we’d all be learning and finding our way together. For once, I didn’t feel so alone in math. Being honest created a sense of connection with my colleagues. It helped us approach the new school year as a team.

Vulnerability Builds Trust

Fractions were another story. Research shows that many children have trouble with fractions, and my students were no different. I even brought in candy bars and broke them into pieces to make the abstract concept tangible, but I was met with blank stares.

I thought back to what I needed as a student and decided to be completely transparent. I admitted that I had struggled with fractions at their age and that it took me a while to learn them. Hearing that made my students feel so much better. They knew they could ask me questions and admit their confusion without judgment. My openness about my own math struggles made it safe for them to share theirs.

The next morning, one student handed me a note, thanking me for helping her understand fractions. I cried when I read it and realized that I had reached her in a way that not only helped her grasp the math but also helped her believe in herself.

I feel like I have become a more confident teacher through all of this, but I’m still figuring out how to reach kids who struggle (the kind of kid I used to be). Sometimes it does not click for them once in a lesson. It is a challenge because not all students respond the same way. Some kids need one-on-one support when learning a new skill. That’s hard for a teacher who has more than 20 kids in a classroom. My school added an interventionist this past year, and that was truly a blessing. She and I communicated consistently, and she was able to pull those who struggle and reach them in a different way. As a new teacher, I hope to learn and become better on how I can implement extra guidance inside the classroom on my own if there’s ever a day I don’t have the help from an interventionist.

Mistakes Are Part of Learning

I also talked openly with my students about how productive struggle in math is part of the learning process. When I was in school, I was so afraid of making mistakes on my math homework that I didn’t even try. But mistakes can play a powerful role in learning if we are brave enough to make them.

Students’ mistakes also provide a window into their thinking. I like to tell my students, “If I don’t see your mistakes, then I won’t know where to help.”

One day, I found one of my strongest students crying because she couldn’t solve a problem. I told her, “I’m not expecting you to leave here today knowing how to do this. I just need you to try.” She did, and afterward she said, “I thought I couldn’t do this. You told me I could if I kept trying, and I got an A on the test.”

When students feel safe enough to take risks and persevere, it not only builds their skills but also their confidence.

At the end of the school year, I literally gasped when we received our West Virginia General Summative Assessment scores. My class had the highest math scores of all the fourth-grade classes at my school.

I used to be ashamed of my math struggles, but I’ve learned how to turn my biggest weakness into my superpower. I’m now teaching third grade, the same grade where my math fears began. It’s amazing to think that I used to feel so lost, but now I’m the one helping students find their way. My students love learning math, and that has made me love teaching it.

Confidence in Yourself and Your Students

If I could share one piece of advice with other new or aspiring teachers, it would be to have confidence in yourself. Math is not so scary. It’s actually fun when you believe in yourself. Take a deep breath and say, “I can teach this lesson. I can do this.”

It’s equally important to believe in our students and actively encourage them every day. When my students are working through problems, I tell them, “Great job! I love seeing your work.” When they get the correct answer, I say, “Fantastic! You did such a good job.” If I see students struggling, I tell them, “Good work! Let’s try that one again. You’ve got this.”

Those words of encouragement — for our students and ourselves — keep us motivated and excited to do our best every day. Whether we’re teaching or learning math, we all want to feel capable and supported. When we set high expectations and believe we can succeed, amazing things can happen.

High Schools Need a New Model for a New Economy

Scott Laband — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

America’s teenagers are struggling to find work as businesses hire at record-low rates for the traditional summer jobs teenagers depend on. But a job scooping ice cream may be just the beginning of teenagers’ struggles with the job market; the outdated secondary education system in the United States is leaving students behind and setting them up for failure after graduation.

Falling Behind in More Ways Than One

The statistics on American education are bleak. Reading and math scores are the lowest they’ve been in 20 years as post-COVID-19 effects continue to reverberate. Chronic absenteeism continues to plague student success, despite improvements in some districts. And the majority of high schoolers say they feel unprepared for life after graduation.

Although conversations about student success often devolve into political games and finger-pointing, the fundamental challenge for high schools isn’t a lack of caring educators or committed communities.

The biggest challenge is that students simply don’t see the point in what they’re learning. In an age where every answer to every test is available in an instant, school begins to feel abstract, performative and detached from adulthood, rather than a pathway into it.

Filling the Skills Gap of the Modern Economy

The rapidly changing nature of entry-level work has exposed the weakness of the traditional education model, which sets students on one of two paths: toward college or not.

But today, it’s not one future that students need to be prepared for; it’s all of them. Career paths are more fluid, and the modern economy increasingly rewards adaptability over routine, skills over seat time and applied learning over passive credit accumulation.

What this means for high schools is that the demands of education need to change — to focus on exposure and engagement rather than just college preparedness.

Colorado has identified these demands as “The Big Three” and is working to ensure that school districts provide opportunities to earn college credit and industry-recognized credentials and engage in meaningful work-based learning that is connected to a broader career pathway.

In addition to helping students identify or rule out potential career paths, meaningful work-based learning helps students connect classroom learning to adult goals. Algebra becomes less abstract when it’s tied to engineering, construction estimating, advanced manufacturing or healthcare analytics. Communication skills can be practiced in realistic settings with supervisors, clients or patients.

School stops feeling like preparation for another level of school and starts feeling connected to life itself.

In many communities, educators report stronger engagement, improved attendance and greater persistence among students who participate in career-connected pathways — not because the work is easier but because it feels consequential.

Employers see another benefit. Durable skills — such as collaboration, reliability, initiative, communication, judgment and problem solving — are difficult to teach through worksheets alone. But they are the skills that matter in the workplace and determine long-term success.

As artificial intelligence plays a larger role in the workplace, these durable skills become what determines whether someone gets hired, promoted or eventually let go. Entry-level jobs (including those summer jobs) are increasingly being eliminated, meaning the opportunity for young people to learn these skills on the job is vanishing.

By integrating these lessons into their curriculum, schools can help the labor market fill the growing gap for workers with the prerequisite skills, despite the lack of entry-level jobs. Students get to learn and develop these skills in real-world situations, and they gain something increasingly essential in today’s labor market: social capital. Students can graduate with networks, exposure, and insights that have historically taken years to unlock.

Learning From Real Examples

States have started to move toward more holistic, real world-focused learning frameworks. According to one analysis, 39 states have adopted some sort of curriculum focused on helping students connect their coursework with their career goals; seven states have made durable skills a part of their graduation requirements; and 25 states clearly distinguish between attending college and pursuing a trade as legitimate postgraduation paths.

What unites the states that have done this effectively — such as Tennessee and Colorado, for example — is the willingness of school leadership to collaborate with businesses and workplaces to understand their job demands. In these states, high school students can earn transferable college credit while participating in apprenticeships, internships and career-connected learning, and schools are not financially penalized for not meeting rigid seat-time requirements. Instead of locking students into just one future or just one measure of success, high schools must focus on preparing students for all of it.

When educators, employers, colleges and state leaders work together, high school education can be more than a checked box; it can support students in a way that feels vital and important to the rest of their lives.

America needs a new approach to preparing students for life after high school. Not one based on sorting students into winners and losers or college-bound and career-bound but one focused on helping every young person discover purpose, build skills and gain momentum toward a meaningful future. The strongest high schools of the next generation will not simply prepare students for tests or graduation. They will prepare them for lives of contribution, opportunity and continued learning in an economy that never stands still.

I Used AI to Build AI-Resistant Assignments

Michael Hernandez — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Artificial intelligence has wreaked havoc across secondary and higher education classrooms, leaving educators struggling to figure out how to create cheat-resistant assignments and assessments. While everyone is good at diagnosing the problem, no one seems to have a workable solution. So I designed a free tool to help teachers create uncheatable assessments and avoid the headaches of AI and academic dishonesty.

The Cheat Vulnerability Index

Based on the concepts from my book, course and workshops, I built the Cheat Vulnerability Index, a web app that lets teachers analyze their existing assignments to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses when it comes to vulnerability to cheating. Users upload an assignment, then get a custom report and suggestions for how to make improvements.

I came up with the idea when I noticed that educators struggled to take the ideas from my conference sessions and workshops and implement them in their unique learning contexts. Since I can’t always sit with everyone as they plan lessons or write a syllabus, I wondered how I might scale the concepts and strategies from my content leveraging the power of AI.

I needed to create a brand-new tool that didn’t exist before and to do so with no budget. So I learned to "vibe code," the method of using natural language in an AI model to create computer code. I hadn’t done coding since I used BASIC in high school, and it took me a while to figure out how it worked, and how to turn the code into an interface on my website.

I trained the index on concepts from my book Storytelling With Purpose: Digital Projects to Ignite Student Curiosity and a variety of other workshops and articles I’ve published as the pedagogical framework for the assignment analysis. The concepts, processes and strategies it produces are unique to my published work, and create suggestions through that research-based, classroom-tested lens.

Turns out, vibe coding is a lot like teaching: you begin with deep subject-area expertise (in this case, authentic learning and assessment), create a complex set of detailed instructions and processes for the AI agent to follow (a lesson or unit plan), define what “good” looks like (learning outcomes, standards and rubrics), and how to describe the concepts clearly to an audience (a learning artifact). I was stunned by how well the app turned out, and teachers who have tried it find it useful.

But the biggest takeaway for me is how this experiment revealed the ability of AI tools to remove barriers to learning and how they can facilitate deeper learning through the application of knowledge.

Despite what they say, not everyone can code — including me. So why should coding (or the cost to hire a team of coders) get in the way of my ideas and creating a useful tool to help others? In the same way, how does a student’s writing ability, processing speed or facility as a public speaker affect their grades if our assessments are in-class essays, timed tests or presentations and debates? It got me thinking about the obstacles students face expressing their knowledge and how traditional assessments can get in the way of assessing them.

Students may cheat or cut corners for a lot of reasons, not all of which have to do with moral depravity. Designing uncheatable assessments requires more than adjustments to a single assignment — it requires us to expand our definition of success and to rethink what counts as achievement and how we measure it.

Creating Uncheatable Assessments

The Cheat Vulnerability Index is a quick diagnostic that gives teachers and faculty feedback on a single assignment. But to have meaningful, sustained resilience while maintaining rigor and high standards across an entire school year, teachers need to rethink what and how they assess, and foster cultures of integrity that go beyond any one test or unit.

Cheating happens when two conditions are met: when an assignment is cheatable by design and when students have the incentive to cheat.

Assignments like tests, worksheets or essays are all vulnerable to academic dishonesty simply by their design. AI can write essays, and students can share answers, for example. How can the format of an assignment minimize opportunities for cheating or rely on a combination of multiple metrics that make it less possible?

No matter how well an assignment is designed, if a student really wants to cheat, they will. So instead of trying to surveil students and make our job as educators about policing them, we can create assignments that disincentivize cheating before it becomes a problem in the first place.

There are three ways to do this.

Three Uncheatable Assessment Traits

1. Originality. When we expect students to create the same answers at the same time, we’ve set ourselves up for cheating (with or without AI). Authentic learning experiences result in one-of-a-kind learning artifacts that no other student could copy or use AI to complete entirely.

2. Personal connection. To be truly invested in learning, everyone wants to know “why this matters.” Allowing ways for students to connect curriculum to their lives or community helps them personalize an abstract concept and disincentivizes cheating because they care about the outcome and know it will help them or people in their community. Students should also have multiple opportunities for agency throughout the process.

3. Purpose. What’s the point of students’ hard work? If an assignment ends up in the trash, it sends a powerful message about the value of their effort and your curriculum. Instead, have students create learning artifacts that are designed for users or audiences beyond the classroom. Give students a good reason to complete an assignment with integrity and accuracy. Real stakes beat clever rules.

What’s Next

The problem of academic integrity is more fundamental than preventing students from cheating. AI has forced us to recognize that the old proxies we used to assess students are no longer reliable as evidence of learning (if they ever were), and requires us to redefine what counts as evidence of understanding. Like the Cheat Vulnerability Index I designed that didn’t require me to know the vocabulary or grammar of coding, my learning artifact still required me to build subject-area expertise, identify goals and limits, interrogate what good learning means and take responsibility for the outcome of my work.

As mathematician Terence Tao says about AI disrupting mathematics research, it’s like we’ve been trying to drive a car on outdated roads made for horses and pedestrians, and it’s revealed potholes and bumps and cracks. AI is now giving us faster cars that lead to big traffic jams and accidents.

The destination hasn’t changed, just how we get there. What we need isn’t better ways to catch students cheating, but a new pedagogical road forward.

Why Would Anyone Opt for Virtual Kindergarten?

Mi Aniefuna — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This fall, my daughter will attend kindergarten virtually. My theory is that she’ll actually have less screen time. My wife and I have been going back and forth about where to send her for school (and what type of school) for the past couple of years. My wife always envisioned curating our children’s learning environment from the comfort and safety of our home. The first time I heard it, I shrugged it off — happy wife, happy life. Sure, yep. We’ll deal with it when the kid turns five. But the kid has now turned five, and kindergarten has arrived.

I was a latchkey kid. Born and raised in the mean streets of Trenton, New Jersey, I grew up walking to school as early as kindergarten before being shipped from gifted and talented to private school — I got in one little fight and my mom got scared and said, “You’re going to that good private school in Bucks County in Pennsylvania.” Because of this incident, I’ve always been a proponent of social learning. My way of schooling taught me independence, conflict resolution, consistency, and resilience.

Virtual school, especially for early elementary, is still statistically uncommon. But after the COVID-19 pandemic school shutdowns between 2020 and 2021, the numbers of homeschool and virtual school students continue to rise. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates in its 2023 Parent and Family Involvement Survey that the percentage of students who received instruction at home increased from 3.7% before the pandemic to 5.2% during the 2022-23 school year. That’s approximately 1.7 million students between the ages of 5 and 17. The NCES, however, acknowledges that this number is difficult to measure accurately across multiple years.

Anecdotally, I often talk to other parents and friends who are also busy chasing toddlers around grocery stores and playgrounds about how we choose our children’s educational and social environments. Regardless of what type of schooling they choose, most parents I come across significantly weigh the tradeoffs and put a lot of thought into these decisions. Sometimes we end up commiserating over our shared fears and worries that we’re making the right decisions for our children.

I watched my niece attend kindergarten from a screen, saw her social life diminish to a dozen Zoom boxes, and observed her generation’s growing reliance on social media for connection. I remember how hands-on we had to be to keep her learning consistent. She also received direct instruction from multiple adults, so she learned to quickly correct writing the letter “e” backward and to write in a straight line. She also finished up her year of dance classes on Zoom, and I remember the teacher’s frustration of trying to teach six-year-olds a proper pas de bourrée online.

So much of Gen Alpha and Gen Z came of age on a screen. Some of their most important moments of adolescence were facilitated in a virtual environment. There is a flurry of data showing the negative consequences of the generation of COVID kids. Knowing all of this, we still decided on virtual kindergarten anyway.

What convinced me to suspend my judgment and assumptions about homeschooling and virtual schooling is that the difference between then and now is that the world is no longer shut down. Virtual school will be one of several components of my daughter’s academic and social learning environments. But that doesn’t fully alleviate my parental anxiety, especially since it’s difficult to forget concerns of school safety, cultural belonging, and bullying. According to the NCES, these are among the frequently cited concerns of parents who chose home-based instruction.

My first thought about virtual school was that my daughter would be looking at a screen all day. Of my three children, my oldest is the screen monster. The latest American Academy of Pediatrics guidance on quality screen time suggests that its recommendations should be applied in the context of the child’s general reaction to screen time. And she is the one who concerns me most because she seems particularly sensitive to television, edtech, and most screens, in general.

School is Just One Component

One of the first theories I learned in behavioral science was Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory of human development. School is one of several places that facilitates social learning. It’s arguably where children spend the most time throughout their childhood, but it is part of the microsystem in a child’s life. Other components influence who they become.

Being Team Traditional School, I feared that without the brick-and-mortar school as the source of consistency and a cohort of other children she’s matriculating with, my daughter might miss out on what occasional drop-in gymnastics or library read-alouds can’t offer. What was missing from her pre-K homeschool education was the camaraderie growing up within a community, so I worried she might not develop the muscle of navigating evolving friendships over time, and eventually fail to learn to resolve the inevitable adolescent and preteen conflicts as they arise. Few challenges in adolescence show you who you are more than facing friendship breakups and makeups in chattery lunchrooms.

My cinematic imagination has played out so many scenes of my precious baby girl being unbearably socially anxious, curled up in her college dorm twin bed, because she's overstimulated by the campus dining hall. But I’ve had to calm my own anxiety and drop the dramatics and biases.

Trade-offs and Gaps

Consistent with Bronfenbrenner’s theory, we’ve decided on ways to tend to the various trade-offs and potential gaps of virtual school. Careful not to overcorrect, we’ve chosen developmentally appropriate extramural activities for the year, such as dance and other physical activities that she seems drawn to, and a culturally affirming youth auxiliary club. And we’ll continue organizing playdates and building routines and traditions around family, community, and cultural learning.

Am I ignoring the science of learning and the techlash debate? Yes and no, but mostly, no. Like most parenting decisions, there is no perfect answer or choice. There are trade-offs to traditional school, virtual school, and homeschool. There will be high- and low-quality screen time involved with each, because teaching and technology are enmeshed in ways that both aid and challenge learning. As parents, we simply cannot optimize every environment our children inhabit. Instead, we can be intentional about the totality of our children’s experiences and how those memories age as our children do.

Reality Bites: Students Say They Face Stark Challenges After High School

David Weldon — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Many Gen Z high school graduates say they were not prepared for the realities of the real world — and new research supports their concern.

According to a new Agency study, “Turning the Tassel: What Generation Z Says About Life After High School Graduation,” recent high school graduates are more likely to land jobs in shrinking rather than growing workforce sectors; a majority don’t complete the secondary education or training programs they start; and slightly more than half say their high school did not properly prepare them for the rigors of postsecondary or continuing education.

The study challenges the way a successful high school experience is defined and whether high schools are adequately preparing students for life after graduation, explains report author and Agency CEO Debbie Veney.

“If schools are doing their jobs well, we should be able to see it in the life outcomes of their graduates,” Veney says. “Are they employed? How much money do they make? What type of jobs do they have? Did they complete a postsecondary credential? Are they able to live independently? We basically wanted to know if they feel prepared for adulthood after high school, and whether they are thriving.”

Well-Prepared High School Grads

Well-prepared high school graduates are more than their transcripts or resumes, says Stephanie Simpson, chief executive of the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA). A well-prepared graduate has genuine self-knowledge — a solid understanding of their strengths, interests and the value they place on learning — and can make an informed decision about their next steps.

Evaluating this generation means looking beyond their transcripts to the core qualities and skills that matter most, such as their curiosity, adaptability, resilience and self-awareness, Simpson explains. These are exactly the areas where students build the confidence and capabilities they need to succeed well beyond high school.

Dan Gonzalez, general manager of Teamship at the College Board, shares that view: “To me, a well-prepared Gen Z high school grad has shifted from a completion mindset to a contribution mindset. A completion mindset is what schools often reward: finish the assignment, move to the next one, advance. A contribution mindset asks a different question: What value can I create for someone else — a teammate, a supervisor, a customer?”

Those are the durable skills — communication, problem-solving, collaboration — that a recent College Board and U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey confirms that employers are looking for, Gonzalez says. Technical skills still matter. But it’s these human skills that will empower a young person to make real contributions, and contribution is what the labor market rewards.

Veney agrees that a well-prepared graduate is not just someone who crosses the stage with a diploma. It is someone who has multiple pathways before them because they are equipped to navigate an ever-changing terrain.

“It looks like a young person who has a plan, knows how to adapt, can communicate clearly, understands their options and has the confidence to advocate for themselves,” Veney says. “They know how to be lifelong learners. They may be headed to college, career training, the military, public service or the workforce, but they should leave high school with both direction and the skills to navigate change.”

Gen Z Satisfaction

In light of the gaps between preparation and expectation, Gen Z graduates have mixed feelings about their current lot in life, explains Jane Swift, chief executive of Education at Work, an educational consultancy nonprofit, and former governor of Massachusetts. “Gen Z is ambitious and values-driven, more focused on purpose and flexibility than generations before them, and that’s a real strength,” she says. “But many are also anxious about their economic prospects and frustrated that their education hasn’t translated into the opportunities they were promised, especially as artificial intelligence reshapes the job market just as they’re entering it.”

At the IECA, Simpson says her members also have mixed views of Gen Z’s plight. “On one hand, this is a purposeful, values-driven generation that wants meaningful work and is thoughtful about well-being and balance,” Simpson explains. “On the other hand, our members consistently note high levels of anxiety and pressure, much of it rooted in admissions culture as well as in economic uncertainty about whether the path they choose will pay off.”

Many Gen Z graduates are navigating an incredibly complicated transition to the labor force, Veney says. Nearly two-thirds of employers say there is a mismatch between the skills they are looking for and the skills job seekers possess. Also, the pace of change is enormously quick. The skills needed for jobs today are expected to change 70% by 2030. College costs are high. Housing is expensive. Mental health pressures are real. And too many students leave high school without enough exposure to the range of career paths available to them.

Understanding Career Realities and Job Opportunities

A significant factor in the skills mismatch is that students often don’t understand what is required in many job roles and, therefore, don’t take the necessary steps to prepare for these roles.

“Students rarely have an idea about the workforce outside of what the family does, what they see on YouTube and what their friends tell them,” says Mike Wysocki, author of Careers By the People. “Students do not understand pay structure either. These subjects are rarely broached in the high school or university settings.”

Career readiness is a major issue, but education and industry are doing little to resolve it, Wysocki says. “I always tell students to talk with workers outside of their family that have been in industry 10-plus years,” he explains. “Ask to shadow the person at their work. Attend a trade show of an industry that interests you. Learn about the [networking] power of LinkedIn.”

At college admissions consultancy Hello College, faculty spends a great deal of time helping students understand career realities and the different paths available to them, says college counselor Raymond Gonzales.

“We educate students about the careers they’re considering, but we also explain the realities of how today’s job market works,” Gonzales says. “Right now, many students are afraid AI is going to replace their jobs. We don’t want them to be afraid of AI; we want them to understand how AI can complement their careers. That approach makes students much more confident as they explore majors and career opportunities.”

How High Schools Can Do Better

High schools clearly need to do a better job connecting academics to life after graduation, Veney explains. For example, dual-enrollment programs and early college programs allow students to graduate high school with an associate degree. That degree can be used to step right into a well-paying job with growth potential. Or it can be used to shorten the time it takes to earn a four-year degree.

Schools must also be committed to stronger college and career advising, providing more exposure to real workplaces; placing more emphasis on writing, speaking and problem-solving; and teaching financial literacy and life skills. It also means creating a school culture where every student is known, challenged and expected to succeed. One of the clearest lessons from this study is that expectations matter, Veney says.

High school leaders must understand that a well-prepared graduate is one who is ready to enter their chosen path, whether it is college, career or military, explains Nicole Alioto, education consultant and author of You Can Measure Anything! An Educator’s Guide to Measuring What is Hard to Define.

“Success means a combination of academic, applied or technical, and interpersonal or soft skills,” Alioto says. “There is no fixed formula for success that fits into every setting, but there is an expectation of basic literacy, numeracy and ability to communicate, both face-to-face and using technology.”

Finally, Gonzales says schools should focus on helping students develop the core skills of curiosity, adaptability, communication and resilience. Those are the qualities that prepare students to navigate change, solve problems and continue learning long after they leave high school.

Grades and academic performance will always matter, but they’re only one piece of the equation, Gonzales notes. Students also need opportunities to build leadership skills and have real-world experiences that prepare them for college, careers and life.

What Should Students Still Have to Do for Themselves?

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In this episode of This Week with EdSurge, two educators grapple with the same question from opposite ends of the classroom. One traced it back to a trip to the record store. The other found it waiting inside a lesson plan. Together, they explore what artificial intelligence changes about learning, and what remains unchanged.

A Trip to the Record Store

Nathan Kraai, Director of Innovation and Design Thinking at The Fenn School in Concord, Massachusetts, did not expect a family outing to a record store to change how he thinks about artificial intelligence in the classroom. Watching his kids puzzle over why anyone would buy a vinyl record when streaming exists led him to a comparison he could not shake. He calls it a signal, borrowing a framework from author Jane McGonigal, and argues it says something important about what people actually want from learning.

A Classroom Already Made Its Choice

Court Shuller teaches middle school English in New Jersey, works as a reading specialist, and recently joined the EdSurge Voices of Change Fellowship. Speaking from ISTELive in Orlando, Court describes a classroom where the response to artificial intelligence has already taken a surprising shape. From a room full of educators picking up pens instead of talking about writing, to a hard line drawn around one particular use of AI, Court makes the case that some choices should stay firmly in human hands.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

How a Vinyl Record Resurgence Helped Me Understand the Future of AI in Education by Nathan Kraai

Voices of Change Fellowship by EdSurge

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

Translating Dignity, Not Just Language

Monika Vereb — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One evening, while supporting a family after hours, I asked a mother whether she felt more comfortable speaking with me in Spanish or English. My bilingual front office staff had already left for the evening, and I knew this family would likely need direct support navigating a series of complex digital enrollment forms and communication systems before they left.

Although I retained conversational Spanish from years of academic coursework and lived experience, my own speech in the language remains slow and hesitant. I wanted to ensure they felt entirely supported by the school from day one. Yet, before the mother could fully respond, her older son quickly interrupted to clarify that his mother speaks English.

I immediately sensed from his distinct defensiveness that my question had impacted him in a way I had not intended. In his expression, I recognized a familiar, painful look: the exhaustion that comes from feeling judged, categorized, or misunderstood before you have even had the opportunity to introduce yourself.

Later, when we sat down together to work through the school division’s digital portal, I could not let the interaction pass without gently asking about his reaction. The student explained that he was deeply frustrated by the constant assumption that his mother did not speak or understand English. I validated his feelings and clarified that I had asked which language his mother preferred for navigating dense administrative jargon, not which language she was capable of speaking.

Then I shared something with him that I rarely say out loud: As a second-generation Chicana American, I sometimes carry a persistent internal guilt about not feeling “Latina enough” because I did not grow up speaking Spanish with absolute fluency. That tension has followed me throughout my life. Long before I became a principal, it deeply shaped how I understood the concept of belonging: who feels seen, who feels understood, and who feels as though they must constantly defend or explain themselves.

Years later, those exact same questions have resurfaced in my work with multilingual students and families navigating school systems that are not always designed with their lived experiences in mind.

Now serving as a Latina principal in a predominantly Spanish-speaking school community, I find myself translating far more than literal language. Every day, I bridge the gap between human families and the digital frameworks of modern education. I help families navigate educational jargon, intricate online platforms, and digital communication that can easily feel overwhelming without direct, personalized support. Increasingly, that work means helping families slow down and process information that often arrives on their smartphones much faster than genuine, trusting relationships can be built.

I have come to realize that the true promise of educational technology is not simply faster communication, but communication that helps families feel confident, capable, and connected to their children’s school.

Technology Drives Alienation

As school districts rapidly adopt automated communication platforms, mass text alerts, and AI-driven translation tools, we face a critical intersection. Technology is often championed as the ultimate equalizer for equity and access. Yet when implemented without a human-centered lens, these digital tools risk automating the very sense of alienation that multilingual families already experience.

The fundamental question we must ask ourselves as educational leaders is simple yet profound: How do we ensure that people feel genuinely understood, rather than simply informed? For me, this question has become less about whether schools should embrace technology and more about how leaders intentionally shape technology to strengthen relationships instead of replacing them.

Clarity is Key

Recently, I participated in an illuminating listening session with our multilingual families focused specifically on communication, digital access, and school engagement. What struck me most was that families were not asking the school to communicate more frequently. Instead, they were asking the school to communicate more clearly. Parents spoke candidly about wanting critical information delivered in accessible formats, practical support navigating digital opportunities, and flexible ways to participate when demanding work schedules, lack of transportation, or unfamiliar digital systems created barriers.

That listening session fundamentally shifted my own thinking as a school leader. I realized that successful technology implementation cannot be measured solely by how efficiently information is delivered, but by whether families feel empowered to act on that information and engage confidently with their school community.

Many of the solutions raised during our conversation directly involved technology. One parent shared how she used the translated messaging feature through our school’s communication platform to ask specific questions about an advanced academic program — an opportunity she had previously not felt comfortable pursuing due to the language barrier. That interaction was a beautiful reminder of technology’s genuine potential to expand access, democratize information, and open doors that were previously closed.

However, beneath every parent’s comment in that session was a deeper, more urgent request. Families did not just want error-free translated messages; they wanted communication that felt fundamentally empathetic and understandable. They wanted real people they could trust to help them co-navigate increasingly complex, digitized systems. The technology opened the door, but relationships gave families the confidence to walk through it.

The Promise of AI

The deeper I listen to multilingual families, the more I realize that truly accessible communication requires far more than literal, word-for-word translation. Translation software often strips away cultural nuances, regional dialects, idioms, and emotional tone. Many of the families I serve also communicate through rich oral traditions and lived experiences that cannot always be captured through written text alone. This is where I see tremendous potential for emerging educational technologies and AI-supported communication tools. Forward-thinking schools have a unique opportunity to move beyond static, text-based translation and toward AI-generated audio and video communication.

Imagine a system where a parent receives a short, personalized video in their native dialect explaining a school policy, or an interactive audio guide that walks them through a complex enrollment form. These tools could remove barriers not only by translating words, but by preserving voice, emotion, and cultural context. In doing so, technology becomes less transactional and more relational.

As Christopher Emdin powerfully reminds us through reality pedagogy, authentic relationships must always come before trust. Technology should be used to help us translate deep human understanding, not simply literal language. The teenage student who fiercely protected his mother from my question wasn’t just reacting to an inquiry about language preferences; he was defending her dignity against an educational system that too often feels cold, rigid, and transactional. His reaction was not ultimately about whether his mother spoke English. It was about her identity, her absolute right to belonging, and the profound exhaustion that comes from constantly feeling misunderstood by authority figures.

As schools continue to aggressively adopt new technologies, automated platforms, and digital communication tools to streamline their daily operations, we must remember that the ultimate goal of education is not simply the efficient dissemination of data.

Culturally responsive leadership in the digital age requires us to practice vulnerability, intentionally build human checkpoints around our software, and foster deep connection long before our technology can ever do its job effectively.

As educational leaders, our responsibility is not simply to implement new technology but to ensure that every digital innovation reflects the values of empathy, dignity, and belonging. Technology can expand access, but authentic understanding, mutual trust, and true belonging will always be built through the irreplaceable power of human connection.

I Went from Rising Senior to Teacher. Here’s What I Learned

Brayden White — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’m a high school student in Paramus, New Jersey. I’m also the creator of a free economics program that I teach to middle school students. With each virtual session I lead, I share a link in the chat with my students, and they load the simulation I created — one that puts them in positions like CEO of a sports team or commissioner of a league.

In one simulation, every student runs a team’s payroll and decides whether keeping their star player is worth exceeding their salary cap and crossing into “luxury tax” territory. Nobody tells them about the consequences of going into the luxury tax; they learned the way real general managers do, by paying the additional fee and experiencing the negative impact it can have on a team.

I created the program because I am a huge sports fan and I wanted to share my passion with other kids. I also knew that a lot of kids love professional team sports and almost none of them love economics, even though the two are often linked. A team salary cap is a budget constraint. A trade deadline is linked to supply and demand. A rookie contract is a bet on future value.

Simulations Unveil Concepts

So far, I’ve led two six-week online classes for about 30 middle school students. Each class combines slide lessons explaining economic concepts, open discussions, and simulations I built with artificial intelligence.

My students played a luxury tax game where they managed a roster under real salary cap pressure. They played an NFL draft game where they weighed risk against reward with every draft pick. There were trade negotiations, ticket-pricing challenges, and roster-building hurdles with no clear “right” answers. Hiding inside each simulation were economic concepts that teachers have spent decades trying to get students to care about, like incentives, opportunity cost, scarcity, risk and market value.

I expected the sports fans in my classes to dominate the conversations. In reality, the student who knew every sports statistic wasn’t always the one who made the smartest payroll decision. The student who couldn’t name a single starting team lineup often built the most balanced roster in the class because they understood the trade-offs better than the sports fanatics.

Leading these online classes gave me real insight into what it takes to be a successful teacher. What I realized is that a great lesson is not about the content; it’s about how students interact with the content. I could have lectured for an hour on opportunity cost, watching eyes glaze over. Instead, I gave them a roster and a budget that couldn’t cover everyone they wanted to draft, and the concept of opportunity cost practically taught itself. Instead of being just another “vocabulary word,” the concept became the reason they couldn’t sign Jalen Brunson.

Teaching these middle schoolers and seeing what really motivated them to engage with the material makes me think this can be applied to every subject. It doesn’t have to be done with a video game. It can be accomplished with a worksheet, flashcards or other activities. The idea just has to make students feel like the concepts they’re exploring matter outside of the classroom.

Discussion Fuels Learning

Another observation that surprised me was how much the discussions mattered. I initially thought the simulations would be the main event and the teaching and discussions would be “filler.”

In reality, it was the opposite.

It turns out that the simulations created the basis for discussion and disagreement, and that is where the learning happened. For example, after the luxury tax game, I had students defend their choices to the class. One student explained that they paid the tax because they were “in a championship window,” while another student didn’t pay the tax because their roster was “too young to waste the money.” They were doing real economic reasoning, but they didn’t notice. They were simply having a great time discussing their teams.

Peer-Led Teaching Lowers the Stakes

Peer-led teaching is not a replacement for trained teachers. But I do think that peer-led programs such as the one I led can be a valuable complement to teacher-led classes because they can lower the stakes and make learning less daunting for students. When the person teaching you is closer to your own age and the lesson is built around a game instead of a grade, students are more willing to take risks.

Based on my observations, students in student-led classes seem more likely to guess and debate. Their ideas might be wrong, but they are willing to try and make themselves vulnerable in front of their peers – something that they may not be willing to do inside a formal classroom. That freedom to try, fail, and try again is where a lot of real understanding begins.

Lessons Learned Along the Way

If you are a teacher and I haven’t chased you away with my precociousness, here are three more pieces of advice to help you help your students.

Incorporate what students love. Consider starting with something your students are already interested in and then sneak in the educational subject behind it. I never opened a class by saying, “Today we’re learning about scarcity.” Instead, I opened by saying, “You have $40 million and three players you can’t afford to keep.” The economics lesson arrived after the engagement, not before. Using a topic students already cared about did more to fuel their learning than any creative explanation I could’ve ever written.

An accessible entry point gives students a reason to care before asking them to memorize anything. The students in my classes kept asking for more simulations. Parents told me their children were recommending the class to friends, which is not something I have ever heard a kid do for an economics worksheet.

Let students be wrong. Some of my best sessions came from a student making a terrible trade and the whole class reacting. My first instinct was usually to jump in and explain why the move would not work. But I realized that the better outcome arrived when I waited and let the students teach.

This is the kind of class “mistake” that students remember. Those moments stick with them much longer than any rule or definition written on a slide and help them truly grasp the underlying concepts.

Keep the barrier to entry low. I purposefully made my program free and ran it on Zoom, so students of all backgrounds can join from anywhere in the world. I communicated that they do not need to be great at math, nor do they need to know every player in the NBA or NFL. They do not even need to think of themselves as “economics kids.” They just need to be curious about why things cost what they cost, why teams make the choices that they make, and why every decision has a trade-off.

Making the program easily accessible was particularly beneficial to those students who need a subject taught in a less formal setting. They are often the first ones who are intimidated by traditional classroom learning. If a class feels like it has prerequisites before you even reach the first lesson, you sometimes lose the student as soon as they walk into the classroom.

I started my program because I thought a cool sports simulation could make economics more interesting to students. What I learned is that peer-led discussion in a topic students are invested in – whether it is sports or pop culture – can do something better. It lowers the stress, creates a welcoming environment for all students, and still creates genuine opportunities for learning. I’m looking forward to offering more sessions – teachers can join too.

Early Childhood Education Teachers Grapple with Screen Time

Adam Stone — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its guidelines around screen time for children and teenagers for the first time in 10 years this past January, many teachers and educators applauded the news. The document focused less on television and more on digital devices. It offered educators, families, pediatricians, and other stakeholders research-backed guidance on using digital devices to support children’s learning, rather than prioritize prolonged engagement.

However, many of the recommendations were not tailored to specific age groups. Recommendations like “create a family media plan” and “protect sleep” were helpful but offered few concrete steps for pre-K students.

That left early childhood educators asking what they could do for their young learners.

The Risks in Pre-K Through K

Unlike the physical world, digital content comes fast, in short bursts, and when kids get used to that, it has negative consequences. “Too much of this screen and things jumping in front of them, it could be damaging overall,” says Latoya Jones, a pre-K through fifth-grade media specialist in Broward County, Florida. “They are developing their cognitive processes, and if we’re teaching them to think in six-second bursts, maybe that’s not what we’re aiming for.”

When kids interact with devices rather than people, their emotional regulation can suffer, says Kristina Turner, a first-grade teacher at the Paterson, New Jersey, campus of College Achieve Public Schools, a network of three K-12 charter schools. “A lot of the students, they are quick-tempered because they’re just used to quick things. If something takes too long, their behavior starts to heighten,” she says.

For the youngest learners in particular, “it is so important that they are learning how to interact, and listen, and even advocate for themselves,” says Colleen Francisco, a kindergarten teacher at Laurel Springs School.

“There’s beauty in students having an issue or a problem, because then an adult can support them in working through it,” she says. When kids are tethered to their screens, those opportunities don’t arise.

Clearly, the AAP guidance is well timed and much needed. But how to put that guidance into practice?

Classroom Strategies for Reducing Screen Time

“I never want my children using screens passively,” says Devon Caldwell, a pre-K and K teacher at Canupawakpa Education in Manitoba, Canada, instructor at Nipissing University Schulich School of Education in Ontario, and SMART Technologies & Lumio Ambassador. “I want to see kids’ bodies moving, their mouths talking, little hands making something.”

To that end, she prioritizes co-viewing and co-creating, using interactive teaching software approved by her and the school. When students are using a screen, “they’re always using it with a partner. Right away they’re negotiating rules, talking to each other, developing those really important skills,” she says.

For her first graders, Turner tries as much as possible to create hands-on activities instead of relying on screens. For example, she uses a whiteboard, but tries to avoid it when giving instructions. “Students have to use their listening skills so they can be able to follow directions without using a screen,” she says. “By end of school year, I’m able to give them different tasks, and they’re able to do that independently, without depending on technology.”

Tyler Brown, an English teacher at Indian River Middle School in Philadelphia, New York who spoke recently at a GoGuardian webinar on screen time in school, encourages teachers to be thoughtful about the digital tools they share with the youngest learners. “Don’t throw [the digital tool] at everything,” he says. “Think about what you’re using it for. Think about what it’s supposed to do. Is this an enhancement of learning or is this a replacement?”

These self-directed questions can drive practical choices in the classroom. “You’re doing AT words: cat, mat, bat. You could easily have a website or a Google slide where they’re dragging those items onto the correct word,” says Brown.

“Or you could do what we’ve done in the past, which is a cut-and-glue activity,” he continues. “Why are we using screen time for something that can easily be a manipulative activity, where kids are doing things hands-on? Little kids are tactile learners, and those hands-on exercises have real value.”

Even as a teacher in an online school, Francisco is finding ways to limit screen time. “One of our assignments is taking a nature walk and writing down what you see. That is something that extends the learning off the screen,” she says.

Even math can be hands-on for early learners, she adds. “You don’t have to have anything fancy. You don’t have to buy the tools: Even just using cereal in order to practice adding and subtracting,” she says.

Jones was a kindergarten teacher before becoming a media specialist. “Anytime I had a word of the week, we used Play-Doh to build a word. Or we did those little sandboxes where they drew the word in the sand,” she says.

Big picture: Active and tactile often are better than passive and screen-based. “Could this be accomplished with blocks or Play-Doh or markers and paper? If it could be, let’s do it that way,” Caldwell says.

But teachers can only do so much in the classroom when kids are immersed in digital media at home. In support of the AAP’s call to prioritize family time over screen time, teachers may need to engage more with parents.

Engaging with Families

Pre-K and K teachers don’t have control over what kids do outside of school. “At home, a lot of my students go straight to their screens,” Turner says. To help steer her own kids and her students when they are at home, she gives parents resources. “I’m able to provide them with index cards, and you can keep them in the back seat,” she says.

When kids get in the car, “instead of reaching for an iPad, they can reach for their index cards, whether it’s math problems or sight words,” she says. “Or you can put that as a magnet on your refrigerator: If you want a snack, you got to read this word.”

When Francisco sends homework through the learning management system, “we have workbooks and other hands-on activities that support the lesson,” she says. And she encourages parents to talk to their kids, as a pedagogic exercise.

“Phonemic awareness is especially important to early-literacy learners. The learner is listening to sounds and how sounds are manipulated,” she says. “I’ve given parents additional resources so that [kids] are not reading or not listening or watching on the video. Instead, they’re doing it with their student, face to face.”

It takes some creativity and extra effort by teachers and parents to pivot kids off of screens, but experts say it’s worth the effort. Too much screen time “can negatively impact executive functioning, socio-emotional and language skills,” says Bryana Casas M.A., master teacher at Pacific Oaks Children’s School in Pasadena, California.

For those honing their interpersonal skills — a main goal in pre-K through K education — “nothing can replace relationships and face-to-face interactions between people,” she says.

What Does AI Cost When We Skip the Work?

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every few months, another headline declares the college degree dead. This Week with EdSurge examines what still holds up when artificial intelligence moves fast, through two guests who are both defending something slow against something fast.

A Four Year Degree in the Age of AI

Rita Finkel, co-president of the Armory Foundation and director of the Armory College Prep program, argues that a college degree was never just about a technical skill. She says the data tells a different story than the headlines suggest, and that the value of a degree comes from something artificial intelligence cannot replicate.

The Fourth Essay

Cobretti Williams of the EdSurge Voices of Change Fellowship makes a similar case for writing. He talks about the beauty in imperfection, and how a fellow's fourth essay reads nothing like the first, growth that only comes from doing the work yourself.

Listen to the episode.

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

Why College Degrees Matter in the Age of AI

by Rita Finkel

EdSurge Voices of Change Writing Fellowship

by EdSurge

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

We Must Stop Using AI to ‘Level-Down’ Our Students

Court Shuller — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

No one would remember the line, “Keep being good and special, Ponyboy. Don’t change.” It just doesn’t hit the same as S.E. Hinton’s classic line, “Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.”

Many English teachers, myself included, would consider it an atrocity to diminish this canonical line in literary history to such sterile and lifeless simplicity. Students deserve a better reading experience than that. Yet this is just what happens when teachers decide to level a text down to a student’s “instructional level” rather than scaffolding up their access to a complex text.

In my own district, just two years ago, educators raved about a new AI tool that helps teachers level text and encouraged the department to spend thousands of dollars on it. When I first heard about it, I admit, I was dazzled. The most time-consuming and work-intensive part of teaching for me has always been differentiating for the small percentage of kids who just don’t get it the first, second, or even third time you teach something.

This program was going to do it all for me, but the caveat was that it would also do all the thinking for the kids. When we keep kids from actually doing work that requires effortful thinking, they don’t learn anything at all.

While many states are passing legislation that focuses on the Science of Reading, moving districts away from programs that promote text leveling, many edtech companies are promoting this practice through their newest AI models. In our world of quick and snappy AI solutions, the leveled text shortcut is all too easy to take, but we should not give in to temptation.

The History of Text Leveling

The practice of teaching students at their “instructional” level has a long, storied history leading back to the founding colonies. If that sort of history interests you, I highly suggest checking out Timothy Shanahan’s “Leveled Reading: Leveled Lives,” which, for me, was one of the most eye-opening takes on reading education in this country since Natalie Wexler’s “The Knowledge Gap.”

Essentially, the practice of leveling text rests on the belief that we should give students texts that are at their “instructional” level only; for example, if a seventh grader is significantly behind, they may be reading on a third-grade level, so as their teacher, I should teach them using only third-grade-level books. This practice was popularized by elementary programs that assigned students reading levels such as the Fountas and Pinnell levels, Accelerated Reader, and Guided Reading. Eventually, it pervaded secondary intervention spaces and general education classrooms.

The problem with leveling text is that decades of research, more recently popularized by Science of Reading advocates, show that it doesn’t give students much room to grow.

What students need to grow is complex texts, but not only that, complex texts with a teacher modeling how a good reader approaches these texts, while also scaffolding access to them through chunking, discussion, vocabulary practices and all the critical components that we know make up good teaching.

As much as research pointed toward the necessity of complex texts, the pressure to maintain instructional levels was a tension I had to navigate daily, and that tension came to a head when my district adopted a new curriculum.

The Faustian Bargain

“It's too hard and too boring. Our dyslexic and ADHD students will never be able to read Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Remarque.”

I heard comments such as these far too often when my own district in New Jersey switched to complex grade-level texts. As a literacy coach in 2025, I lived in the middle, translating the will of state- and district-level administrators to the classroom and the average teacher.

Surprisingly, I got the most pushback from eighth-grade teachers who were terrified that even the general education students couldn’t handle reading the classic anti-war novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front.” That is when Diffit was first suggested to me. Diffit’s primary function is to level texts; it even promotes itself on Google as “an AI tool teachers use to get ‘just-right’ instructional materials.”

In the midst of this difficult year implementing a new curriculum, our teachers were unfamiliar with evidence-based practices and used to a home-brewed curriculum; students were also not used to the rigor of it all, especially the texts.

One group of teachers who struggled was the special education teachers, who, admittedly, had too many preps and too large a caseload to adequately understand these new mandates. It was then that a well-respected Learning Disabilities Teaching Consultant (LDTC) in the district first suggested I check out Diffit and start putting each chapter of “All Quiet on the Western Front” into this AI program to give eighth-grade special education students a third-grade-level summary.

Initially, I was impressed by the power of this new AI program, but I also felt conflicted because my supervisor had just told me about Shanahan's work. The world didn’t freeze, per se, but in that moment, it certainly felt like I was living in “The Matrix” — the electronic alternative universe popularized in the movie of the same name.

“Isn’t that like…frowned upon? That’s not good practice, right? I thought we don’t level texts,” I asked the LDTC cautiously.

My gut and everything I had learned about teaching reading told me this was wrong, but this was a well-respected educator with decades of experience working with students with disabilities; surely she knew better than I did. I figured that since I was a general education teacher, I was clearly missing something about teaching reading specifically to students with disabilities, so I trusted the veteran educator at the time.

The Fallout

After taking the veteran teacher’s advice, I recommended text leveling to the teachers I coached, and even used the site myself to give a dyslexic, ADHD student I tutored a shortcut. The results were lackluster. My student didn’t show any interest, would wait for me to tell her the answers, and didn’t remember the content of the text from one session to the next. Her special education teacher wasn’t reporting any improvement in class from this resource, either.

It didn’t take me long to shift gears back to what I knew would help. Reading and re-reading a text (yes, the real one); mapping out the sequence and character; discussing the theme; exploring vocabulary; and building background knowledge. All of this is done with intentionally spaced and interleaved retrieval practice to ensure maximum commitment to long-term memory.

Once my student began working to understand the dense text, the payoff was immediate. Our discussions of Paul Bäumer’s psychology and the trauma of war were profound. This dyslexic, eighth-grade student with ADHD, whom many had already given up on, started to join her peers in these discussions back in the general education classroom. My student didn’t need a different text; she just needed a different roadmap and timeframe to get there.

Three years later, those same teachers who doubted this student could meaningfully engage with such a complex text are no longer surprised when “All Quiet on the Western Front” is their students’ favorite read of the year. Why? Because it deals with real-world topics in a mature way that middle schoolers are often shielded from.

Student success with the challenging text, despite the availability of powerful, easy-to-access AI, is part of the larger conversation about the quality of the tech tools we use and how they may or may not contribute to more meaningful learning experiences.

The fault lies not in the tool itself, but in how we train ourselves as educators to misuse it.

The Redemption

Faustus' tragedy was not that he sought power, but that he ultimately lost control of the force meant to do his bidding. Like Mephistopheles, AI usage offers educators both power and convenience, but at what cost?

A recurring theme in the use of AI in education is that it must be used critically and responsibly, especially given its impact on the student experience and its interactions with current pedagogy. In this use case, irresponsible AI use actually leads to inequities; why would we give some students access to the great literary canon, and others a robot-created summary?

The bright side is that there is a path to redemption for those who want to use AI to effectively support student access to complex texts, and for what it's worth, Diffit does an incredible job of providing these resources.

It may seem obvious, but AI tools can be used to create the scaffolds that provide access. Graphic organizers, note-takers, vocabulary reference sheets, and sentence starters are just the beginning. Here are some higher-leverage ways to use AI, in alignment with learning science, to help students access complex texts:

Have AI identify passages from the text that will trip kids up and use those passages as a basis for your syntactical and vocabulary instruction.
Use AI to chunk, not change, the passages. Take it a step further by using “/” to separate phrases and create embedded fluency scaffolds that actually prove comprehension.
Use AI to identify passages that could be suitable for fluency practice.
Not good at think-alouds? Have AI create your think-aloud script to model good reading of a complex text.
Create word sets based on the text for deep morphological or connotative study

To avoid a Faustian tragedy, we must remember that AI is our Mephistopheles: a powerful servant, but a dangerous master. It should support thinking, creation, and access — not replace them.

The Language Barrier Is the Real Barrier in Edtech

Marisa Gomez-Garcia — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When I started looking closely at the learning platforms schools ask families to use, I noticed something easy to miss if it doesn’t affect you: almost all of them are built in English first.

For families who speak Spanish at home, that one fact quietly changes everything. A child might be able to follow along in class, but the parent often can’t — and a parent who can’t understand the material can’t sit beside their kid and help them with it. The language barrier becomes an opportunity barrier. And it’s invisible to the people who never have to think about it.

For me, the English-first technology trend was never abstract. My own children use the technology I’ve built, and I built it for families like the ones all around me — so that the opportunity to understand money, technology, and how to build something of your own doesn’t depend on which language gets spoken at the dinner table. I’m tired of watching the same families get left a step behind — not because their kids are any less capable but because no one built the on-ramp in a language they could use.

That language gap is what I set out to close.

It matters now more than ever because a growing number of states are starting to require students to take a personal finance course to graduate. For example, California’s Assembly Bill 2927 requires students to complete a stand-alone personal finance course to graduate high school starting with the class of 2030-31, with schools required to offer it by 2027-28. But if the lessons exist only in English, many households that need that knowledge are also the ones least able to access and reinforce it at home. A mandate built that way doesn’t close the gap. It can widen it.

I’ve spent the past three years building a bilingual K-12 learning platform, and the single most important thing I’ve learned is this: there is a world of difference between a product that has been translated and a product that is bilingual. Most edtech tools that advertise Spanish support only translate the interface — the menus, the buttons, the navigation — but the instruction itself stays in English. To a district evaluating the tool in a demo, it looks bilingual. To a parent sitting down with their child at the kitchen table, it isn’t.

This is the part I think edtech keeps getting wrong. We tend to treat language as the last step: build the English version and then add Spanish later if the budget allows. But a lesson a family can’t understand together hasn’t really been delivered — it’s just a box that got checked.

So, what does taking this seriously actually look like? Having sat on the builder’s side of these conversations, here is the concrete guidance I’d offer.

Five Questions for Edtech Vendors

When a vendor says their product “supports Spanish,” ask the following questions to differentiate true bilingual instruction from a translated menu bar:

Is the instructional content itself available in Spanish — for every lesson and at every grade level — or only the interface? Ask them to open a mid-unit lesson in Spanish during the demo, not the homepage.
Is the audio in Spanish or only the text? Many parents are stronger listeners than readers in either language. Text-only translation still excludes them.
Are parent-facing communications translated? Progress reports, dashboards and notification emails are how parents actually use the platform. If these features are in English, the parent is cut out of the loop no matter what the student sees.
Was the Spanish content written or reviewed by educators or was it machine translated? Machine translation of math word problems and financial terms produces errors that would confuse a struggling reader.
When new content is released, are both languages released together? If Spanish content is released a semester after the English content, Spanish-speaking families are permanently a step behind — by design.

A vendor with a truly bilingual platform will answer these questions in 30 seconds. A vendor with a translated interface will pivot to their roadmap.

Small Changes Keep Parents in the Loop

Teachers can’t rewrite their district’s software, but they can keep Spanish-speaking parents in the learning loop with the tools they already have.

Send the “what we’re learning this week” note home in both languages. Even if the learning platform is only in English, a two-line bilingual summary tells a parent what to ask their child about at dinner. Free translation tools are imperfect, but a two-line note reviewed by parents is achievable weekly.
Show parents the language toggle if one exists. Many families never discover a product’s Spanish mode because nobody walked them through it at back-to-school night. A five-minute demonstration in the fall can change a family’s entire year.
Assign homework with the parent in mind. When assigning homework on an English-only platform, include one question the student must explain to their parent in the family’s home language. This makes the parent a participant instead of a bystander. Plus, explaining a concept in another language is one of the best comprehension checks there is.
Flag the gaps upward. District procurement teams rarely hear which tools are failing bilingual families because the feedback doesn’t travel that far. A teacher noting that “the educational unit has no Spanish audio and my students’ parents can’t understand it” is exactly the evidence a district needs at renewal time.

Requirements Don’t Create Access

Taking access seriously isn’t complicated. It means treating a second language as a design requirement, not a stretch goal. It means making the platform bilingual from the first line of code, in the text and the audio, so a parent and child can move through a lesson together. It means making sure the highest value subjects — the ones tied to a student’s economic future — are the ones that exist in both languages first, not last. None of this is exotic. It’s just a decision about who you’re building for, made early enough to matter.

These Hip-Hop Artists Were Already Teaching

Ellen Ullman — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For decades, hip-hop artists have been invited into schools as guest speakers, workshop leaders and visiting performers. They’ve mentored young people after school; started nonprofits; taught music production, poetry, history and entrepreneurship; and helped generations of students find their voices.

Yet many of these artists lack the one credential schools still value most: a bachelor’s degree.

But what if these artists have been teaching all along?

A new partnership between College Unbound and the Hip-Hop Education Center aims to answer that question, not by teaching artists how to become educators but by recognizing the expertise they’ve developed through decades of community leadership, cultural work and mentorship.

The program — a Bachelor of Arts in organizational leadership and change designed specifically for hip-hop educators and cultural leaders — isn’t a separate degree or a simplified version of one. Students complete the same degree requirements as every other College Unbound student. “It’s the same degree,” says College Unbound President Adam Bush. “It’s simply lived differently.”

The program is about more than hip-hop. It asks a question that reaches far beyond music: Who gets to decide what expertise looks like?

A Degree Years in the Making

Although the bachelor’s degree officially launched this year, its roots stretch back decades.

Hip-hop emerged outside traditional institutions, often in response to systems that excluded Black and Brown communities. As hip-hop education gained legitimacy, educators wrestled with a difficult question: How can we preserve the authenticity of the hip-hop culture while creating pathways that allow practitioners to teach at schools and colleges?

Long before there was a curriculum at College Unbound, there were conversations between Bush, educator and author Sam Seidel, and Martha Diaz, founder of the Hip-Hop Education Center, who has spent nearly three decades helping to build the field of hip-hop education. These conversations focused on this central question.

For Seidel, who has spent much of his career documenting and advancing hip-hop education, the answer required finding the right institution.

“What was always important,” he says, “was making sure the people who created the culture and have been carrying it forward had a central seat at the table teaching the next generation.”

College Unbound proved to be an unusual fit. Rather than asking students to leave their experience at the classroom door, the college builds on it. Students develop projects rooted in the work they’re already doing, making professional experience, leadership and community knowledge part of the curriculum.

“This program opens opportunities for seasoned practitioners,” adds Diaz. “These are people who’ve spent decades mentoring young people, creating art and leading communities but haven’t always had access to the credentials that allow them to teach full-time.”

From the Stage to the Classroom

For Sebastien Elkouby, a hip-hop artist and educator, the degree feels less like a beginning than the fulfillment of a long-awaited opportunity.

Born in France, Elkouby spent years working in music before becoming a U.S. citizen, raising a family and earning a career and technical education credential. Today, he teaches Global Awareness Through Hip Hop Culture and Beatmaking classes at a public charter school in Los Angeles.

“When I found out about the College Unbound program, I thought, ‘Finally,’” he says. “I couldn’t have designed a better opportunity than going to college under the guise of hip-hop culture.”

His years as an emcee prepared him for the classroom in ways a traditional teacher preparation program might not have. Standing in front of students, he continues, isn’t much different from standing in front of an audience. “You have to capture their attention. You have to tell a story. Teaching is a performance.”

He sees similar parallels in curriculum design. The care he once devoted to writing lyrics with a beginning, middle and end now shapes the lessons he designs. His classes trace the historical roots of hip-hop, connecting music to social movements, politics and culture.

Asante Burks reached a similar conclusion while on a different path. Known professionally as Asante Amin, the rapper and member of Soul Science Lab believes that performing and teaching are two sides of the same coin. “On stage, I want to entertain, educate and inspire. In the classroom, I want to do exactly the same thing,” he says.

His teaching centers on the cypher, the circle where rappers, emcees and beatboxers share ideas, stories and experiences while learning from one another. In that setting, everyone becomes both teacher and learner. “It isn’t just me delivering knowledge. The collective mind is where real learning happens,” he adds.

That philosophy reflects one of hip-hop pedagogy’s central ideas: learning is participatory, communal and deeply connected to identity. It also challenges a persistent misconception. “People think hip-hop education is just playing rap music in class,” says Diaz. “It’s a culture, mentorship, history and community. It’s understanding students as whole people.”

Recognizing the Experts Already Among Us

A member of College Unbound’s first graduating class, Anjel Newmann now serves on the college’s faculty, leads the arts organization AS220 and serves on the school board in Providence, Rhode Island. She sees the bachelor’s degree as more than an academic credential.

“It’s helping people who have been teaching in the community move from guest speaker to lead teacher,” she says. “They know how to connect with young people who may have already tuned school out. They understand identity and community.”

College Unbound’s project-based model mirrors the way artists naturally work. “As artists, everything we do is project centered,” says Newmann. “You’re constantly researching, creating, revising and sharing your work. College Unbound allows every subject to connect to that bigger vision.”

For Newmann, the lesson extends beyond hip-hop. “There are experts in our communities who were blocked from credentials because of systemic barriers,” she says. “College Unbound didn’t ask them to become experts. It recognized that they already were.”

Rethinking Expertise

As colleges across the country search for new ways to serve adult learners and employers increasingly question what degrees actually measure, College Unbound offers one possible answer: Instead of asking students to prove they deserve admission, the institution begins by asking what they’ve already built.

Organizing communities, mentoring young people, leading nonprofits, creating art and solving real-world problems are acknowledged as evidence of learning. “We’re recognizing lived experience as the value that it is,” says Diaz.

Seidel hopes the program’s success ultimately will be measured by what graduates build together long after they leave. He imagines meeting them at a future gathering of hip-hop educators — that people who’ve built sustainable careers are supporting their families through education and the arts and remain connected years later. “I want to hear them telling stories about the work they’re doing together,” he adds.

The success of programs like this won’t be measured only by the diplomas students earn. It will be measured by whether colleges begin to recognize that expertise isn’t created the day someone receives a credential.

Burks believes that shift is inevitable.

“I think this educational process is the way of the future,” he says. “In order for education to remain meaningful and relevant, it’s going to have to implement experimental accreditation processes. It should be like music.”

AI Meets ESL, and Teachers Are Intrigued

Adam Stone — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As he instructs bilingual learners in the humanities and social studies, Daniel Gomez sees big promise in artificial intelligence.

“Teachers in general cannot be knowledgeable about every single subject,” and certainly not in multiple languages, says Gomez, who teaches at the bilingual K-12 Ideal School in Tampa, Florida. AI can help close the gaps. “It will be able to pick up any topic students are interested in and handle the topic reasonably well.”

He isn’t alone in this assessment. Harvard researchers, for example, are actively exploring how AI-powered chatbots can support bilingual student learning and parent–child dialogues.

“There are lots of opportunities to use AI to adapt learning materials into different languages, which can expand access for bilingual learners,” says Ying Xu, an assistant professor of education at Harvard and one of the researchers involved in the work.

“Some projects are also exploring how AI can provide additional scaffolding to help children comprehend content in their home language,” she adds. “For example, a multilingual language model might keep the core learning content in English while offering explanations, prompts or supports in the child’s home language.”

Experts see great potential for AI to elevate bilingual education — if it’s done right.

Chatbots as Educational Aids

“Bilingual learners are obviously learning the language and culture of the classroom and the environment that they’re in,” says Krystle Salas, assistant director of special populations at Second Mile, which operates alternative education charter schools for at-risk students in several states.

“They don’t necessarily have access to the instructional materials or even just the conversations going on in the classroom — and certainly not at the level of their peers,” she continues. And teachers may not have the experience or the tools to scaffold the necessary supports for these students.

AI can help teachers to be more effective, and it can help bilingual learners thrive. A chatbot “can give [students] pieces of the content in Spanish or give them smaller sentences that are simpler,” Salas says.

Chatbots can also help bilingual students build confidence. “Maybe I don’t want to talk in English in front of other people, but I’ll talk in English to the chatbot because the chatbot doesn’t care if I’m doing it wrong,” says Melissa Henning, the K-12 educational content manager at The Source for Learning.

“You can have a conversation with the chatbot about what you meant to say and what came out, and it can help you rephrase it,” she adds. “That can really empower you as a multilingual learner.”

Gomez sees a role for AI in helping young learners master the concepts being taught in the classroom. Perhaps the chatbot will teach it to them in their native language, but that’s alright. Students can get a handle on the materials, “and later on we can worry about knowing whether [they] also know the word” in English, he adds.

Chatbots can be a boon, too, because of their 24/7 availability. Although there are many ways to master learning materials, they don’t help “if you are not actively practicing,” Gomez says. Especially for those learning in a foreign language, AI’s ever-present availability creates more opportunities for practice.

Using SchoolAI, education strategist and ISTE Certified Educator Stephanie Howell has seen the benefits of AI firsthand. Students use it as a “guide on the side,” annotating as they read, she adds, “and if they don’t know a word, they can go over to the AI and say, ‘Explain this to me in another way.’ It creates that self-awareness skill. I’m not the one always finding the words that they need help with.”

As a second- and third-grade intervention specialist at Lancaster City Schools in Ohio, she’ll create a learning activity and tell the AI, “When they get it wrong the first time, I don’t want you to super-scaffold for them. I want them to have that productive struggle. But if they miss it a second time, I want you to provide a sentence starter.”

And she’s using AI herself to support her students. As a co-teacher, she’ll take what the main teacher has assigned and break it down, asking AI, “What vocabulary in this article might my students struggle with?” or “Help me analyze the patterns that you notice.” This gives her greater insight and more time in the day to focus on one-on-one learning and other high-value strategies.

Chatbots as Family Engagement Tools

Chatbots can also help close the gap for students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to talk fully about their schoolwork at home.

“A lot of parents speak Spanish. Their kids are coming home with this English stuff, and they don’t speak [the language]. Rather than having students speak in both languages, they can actually use both languages at the same time to build concepts,” with the chatbot translating simultaneously, Henning says.

“A lot of times the students are stronger English speakers than their parents,” she continues. With help from a chatbot, “they can engage in dialogue, positioning the home language as an asset rather than a barrier.”

Teachers can foster this. With their prompting, “a bot could send a family a nightly question tied to the day’s lesson, like ‘Ask your child about the bravest thing this character did in the book,’” she adds. “That gives non-English-speaking parents a way to have a conversation about that content.”

Best Practices for Using Chatbots

For schools looking to leverage chatbots in support of bilingual learners, experts say it’s important to move ahead thoughtfully. They need to be careful about “the unintended consequences of widening existing gaps,” Xu says.

“For example, many AI systems are still less accurate at recognizing bilingual children’s speech, especially when children have accented speech or dialectal variation or are moving between languages,” she adds.

As a result, “bilingual learners may benefit less from these tools if the system cannot accurately understand their speech,” she continues. “This concern also applies to the use of AI for assessment, where dialectal variation or accented speech could lead to inaccurate evaluation.”

Then there’s the digital divide to consider, since students will need access to the chatbots for any of this to work. “You want to make sure that we’re not widening the gap because they don’t have devices available at home or they don’t have internet at home,” Henning says.

Howell encourages teachers to make intelligent use of AI’s built-in multilingual capabilities. With some tools, “[students] can actually start typing in Spanish if I don’t set up the requirement to stay in English,” she adds.

That can be helpful, but it needs to used thoughtfully. “Sometimes as a teacher, I can’t have my students go back and forth because they have to learn it in English,” she continues. “It always goes back to the learning goal.”

Educators also need to be mindful about the AI models their chatbots are using. Tools may be trained on academic language, but students need to tackle school subjects informally as well. The AI should suit the need.

“If we need more technical vocabulary or something that is more prone to be used on an everyday basis, we can train it to do that,” Gomez says. “We can customize it to our needs.”

And the teacher’s voice should always be the most prominent. “Even though AI can be a very valuable tool — it can help with a great many things — you always need that human touch,” he adds.

At Second Mile, Salas echoes this notion. “Children need that human interaction,” she says. “A teacher can read their emotions; they can see the full context of the situation and adjust in real time. And AI can make mistakes, so we always want to make sure the majority of the instruction and support is coming from the humans.”

What Is the AI Cheating Panic Really About?

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Microsoft just released the third edition of its AI in Education Report, surveying more than 3,000 students, educators and leaders across six countries. Ira Apfel sat down with Pat Yongpradit, general manager of global education and workforce policy at Microsoft, which sells AI tools including Copilot to schools, at ISTELive 26 in Orlando, to talk through what the data reveals about daily use, trust, training gaps, and where the policy backlash against AI in schools may be headed next.

Pat Yongpradit on Adoption, Trust and Cheating

Yongpradit walks through why daily AI use in schools still lags far behind overall adoption, even though nine in 10 educators, students and leaders report having tried the tools at least once. He addresses the recent drop in student optimism, framing it as a predictable dip on a familiar technology adoption curve rather than a warning sign.

The conversation also covers the wide gap between how much training school leaders believe their staff have received and what teachers and students say they have actually experienced. Yongpradit also shares his candid take on academic integrity, arguing that the panic around cheating has more to do with long-standing temptation than with any single tool.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

2026 AI in Education Report by Microsoft

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

How My School Used Common Sense and Collaboration to Confront AI

Pattie Morales — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve all had some version of the nightmare: You’ve been inexplicably thrown back into high school, and now you’re standing in front of the class. You’re about to give a speech, but you can’t remember a word. The panic is exacerbated by the faces of students staring at you, some hiding snickers and others openly laughing. Everyone knows what’s going on but you.

I was reminded of this bad dream over the past few years. As my Indigenous school’s instructional technology coordinator, I have seen my office transform from a routine integration hub into a digital confessional. Colleagues and teachers who are trying to navigate destabilizing technology changes slip inside and close the door. Some are looking for practical technology triage, or just a safe space to vent their frustrations, only to recount a similar nightmare.

For these educators, the experience triggers a sharp wave of panic, a sudden realization that the pedagogical ground has shifted beneath their feet and they can no longer trust their own instincts or traditional technology guardrails. But what follows the panic is a deep, stinging embarrassment.

With open and hopeful hearts, these teachers publicly praised student writing, extolling the hard work and growth they believed the student had demonstrated, only to find themselves surrounded by the giggles of classmates who already knew the truth: the writing had been fully generated by an AI tool.

The students had technically succeeded while learning very little, a phenomenon Micah Miner describes as unproductive success in “Beyond Secondary Orality.” As a result, teachers and administrators are left trying to respond to tools and behaviors they don’t yet fully understand and have never been trained to address.

These individual instances of unproductive success were not isolated classroom frustrations; they were early signals of a policy vacuum that would soon overwhelm our entire school system. The challenge becomes infinitely more complex at the school board level, where drafting a formal policy requires balancing the inevitable push toward AI integration with the deeply nuanced and often conflicting perspectives around AI held among students and families in the Native community. Before an AI policy could establish clear lines of accountability for staff and students and safeguard Indigenous data sovereignty, students were already using AI tools outside the school day to engage in cognitive offloading, having essays written for them.

Because neither an official AI policy nor an academic honesty policy existed, teachers and administrators were forced into the uncomfortable position of responding to what many perceived as cheating without the guidance, definitions or training necessary to do so consistently.

The problem wasn’t just that students discovered AI before adults did; it was an economy-of-scale issue. Being a one-person technology department meant that the burden of finding a solution and making high-level policy recommendations rested entirely on me. No matter how urgent the crisis, a lone coordinator cannot instantly scale the resources an entire school community needs to decide what AI means, how it should be used, or how we should teach students to navigate it responsibly.

Schools often rely on common sense, hoping that everyone will land on the same understanding. Unfortunately for us, AI has exposed an uncomfortable truth: common sense is often just unspoken assumptions masquerading as policy. Without a common understanding of AI use, implementation practices, potential risks and benefits, schools risk creating inconsistent and inequitable experiences for both students and educators. This raises the question: who decides what is reasonable or what makes a decision good?

Answering that question didn’t require finding a perfect, pre-packaged solution. Ultimately, it required a small but dedicated team of school leaders, educators and me to build one from the ground up.

Building a Framework on Common Sense and Community

For the past several years, it has been my job to learn as much as I can to create our own AI common sense, one based on the mission of our school to prepare our students to carry forward the wisdom of our ancestors for the benefit of future generations.

My first step was to seek out as much information as possible from trusted sources. This led me to the International Society for Transforming Education and their AI Explorations course, which established my foundational knowledge around AI and machine learning and created a strong network of other professionals who were also trying to navigate without a map.

My second step was to reach out to my school’s stakeholders to ensure the work on AI benefited from as many diverse perspectives as possible. As a new instructional technology coordinator in 2017, one of the first things I did when establishing my program at Indian Community School was to create a Future Ready Team, a cross-functional group of teachers, IT and administrators.

These Future Ready Team members became the resident experts during their two-year terms, learning to communicate with vendors and piloting new software and devices. When the issue of AI policy arose, it was this team that rose to the challenge and continued the research process along with me.

After months of research and collaboration with the Future Ready Team, my binder was overflowing with highlighted articles, ideas, notes and guidance documents — proof that some habits from my 1990s school days die hard — while my computer held an equally overwhelming collection of bookmarked tabs.

Faced with this data overload, I knew my job was to translate this research into action. The solid footing we needed was a comprehensive AI framework, so I took the lead on designing a model that would serve as a strong foundation for building knowledge and be flexible enough to adapt to the ever-changing AI landscape.

I personally curated and authored each layer of this framework to meet our school’s specific needs. This included a core policy I developed using resources from the U.S. Department of Education, UNESCO, the Publications office of the European Union and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. I also drafted staff AI guidance based on the AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit by TeachAI, revamped our student responsible use policy to incorporate AI guardrails and constructed a visual stoplight of AI usage for classrooms based on the work done in our home state of North Carolina.

The framework also needed to do more than establish expectations; it needed to support educators in meeting them by addressing critical issues such as safeguarding personally identifiable information, protecting intellectual property and honoring Indigenous data sovereignty.

Policies Can’t Teach People

While these protocols were a necessary first step in securing our digital environment, a framework is only as effective as the people implementing it. Creating the policy and guidance documents was only part of the work; true equity emerges in a school community’s capacity to respond, specifically having the staff, training, time and funding needed to translate policy into practice.

Knowing that even the best guidance will sit unused without these resources, we ensured our framework went beyond rules to provide active opportunities for people to learn, question and build understanding together.

Before students were given access to AI tools on school devices, staff engaged in professional development designed to build AI literacy and confidence. Learning opportunities continued through local and state conferences, while families and community members were invited to join the conversation at an AI literacy night. The goal was not simply to introduce a new technology, but to build a shared foundation for its responsible use. The outcomes of this collective effort extended far beyond compliance.

Teachers who had previously felt overwhelmed by the sudden influx of these tools gained the confidence needed to navigate them, shifting their approach from policing technology to guiding its purposeful use.

Similarly, our engagement with families provided parents and community members with a transparent look at what AI usage actually looks like in classrooms. This shared clarity transformed potential anxiety into partnership, ensuring the entire school community was aligned around a unified approach that protects student critical thinking while fostering academic readiness.

Enduring Understandings Benefit All

Ultimately, this journey has taught me that AI common sense isn’t something we can simply mandate or print out. It isn’t found neatly tucked inside a binder, no matter how many national frameworks we compile. True common sense has to be built intentionally through the collaborative and sometimes uncomfortable work of research, reflection and learning alongside one another.

While a policy can draw the lines on a map, it is the shared knowledge and trust within a school community that actually gives us the solid footing to move forward.

At Indian Community School, that forward path is always guided by the principle of thinking seven generations ahead. It is a grounding reminder that the choices we make today about AI are not just about managing next week’s essays or updating a student handbook. They are about shaping students' learning habits and critical thinking abilities long after they leave us.

For schools everywhere, the challenge now is to look past the establishment of compliance. We must close our binders, sit down with our communities and commit to the slower, more deliberate work of building shared understanding around AI. We have to stop racing to build rules and instead start investing in the training, time and relationships that ground our educators for whatever comes next.

How Educators Can Practice “Futures Thinking”

Nina Berler — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Schools are navigating a steady stream of change, from new technologies to shifting expectations about what students need to know and be able to do. Yet anticipating change is different from knowing how to prepare for it.

A classroom teacher early in her career, Katie King has spent the last decade helping educators think about that challenge. Now senior director of strategic engagement at KnowledgeWorks, she works at what she describes as “the intentional intersection of futures thinking and education,” helping schools and systems consider possible futures and what those possibilities mean for decisions they make today.

EdSurge spoke with King about futures thinking, the forces shaping the next decade of education and how educators can turn long-term reflection into practical action.

EdSurge: What are the most significant forces shaping the future of learning right now, and how do they show up in your work with educators and systems?

King: The first is AI and integrating with AI, how the next generation of artificial intelligence, which is coming ever more rapidly, has the potential to change how humans think and feel, challenging our current notions of skill development and human relationships.

The second is disruption and its potential to upend daily life in school and learning environments. Our traditional approaches to managing our day-to-day lives and creating change in education really feel insufficient in the face of this very volatile environment.

The third driver is a lack of trust in public institutions: declining confidence, economic constraints and just more market-based competition in education. The good news is that most surveys show that people do have trust in their local schools and their teachers, so I think public education has an opportunity to leverage that by thinking creatively about who they can be in this community.

The fourth driver is the gap in education relevance. The education system faces this urgent need to integrate students’ emerging needs, concerns and aspirations into what they’re learning. The world that they’re living in today and going out into is different from the one schools are setting them up for.

When you talk about “futures thinking,” how is that different in practice from forecasting or strategic planning in education?

Futures thinking is a disciplined research and strategy practice: noticing change, examining assumptions, exploring possibilities and making future-informed decisions — building our mental muscles to avoid making predictions. In futures thinking, we’re actually saying, “We don’t know. Let’s explore a lot of possibilities and then use that range to make informed decisions.” I think when people build these skills and mindsets, they become more flexible and nimble, more attuned to change as it’s happening. I think it’s an avenue toward more proactive leadership than crisis response.

How do you think about forecasts in education, and what role are they meant to play for school and system leaders?

The purpose of a forecast is to synthesize research, trends and emerging issues affecting education. It’s meant to boil it down to some digestible ideas that leaders can then use. We do that by exploring forces that are already affecting education, from AI and workforce changes to shifting expectations of learners, and then how those changes could evolve and shift over time.

We’re hoping our publications [futures forecast and strategy guide] will help people step back from the day-to-day pressures, see the larger patterns shaping the future, and begin to think about how things might be different. What should that mean about what we’re doing today?

AI is one of the forces reshaping education. What does it reveal about how educators can plan in the face of uncertainty?

I think AI is the perfect topic to test how willing we are to avoid predicting the future and instead get comfortable with uncertainty and accept that there is a range of possibilities. We do not have any facts about the future; that is the core tenet. So, when we’re faced with that level of uncertainty about AI, what do we do? In our view, we can plot out as many possibilities and ideas as we can. Then we can decide what we want to do that’s most aligned with our vision.

A recurring challenge in your work seems to be moving from big-picture futures conversations to concrete decisions. What does it take to make that shift effectively in schools and districts?

Try not to resolve uncertainty by moving to strategy too quickly; sometimes a sense of urgency can backfire when we haven’t allowed for the possibilities, contradictions and questions. It can’t be, “Let’s have one big conversation about the future, set our five-year strategic plan and then be done.”

Make sure you have a vision for your school or district that’s more than words on the website. Once you’ve thought about the longer-term future and considered many possibilities, you can use that vision as a filter and revisit decisions as the landscape evolves.

We’re constantly saying: “What have we learned when we’re looking out for the future? And what does that mean for what we do today?”

How can schools balance immediate day-to-day priorities with longer-term futures work in meaningful ways?

We wanted our most recent publication to be concrete, so it focuses on three practical calls to action:

Remake your role by connecting leaders, educators and everyone in the system to their personal vision.
Turn down the noise by creating transparency and clarity so schools can focus on shared goals for young people.
Seed new systems by piloting new approaches and doing small experiments that can grow over time.

None of those are about changing everything at once. They focus on shifting what educators are already doing in ways that support longer-term transformation.

Watch this video:

Anthropic Introduces Claude for Teachers

EdSurge Staff — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic today upped the ante in its quest to win the increasingly competitive market for AI in education by debuting Claude for Teachers, a free large language model designed for U.S. K-12 educators.

Claude for Teachers includes a library of teaching skills and a “direct connection to evidence-based curricula, mapped to academic standards in all 50 states,” the company said in a statement.

The move by Anthropic is the latest in a series of initiatives by tech giants including OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Teachers, Microsoft Elevate for Educators, and Google AI Educator Series to earn market share in an increasingly competitive AI and edtech space.

“We built Claude for Teachers to close the distance between what the evidence recommends and what a teacher’s week allows,” the Anthropic statement continued.

Although some educators are skeptical of AI usage in the classroom, particularly in early childhood education, Anthropic cited Stanford research suggesting that AI tools, when designed and used correctly, can aid teachers and improve student learning.

Privacy and Security Measures

Claude for Teachers has access to academic standards in all 50 states, so it can create lessons that are “scaffolded and aligned to teaching standards.” The tool’s library of skills, co-developed with Learning Commons, was piloted with teachers in Prospect Schools in Brooklyn, New York, and other sites. Anthropic said it plans to evaluate Claude for Teachers in the Detroit Public Schools Community District, “working closely with teachers to study the impact on educator well-being and practice.”

Claude for Teachers includes Claude Code and Cowork, allowing teachers to vibe-code and use the technology to securely analyze class data. “We never train our models on your conversations. Training is off for verified teacher accounts,” Anthropic said.

Anthropic is collaborating with the American Federation of Teachers to ensure student information is protected. “We’ve been working with Anthropic on a Gold Standard that sets out industry best practices for safety and privacy in K-12 education,” said Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, in the Anthropic statement.

We Talk About Whole Children. What About Whole Educators?

Nicol Russell — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2010, a young woman walked into my office at the childcare center I directed in Arizona. She was nervous. She didn’t have experience in early childhood education. She just needed a job.

In most centers, that’s where the story would end. Instead, I offered her a working interview — two observational hours in an infant classroom. When she came back into my office, she was beaming. “I love this,” she told me. “Just give me a chance. I’ll learn.”

Her name is Lindsay. Fifteen years later, she’s still teaching.

Seeing the Educator

Lindsay’s story isn’t just about passion or perseverance; it’s about support. We made a deliberate choice — over and over again — to see her as a whole person first and an employee second. We figured out scheduling so she could get her Child Development Associate (CDA) credential. We found coverage when she needed practicum hours elsewhere. I wasn’t there for every step of Lindsay’s journey that followed, but she and I have stayed in touch throughout all these years. She earned her associate’s degree and then her bachelor’s degree; she grew from part-time infant teacher to lead teacher to program coordinator.

Lindsay’s story shows us what happens when an educator is truly seen — something our field has yet to get right. What gets overlooked most in conversations about the quality of early childhood education is that educators are engineers. Every learning opportunity a young child experiences is designed, built and brought to life by a teacher. There is no curriculum three-year-olds activate for themselves. Every moment of discovery, every language-rich exchange and every carefully scaffolded small group experience is built by someone. A teacher looks at a group of children, weighs their individual needs, considers the family’s hopes, aligns these needs and hopes to learning objectives and makes a decision about what to put in front of those kids at that moment. And they do this all day long.

These educators sit at the nexus of everyone’s expectations — the school’s, the family’s, the child’s — and constantly make consequential decisions on behalf of all of them. How well they make those decisions depends on how well we support them. And right now, we are falling short.

New research shows what becomes possible when we get this right. A multiyear randomized controlled trial conducted by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University examined 125 preschool classrooms across public and private settings over three school years. When teachers worked within a connected ecosystem of curriculum, assessment and live professional learning, teacher retention rates increased by 23 percentage points. In turn, children in those classrooms demonstrated gains in social-emotional, language, and math skills, according to the GOLD assessment. Educators reported higher personal accomplishment and lower fatigue, not because the work got easier but because they felt genuinely equipped to do it well.

Teaching young children is weighty work, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t done it. But there is a profound difference between the exhaustion of doing hard work well and the burnout of doing hard work alone, unsupported and without feedback or the necessary tools. The first is sustainable. The second is what’s driving teachers out of the profession.

Our field is philosophically built on the science of the whole child — the idea that social, emotional, cognitive and relational development are all deeply interconnected. And yet the systems we’ve built to support the adults in our classrooms are fragmented, episodic and too often driven by compliance. A one-day training here. An on-demand module there. A checklist where a lifeline should be.

What drove the study’s results wasn’t any single tool; it was coherence. Curriculum, assessment, coaching and both on-demand and live professional learning operated as an integrated system.

I’ve seen up close what the absence of that looks like. During a recent site visit, I walked into a classroom where a beautifully designed curriculum sat on the shelf, spine uncracked. The teacher was running circle time from a bag of worn printables she’d been reusing for years. When I pulled the curriculum down and opened it with her, her face lit up. She had no idea. Nobody had ever shown her, told her she was expected to use it or checked in to see whether she had. That pattern is everywhere. Leaders make good decisions about what to invest in and then underinvest in making sure those tools are actually used and used well.

The Policy Choice

For policymakers expanding access to early childhood care and education right now, the central policy question is not just what to fund, but how to design systems that enable educators to succeed. Funding curriculum adoption without funding the professional learning infrastructure that makes it sustainable leaves impact on the table. We must invest in the connective tissue — the coaching, the feedback loops and the live and sustained support — that moves the needle. And we have proved that live, sustained support can be delivered very effectively in a virtual model. It’s scalable.

For district and program leaders: Start with an honest audit. Are curriculum, assessment, coaching and professional development working in concert? Are teachers receiving consistent, specific feedback on their practice? Those are the gaps where good teachers lose their footing — and where people like Lindsay either take root or walk away.

Lindsay didn’t stay because the system worked; she stayed because someone made it work for her. But we cannot build a workforce on heroic individual efforts alone. We need systems designed to see educators fully — their potential, their development and the weight of what they carry every day.

We’re a field that talks about whole children. It’s time we design systems that support the whole educator. The evidence is there. Now we need to act on it.

Study: The National AI Policy Landscape in K–12 Education

Jody Britten — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the span of just two years, artificial intelligence has moved from an emerging curiosity to an operational reality in American K–12 classrooms. Students are using it to draft essays and build interactive study apps. Teachers are using it to generate lesson plans, differentiate instruction and develop assignments. Administrators are using it to summarize data, create chatbots and organize teams. And most school districts are scrambling to update or create policies that reflect the ever-changing world of AI. But what does an AI policy landscape look like? How many districts have formal AI policies at all? What do those policies say? And what does the distribution of approaches reveal about the state of readiness, equity and strategic thinking in K–12 education? To answer those questions, we built the AI School Policy Database by using a five-level AI policy continuum to code 122 districts and schools across 38 states and then analyzed the results. What we found is a snapshot of a field that is neither panicking nor confidently leading: it is waiting, watching and managing uncertainty one teacher-directed decision at a time.

What This Snapshot Tells Us

The dataset does not capture every district/school in America; it is a structured sample. But the patterns it reveals are consistent and interpretable. Taken together, they point in the same direction.

Most districts/schools are reactive. The dominant posture is conditional permission, teacher-delegated decision-making and a wait-and-see attitude toward systemic AI integration.
Some districts/schools are still trying to stop the clock. Nearly 30% are actively restricting or prohibiting AI use, an approach that is increasingly difficult to sustain as student access to AI tools extends far beyond school networks.
Only a small fraction is daring to lead. Fewer than one-third of districts/schools have published policies that reflect genuine strategic governance: formal frameworks, defined approved uses, staff development and equity-centered design.
Geography matters. Regional variation in policy progressiveness is substantial and reflects structural differences in state-level investment, board culture and guidance infrastructure.
State guidance is necessary but not sufficient. Districts/schools in states with official guidance are not reliably more progressive than those without. Legally mandated guidance appears to drive adoption more reliably than advisory frameworks.
Policies are written for students, not for districts/schools. The dominant framing of AI policy as student conduct governance leaves critical institutional questions about staff use, procurement, equity and organizational strategy largely unanswered.

As we interviewed districts/schools over the past year, it has become clear that more attention must be paid to adults and systems. One of our findings is that policies emphasize students with a focus on cheating — when, in actuality, most of the districts we are working with this year have had greater risks presented by adult staff members misuse, including sharing a PDF copy of the copyrighted curriculum with a personal LLM account and violating copyright agreements; sharing IEP and evaluation information without deidentifying student data. These missteps hold real long-term risk for districts. The ability of our education systems to integrate AI responsibly is critical to our ability to uphold data privacy for staff, students and families alike.

The Five Levels of the AI Policy Continuum

Level 1 – Pro-Innovation/AI Encouraged: Actively promotes AI as a learning tool; embeds AI literacy into curriculum; proactively deploys AI tools and provides open access to students and staff; emphasizes equity and opportunity in AI use

Level 2 – Guided Integration: Has published a formal AI framework or multilayered guidance document that defines approved uses, builds AI literacy and addresses privacy and ethics; has structured AI onboarding for students and staff

Level 3 – Conditional/Teacher Directed: Permits AI use but only when explicitly authorized by the teacher; focuses on citation, academic integrity and limits on substitution; does not have a districtwide AI curriculum; delegates decisions on AI use to individual teachers

Level 4 – Restrictive/Integrity Focused: Tightly restricts AI use or only allows it when teacher gives permission; only allows use of vetted/approved AI tools; places strong emphasis on dishonesty enforcement and penalties when evaluating AI use

Level 5 – Prohibited/No Use: Explicitly prohibits AI use or treats it as plagiarism/academic dishonesty; does not provide a pathway for authorized student AI use; uses discipline or gives students zeroes as consequences for AI use violations

The 122 organizations spanned public school districts, charter schools and individual schools across all four major U.S. census regions. We coded district/school policies based on publicly available documents including board of education policies, acceptable use policies, staff and student handbooks and official district/school websites. We tracked the status of state-level guidance using the Center on Inclusive Design and Digital Learning (CIDDL) as a reference.

Overall, 3.3% of districts/schools operated at Level 1, 27.9% operated at Level 2, 44.3% operated at Level 3, 17.2% operated at Level 4 and 7.4% operated at Level 5.

Most Districts Are in the Cautious Middle

The most striking finding from our dataset is the concentration of districts/schools that operate at Level 3. The idea that AI is permitted, but only when the teacher says so sums up the policy posture of nearly half (44.3%) of the districts/schools in the dataset.

Level 3 policies share a common logic: they do not ban AI outright, but they do not take a strategic position on it either. Instead, they delegate the decision to individual teachers. Students may use AI only when explicitly authorized and are required to attribute AI-generated content as such. Students are prohibited from submitting AI-generated content as their own. The district/school sets boundaries; teachers set the rules within those boundaries.

This approach is understandable given the pace of AI development. But it carries real risks. When AI governance is delegated entirely to individual teachers, equity of access becomes uneven. Students in classrooms with AI-forward teachers get fundamentally different educational experiences than peers in the same building whose teachers remain restrictive. District-level strategy is replaced by classroom-level improvisation. A Level 3 policy often means the superintendents and administrators have started AI governance work but have not yet developed a true strategic framework.

Nearly 1 in 4 Districts/Schools Restrict or Ban AI

Although Level 3 is the most common policy posture, a substantial share of districts/schools (nearly 25%) has moved in the opposite direction: 17.2% operate at Level 4 and another 7.4% operate at Level 5.

Level 4 districts/schools are primarily concerned with academic integrity, emphasizing detecting and prohibiting the submission of AI-generated content. Level 5 districts/schools take it a step further and issue categorical bans on AI tools entirely.

Restrictive policies are not randomly distributed. They cluster in specific states and regions. Among states with no official guidance, districts/schools tend to have more restrictive or variable policy postures. Florida (with an average level of 4.5 across all districts/schools in the dataset), Texas (average of 5.0), Indiana (average of 3.6) and Wisconsin (average of 3.6) have disproportionately high concentrations of restrictive-to-prohibitive approaches.

It is worth noting that restriction and prohibition are not inherently wrong. Some districts/schools have made deliberate, values-based decisions to limit AI for pedagogical reasons. But the findings from our dataset suggest that in many cases, prohibition is a proxy for policy uncertainty — a way of buying time rather than an intentional governance choice.

Active AI Promotion Is Rare

Only 3.3% of districts/schools in the dataset operate at Level 1. These are districts/schools that embed AI literacy into the curriculum, actively deploy tools across the entire district/school, provide students and staff with open and supported access and emphasize equity of access as a policy design principle.

Another 27.9% operate at Level 2, meaning they have published a formal AI framework with guidance on approved uses, staff onboarding and privacy and ethics.

Regional Variation Points to Structural Inequities

The dataset reveals meaningful regional variation in how districts/schools approach AI governance. The Midwest lags notably behind other regions, with an average policy level of 3.2, about half a point more restrictive than the Northeast (2.7). This pattern holds even after accounting for state AI guidance: Midwestern states like Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio have substantial proportions of Level 4 and 5 districts/schools. The Northeast and West show the most embracing, driven in part by early-adopter districts/schools in California, New Jersey, Oregon, Virginia and Washington. The South is split: some states are producing some of the most progressive district-level policy language in the country, while others are among the most restrictive policies we reviewed.

These regional patterns matter because they are not random. They reflect structural differences in state-level policy infrastructure, edtech investment capacity, school board cultures and the degree to which districts/schools feel supported by state-level guidance. Thus, a student’s relationship with AI in school is, in part, a function of where they live.

State Guidance Matters, But Its Influence Is Uneven

Of the 122 districts/schools in the dataset, 63% are in states with officially published AI guidance from the state department of education. However, only 15.6% explicitly reference state guidance in their own policy documents. This decoupling of state guidance from local policy development is one of the most important findings from the dataset.

States have done significant work: as of early 2025, more than 28 states had published AI guidance for K–12 schools. But that guidance is not reliably making its way into district/school policy. By and large, districts/schools are writing their own frameworks without anchoring to the resources states have developed, or they are not writing frameworks at all.

When state guidance becomes a legal mandate, district- and school-level policy follows. When it remains advisory, districts/school adoption is inconsistent. States that have published guidance but have not mandated adoption should consider what additional supports, such as model policies, technical assistance and tiered implementation tools, would help districts/schools move from awareness to action.

Most Policies Speak to Students, Not Systems

Nearly two-thirds (65%) percent of policy documents in the dataset list students as the primary audience. Only 22% have policies explicitly addressed to both students and staff. Just one organization has a policy focused primarily on staff.

This distribution reveals a gap: most AI policy in K–12 education is framed as student conduct governance, not as institutional strategy. The policies answer the question of what students can do with AI far more often than they address how the district/school should use AI to better serve students.

Policies that focus exclusively on student behavior miss the larger organizational dimensions: How are teachers being trained to use AI responsibly? How is the district/school vetting AI tools for data privacy and algorithmic bias? How is the district/school protecting staff and student data? How is leadership thinking about the role of AI in special education, multilingual learner support, or mental health services? These questions require policy that speaks to the whole organization, not just to student handbooks.

Recommendations for District/School Leaders

Based on our findings, we recommend the following to superintendents and district/school administrators:

Treat AI policy as strategy, not compliance. A policy that tells students when they can and cannot use generative AI is a starting point, not a destination. Effective AI governance requires district- or school-level strategic thinking: What AI tools will we use? What use cases for AI will we prioritize and systematize? How will we vet tools and their outputs? How will we train our staff? How will we ensure equitable access? These questions belong in board-level policy, not just student handbooks. They necessitate forward thinking commitments that allow for safe innovation by adults.
Engage your state’s guidance resources. Only 15.6% of districts/schools in this dataset explicitly reference state-level guidance — a missed opportunity. State education agencies have invested significant resources in AI frameworks, model policies and procurement guidance. Districts/schools that are not anchoring to these resources are doing more work than necessary.
Move prohibition to a transition plan. Districts/schools currently at Level 4 or 5 should honestly ask themselves if prohibition working. Students with smartphones have access to AI around the clock. A policy that prohibits AI on school networks without addressing the broader context of students’ AI access outside of school is not a governance solution. It’s a governance deferral. The question is not whether students will use AI but whether schools will help them learn to use it well.
Design for access from the start. The Level 1 districts/schools in this dataset recognize that every policy decision either expands or limits students’ opportunities to benefit from AI. Rather than treating equity as a separate initiative, they build considerations such as device availability, internet access, accessibility, multilingual supports, professional learning and approved AI tools into the policy from the outset. As districts/schools develop or revise their AI policies, they should ask explicitly whether each policy decision will create or reduce disparities in student and/or staff access to meaningful AI use. The answer should continually shape the policy.
Build policy with your community. The most durable AI policies in this dataset emerged from multistakeholder processes: committees of teachers, students, parents and administrators working together. Policy built with the community carries legitimacy that top-down mandates cannot. It also surfaces practical concerns about academic integrity, data privacy and student well-being that benefit from diverse perspectives.

What We Learned

The AI policy landscape in K–12 education reflects a field in genuine transition. The governance conversation has clearly begun. But the distribution of that progress suggests a field that has not yet found its footing.

What the data make clear is that a single policy posture is not the path forward, nor is a single tool or use case. What districts/schools need is a sustained governance process — one that moves from reactive management of student behavior to proactive design of AI-enabled systems, connects local practice to state-level resources and treats access and opportunity as a non-negotiable design principle.

The districts/schools at the leading edge of this dataset offer a proof of concept. They are not waiting for perfect clarity about where AI is headed. They are building frameworks resilient enough to evolve, transparent enough to sustain community trust, thoughtful enough to provide safety and security and flexible enough to ensure that the use of AI by adults can support outcomes for all students.

That may be the model worth scaling.

In Rural Districts, AI Resources for Educators Are Scarce

Adam Stone — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Professional development is crucial in ensuring teachers can put AI to work effectively. But a recent study from Texas Tech University found that PD around AI may not be readily available in rural schools. Another study compared elementary school students in rural areas to students in urban areas and found that rural students scored “statistically significantly lower” in Information and Communications Technology access and literacy, resilience, and online learning capabilities.

“The resources are limited. There is not much support out there for our rural educators,” says Nikkolina Prueitt, a co-author of the study. For rural schools to get the most out of AI, “we will need to build that knowledge base.”

Closing the Gap

AI has the potential to give rural teachers a pedagogical boost. It can provide instructional support, “like creating differentiated instruction, adapting lessons, drafting individualized education plans,” Prueitt says.

And AI can expand rural students’ understanding of the world, says Amanda Robinson, an elementary teacher at Pikeville Elementary, a Title I school in Eastern Kentucky. “AI opens the students’ horizons.”

In a rural community, AI can students to “experience new learning, outside of their communities,” said Dr. LeeAnn Lindsey, director of edtech and innovation at Northern Arizona University. But she sees rural schools struggle to embrace that potential, due in part to a lack of in-house expertise. “Our big urban and suburban school districts, they have technology integration coaches who have been diving into the AI work for the past three years,” she says. “Rural school districts often don’t.”

To help close the gap, Northern Arizona last fall led a collaborative effort to offer PD around AI in three rural school districts in the state. Each district made available its superintendent, an instructional leader, and three classroom teachers for training over the course of two and a half months.

This was action-oriented PD. “They identified problems of practice in their own classroom that they wanted to address. Some of them looked at writing skills, some looked at student engagement, some looked at relevance of their lessons,” Lindsey says.

“They learned the AI specific to the area that they wanted to address,” she adds. “Then they actually took those solutions into their classroom and collected data to find out if AI would really help them solve that problem.”

At Pikeville Elementary, Robinson gets professional training from a district learning coach, who helps teachers understand the current AI tools. “She tends to do them about twice a month, as her schedule permits, after school for about an hour. And then also she works with you one-on-one during your planning periods, if you need that,” Robinson says.

The AI training has helped improve Robinson’s instruction, she says. For example, she has leveraged her AI knowledge to develop a chatbot that helps students explore animal adaptations in certain habitats. PD around AI “gives us the opportunity to provide our students with more opportunities and more in-depth ways of thinking,” she says.

Building an AI PD Effort

However, success stories like Robinson’s are outliers. The Texas Tech paper found that a lack of professional development resources often hinders AI adoption in rural schools. While tight budgets can make it hard to mount AI training, there are ways that schools can move forward with AI training.

Prueitt says it’s important that schools use their limited resources to mount the right kind of professional development. Rather than focus on specific AI tools, PD in K-12 should focus on “AI literacy and the foundational knowledge around AI,” she says. When teachers have a firm grounding in the basics, they’ re able to evaluate the tools effectively, “and that’s where it starts to grow and to be super useful for these rural educators,” she says, adding that the Center for Innovation, Design, and Digital Learning (CIDDL) is a great resource for educators.

School leaders should also focus on the big-picture intent of that training. “Our information and decision-making landscape is changing,” says Lindsey. “Our students need to be well versed in this changing information economy and the changing workforce.” Rural schools should prepare students for work in an increasingly tech-driven economy, she says, and PD around AI should reflect that intent.

Robinson has seen first-hand the value in that approach. “In our area, our students only see the jobs that are there within our communities. As teachers introducing AI, we are giving them more opportunities to become digitally literate,” she says. “As they start looking into universities in college, we’re putting them on a level playing field, instead of leaving our children behind.”

As schools look to meet that mark, “there are programs and grants that rural districts can apply for, to be part of professional development experiences like the one we offered,” Lindsey says, noting that the training was offered was for free.

“The first step would be to look at the resources available in your state,” Prueitt says. Her institution offers free professional development opportunities to rural schools, including a recent two-day AI workshop for special educators.

State and regional education service centers can also help rural schools ramp up PD programs, Prueitt adds, and they can help those schools understand how PD can be best support teachers’ efforts to ramp up AI. That will include not just training on what AI can do in the classroom, but also instruction on how to use it appropriately.

A key question around classroom AI remains: “How do we use it ethically?” Prueitt says. The right PD will help teachers to not only make effective use of AI, but to do so “in a way that still keeps that human in the loop.”

Robinson points to ethics as a key element of professional training around AI. She had previously taught K-6 technology and now is pivoting back to teaching writing and grammar, and while she’s looking forward to more PD to get familiar with the tools, she’s also aware of the limitations.

Chatbots for example can score students’ writing based on the rubric, before assignments are handed in. But “it will not eliminate my one-on-one conferencing,” she said. Rather, the AI can give students insight into their work, “so that I can show them where we can improve on this.”

I Built the Chemistry Platform I Needed in My Own Classroom

Ky’lin Spears — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As a current high school student, the first thing I noticed about chemistry was that it was not only hard because of math or vocabulary. It was hard because so much of it was invisible.

In class, I could write a chemical formula. I could memorize that a molecule had a certain shape or that a reaction moved in a certain direction. But much of chemistry did not feel like something I could touch, move, test, or explore. The most important parts happened in a way I would never see.

A Two-Dimensional Perspective

Chemistry is a subject built on relationships. Atoms connect, electrons move, bonds form, molecules bend, acids and bases shift equilibrium, gases respond to pressure and temperature, and reactions balance because matter must be conserved. When those ideas stay flat on a page, students memorize answers without understanding the system behind them.

As a rising 12th-grade student at Suitland High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, I set out to build a solution because I wanted a serious chemistry workspace students like me could use. I wanted something visual and interactive that could run on school devices without complicated setup — without the need for students to create accounts, download resources, or collect student data. I also wanted something that could open in a browser and allow students to begin learning right away.

Atomency started from a simple question: What would chemistry look like if students could build, manipulate and test ideas instead of only reading about them?

I began by building a workspace where students could create molecules and see structure-based information. From there, I added VSEPR-style analysis so students could connect formulas to molecular geometry instead of treating shapes as something to memorize from a chart. Then I kept expanding it: I incorporated reaction simulations, nuclear decay tools, kinetics tool, acid–base and pH tools, gas-law models and assignment workflows to help teachers bring the platform into the classroom.

I built all of this independently while still being a high school student. That meant I was not just designing a product in theory; I was building from inside the problem. I knew what it felt like to sit in a classroom and need a better way to see what was happening. I knew what it felt like when a concept almost made sense, but the missing piece was the ability to interact with it.

A Three-Dimensional Solution

Students usually receive educational tools instead of imagining or creating them. But students notice things adults can miss. We notice when a website is too slow on a school Chromebook. We notice when a platform requires an account before we can try it. We notice when a tool looks impressive in a presentation but does not align with the way a classroom actually works.

Access shaped how I built Atomency. A chemistry platform should not require expensive software or perfect devices. It should not require students to provide personal information. It should not assume all students have tutors, can pay to access resources, and have personal laptops powerful enough to run advanced programs. If a tool is meant to help students, it should reflect students’ reality.

For me, that reality was a public school classroom where students needed more ways to understand chemistry. Chemistry can become a gatekeeping subject. If students fall behind early, later topics become harder because everything builds on earlier ideas. Atomic structure connects to bonding. Bonding connects to molecular geometry. Geometry connects to polarity. Reactions connect to stoichiometry and equilibrium. Once one link in that chain breaks, the whole subject can start to feel impossible.

I wanted Atomency to help repair those links by making the relationships clearer. Instead of only telling students that a molecule has a certain shape, the platform can help them see how structure connects to geometry. Instead of only practicing reaction-balancing in steps, students can work with reactions as systems. Instead of treating acids, bases, gases, kinetics and nuclear decay as separate units, students can see chemistry as a connected field where patterns repeat in different forms.

Early usage showed me that students and teachers were looking for a platform like this. Atomency’s aggregate GoatCounter analytics indicated 25,162 visits from Feb. 24 to May 24, 2026, with strong engagement in the builder and simulations, the molecular workspace where students can create molecules and see structure-based information. This mattered to me not because it made the platform look popular but because it showed that people were using the parts of the platform that matched the original reason I built it: to give students a place to experiment with chemistry visually.

Atomency has been featured by Eric Curts in Control Alt Achieve and mentioned by Middle School Matters. My AP Chemistry teacher, Dr. Glenn Soltes, described the platform as having meaningful instructional potential. These moments helped me understand that the platform was not just something I made for myself. Other educators could see value in it too.

Still, the biggest lesson I learned was that students should be taken seriously as designers of learning environments. We are close to the problems because we experience them every day. When students say a tool is confusing, inaccessible, slow or disconnected from the way they learn, that feedback is not a complaint. It is design information.

Educational technology should not only be built for students but also with students and by students. That does not mean every student must become a software developer. It means schools and education companies should recognize that students have insight, creativity and lived experiences that can improve tools inside real classrooms.

I built Atomency because I needed a better way to learn chemistry. But as the platform grew, it became about something larger than my own classroom. It became a way to ask what happens when a student is trusted not only as a learner but also as a builder.

Chemistry became easier for me to understand when I could make it visible. Maybe school technology can become better when student experience becomes more visible too.

What Did ISTELive 26 Teach Us About Relational Intelligence?

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ira Apfel sits down with Sarah McKibben, Editor-in-Chief of EdSurge to close out a full week of coverage from ISTELive 26 in Orlando. This conversation is a recap of everything that stood out once the keynotes ended and the convention floor quieted down, from a new idea called relational intelligence to a phrase about AI slop that stuck with educators all week. It only scratches the surface of what the EdSurge team gathered on the ground. Many more conversations recorded live at the conference are set to roll out across upcoming episodes in the weeks ahead. Listen now to hear what Apfel and McKibben took away from ISTELive 26 before the rest of the coverage arrives.

Listen to the episode.

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

This is a special recap episode from ISTELive 26 in Orlando where Ira and Sarah reflect on the hallway conversations, speaker presentations, and podcast interviews they enjoyed throughout the week. Featured speakers include:

Pat Yongpradit, GM, Education and Workforce Policy at Microsoft
Dr. Nneka McGee, Fmr. Chief Academic Officer and Founder of Muon Global
Isabelle Hau, Executive Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning
Heather E. McGowan, Bestselling Author, Leadership Expert, and LinkedIn Global Voice for Education
Melinda Glowacki, MAT Supervisor and Leadership Coach for the University of California, Irvine
Tambra Clark, Technology Integration Facilitator of Birmingham City Schools
Mary Ehrenworth, Author, Speaker, Consultant, from Teachers College, Columbia University
Philip Seyfried, Student, from Teachers College, Columbia University
Jessica Garner, Managing Director, Innovative Learning at ISTE+ASCD
Court Shuller from the Voices of Change Fellowship

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletter for more news and analysis on education and technology.

How a Vinyl Record Resurgence Helped Me Understand the Future of AI in Education

Nathan Kraai — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A few months ago, I found myself standing in the vinyl record section of a bookstore with my children.

“What even is a record?” one of them asked.

After a quick explanation, another question followed.

“Why would anyone buy one when you can stream everything?”

I laughed. Then I realized, I wasn't entirely sure how to answer that question.

After all, they weren’t wrong. Streaming gives us access to nearly every song ever recorded. It’s cheaper, faster, more portable, and infinitely more convenient than vinyl. By almost every measure, it is better technology. Which makes the resurgence of vinyl so unexpected.

What struck me wasn’t that my children didn’t know what a record was. It was that they couldn’t imagine why someone would want one.

To them, music is immediate. Infinite. Effortless. The idea of listening to an album from beginning to end seemed almost irrational. This friction between convenience and engagement is exactly what I’ve been wrestling with as AI has become more prevalent in the classroom.

Vinyl records and AI are actually similar technologies. Both seem to provoke a human response to technology: the easier something becomes via technology, the more we begin questioning what was valuable about the underlying use in the first place.

In my own experience with AI, I can’t remember another issue that has prompted so many conversations about what learning is actually for. But as I listen to educators wrestle with these questions, I increasingly hear another one emerging beneath them.

It’s not a question about technology. Rather, it’s a question about learning: What should students still need to do themselves?

I found myself thinking about that question recently while sitting in on rehearsals for our ninth grade capstone presentations.

This capstone project brings together English, science, and global studies and asks students to partner with local nonprofits, investigate real-world challenges, and develop ideas for meaningful action. Their final task is to synthesize everything they’ve learned into a TED-style presentation.

As Director of Innovation at an all-boys middle school outside of Boston, I spend a lot of time thinking about what learning should look like in the age of AI. I work closely with teachers as they design projects, assessments, and learning experiences that ask students to do meaningful work.

As I listened to students rehearse their talks, I was struck by something: Students had access to research, interview notes, statistics, and AI tools capable of generating polished drafts in seconds. Their challenge was deciding what mattered. Which story should they tell? Which evidence was most compelling? Which ideas deserved an audience’s attention?

Watching those students, I found myself feeling unexpectedly hopeful.

The tools sitting on their laptops could summarize articles, generate outlines, and draft paragraphs in seconds. But none of those tools could decide which story deserved to be told. That work still belonged to the students.

As someone whose role in education is focused on the intersection of innovation, learning, and emerging technologies, I expected to leave those rehearsals thinking about technology. Instead, I left thinking about judgment.

I didn’t see technology replacing thinking. I saw technology making a different kind of thinking more important.

For all the anxiety surrounding AI, that moment reminded me that some of the most important work of learning still resists automation.

In Imaginable, futurist Jane McGonigal argues that one of the best ways to prepare for the future is to distinguish between trends and signals. Trends are the large, visible forces reshaping society. Signals are the smaller observations that reveal how people are responding to those forces.

Artificial intelligence is clearly the trend. But the resurgence of vinyl felt like a signal.

The more I thought about it, the less interested I became in whether vinyl sounds better than streaming services.

What interested me was why people were choosing vinyl at all.

Streaming solved the problem of access. It put nearly every song ever recorded in our pockets. By almost every measure, it is the more efficient technology.

And yet, people continue buying records.

Maybe it is because a record asks something of the listener.

You choose an album.

You place the needle.

You stay with it.

The music becomes the activity, not the backdrop to something else.

As technology becomes increasingly good at solving problems for us, I wonder whether we will begin to value experiences that ask something of us in return.

I found myself wondering whether schools were wrestling with a similar tension.

This search for participation over efficiency is the same tension surfacing in our schools. I’ve heard the phrase “cognitive offloading” more in the past year than I have in my entire life.

Not just at conferences or in articles.

I’ve heard it while sitting around tables with teachers trying to make sense of what AI means for learning.

Those conversations have led us to rethink assignments, assessments, and even where some learning takes place. We’ve debated when students should brainstorm with AI, when reflection should happen without it, and which assessments require students to show their thinking in real time.

Not because we’re opposed to AI. Because we’re trying to better understand what learning requires.

At first glance, these decisions seem contradictory. But, in reality, they are not.

When educators ask students to write by hand, discuss an idea face-to-face, wrestle with a difficult text, or work through a problem without immediate assistance, they are often protecting something more than academic integrity.

They are protecting opportunities for students to think.

Learning requires students to do some of the cognitive heavy lifting.

And I can’t help wondering if that’s the signal hidden beneath many of today’s educational debates.

As AI becomes more capable, what humans contribute may matter even more.

The ability to discern.

To judge.

To create.

To remain present long enough to make meaning.

If Jane McGonigal is right that signals reveal how people respond to larger forces, then the resurgence of vinyl may be telling us something about the future of learning.

It’s not about what AI technology can do. Rather, it’s what humans may continue to value alongside it.

None of this is an argument against AI. Quite the opposite.

At my school, we’ve spent the past couple of years exploring AI literacy, assessment, academic integrity, and responsible use. Those conversations matter deeply.

But the conversations that have stayed with me most weren’t really about AI.

They were about learning.

I’ve found myself sitting with teachers and asking questions that feel both surprisingly new and strangely familiar.

Why are we asking students to write?

Why are we asking them to read?

Why are we asking them to discuss, solve, create and reflect?

The more I listen, the more I realize those questions aren't really about technology. They’re about purpose.

AI didn’t create those questions. It simply makes them harder to avoid.

Streaming won the battle for access, but vinyl has survived because it offers something access cannot: participation.

Watching these conversations unfold at my school, I can’t help but wonder whether learning is forcing us to confront a similar distinction.

AI can increasingly provide answers. The question is whether students still need the experience of arriving at them.

My children thought vinyl records were obsolete. In some ways, they were right. Streaming solved the problem, and yet, records returned.

Watching students navigate AI has left me less interested in what technology can do and more interested in what learners still need to do themselves.

The value of vinyl was never the music.

The value of writing was never the essay.

The value of learning may not be the answer.

It may be the experience of arriving at one.

And as AI becomes increasingly capable of producing answers, that experience may become more valuable, not less.

That’s the signal I hear beneath the crackle of a record player. It’s a reminder that in an age of instant digital access and gratification, the most valuable things that will remain are those that ask us to show up.

And this may be one of the most important educational conversations of the next decade.

New Study Cites Growing 'Crisis' of Healthcare Costs on School District Budgets

David Weldon — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Public school districts appear to be at a near tipping point when it comes to the impact of healthcare costs on school budgets. Premiums are rising so rapidly that healthcare obligations are threatening the ability of districts to deliver critical educational programs, materials, and services, hire, pay, and provide benefits to educators and make improvements to facilities.

A new study conducted by The School Superintendents Association (AASA) and the Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO International) surveyed more than 750 public school district leaders in 42 states about the impact of healthcare costs on their budgets. Findings from the study, summarized in the report “Rising Premiums, Falling Opportunities: The Budgetary Impact of Healthcare Costs on School Districts,” reveal that 98% of district leaders report that rising healthcare costs are having a measurable impact on their budget.

To offset their healthcare obligations, 46% of school districts have modified employee benefit packages, 34% have delayed hiring staff, 31% have reduced or postponed spending on instructional materials and technology and 28% have cut back on the levels of insurance coverage they are able to offer.

These budget impacts are making it hard for schools and districts to remain competitive in recruiting and retaining a high-quality workforce. If not resolved, the problem will quickly become a “crisis,” if it isn’t already, say report authors Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy at AASA, and Elleko Yost, director of advocacy and research at ASBO International.

How Did Things Get This Bad?

The reason things have reached this point is simple. During the 2025–26 fiscal year, nearly all districts (92%) spent up to 30% of their budget on employee insurance benefits. The leading causes of rising premium costs are increasing prescription drug costs (cited by 60% of survey respondents), more claims for expensive treatments (cited by 56%) and increased utilization of high-cost specialty drugs such as GLP-1s (cited by 56%).

“We are at the tipping point of a cost trend that has been occurring for decades,” explains Lisa Marceau, founder and president of Boston-based advisory firm Alpha Millennial Health and author of “Breaking the System: How Digital Innovators Shape the Future of Healthcare.”

The study findings are alarming, but they are not new, Marceau explains. Rather, they are an added burden on an already stressed system. She says there is sufficient research connecting strong education systems to the health of students, families and communities. When education systems are strained, programs are cut, and teacher benefits are reduced, the impact ripples not just to families and communities but to the future health status and earning potential of students.

Zahava Stadler, director of New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative, agrees that the study findings reflect a very tough reality facing far too many school districts.

“We want district leaders to use their resources to support students and advance their learning. And we want to be able to hold decision-makers accountable for those spending choices,” Stadler says. “But as these numbers show, lots of school district dollars are spent before they even come in the door, on health benefits whose costs district leaders don’t control. How can we ask leaders to do better with their funding when so much spending is predetermined by factors that have nothing to do with educating kids?”

Taking a Clue From Business Sector Actions

A trend to watch is the growing number of private sector employers eliminating healthcare benefits entirely, something that was once unheard of, Marceau explains. The question for future public education contracts is whether rising healthcare costs will eventually force districts to reduce or eliminate healthcare benefits for educators to manage financial risk?

Right now, we’re seeing the first phase of this, where school boards are hitting the pause button on ongoing contracts and any new projects to assess what current expenditure are necessary and how to improve their investment strategies, explains David DeSchryver, senior vice president and co-director of research at Whiteboard Advisors, a research and policy firm in Washington, D.C.

There is another healthcare-cost factor set to squeeze education budgets soon, Stadler says. The big federal cuts to Medicaid are going to fall hard on states, leaving them to either fill huge new gaps in healthcare funding or let people lose access to care.

In some states, hundreds of thousands will lose their insurance if the state doesn’t step in and spend more on healthcare, Stadler says. That money will have to come from somewhere. States have to balance their budgets. The biggest pot of state spending outside healthcare is education, and he says there’s real reason to worry that states will freeze or cut education funding as the federal government dumps more healthcare costs onto them.

“Rising health care costs create pressure on school districts, but this is not a singular issue,” DeSchryver explains. “If it were only healthcare costs, we wouldn’t hear about it, but it’s not. It’s healthcare costs, plus operational costs, plus gas and transportation, plus salary-schedule pay raises, plus rising special education and clinical service needs, and on and on. All of these are magnified by flat or declining revenues.”

A Successful Funding Strategy in Montana

Pudelski and Yost are quick to point out that there is a lot that individual states can do to counter the healthcare cost challenge. They cite the example of Montana’s school healthcare transformation as “one of shifting from a state of crisis to a position of collective power.”

Montana faced a financial nightmare that would become the catalyst for change, Pudelski and Yost explain. The district in eastern Montana, then part of the Montana Unified School Trust, was hit with a staggering 72% insurance premium increase in a single year. It was the second-highest spike in the state, far exceeding the already painful average annual increase of 35%.

In 2023, a coalition of education groups in Montana helped draft HB 332, a bill designed to create a unified statewide health insurance trust, Pudelski and Yost explain. The results of this coalition building were transformative: 7 out of the state’s 8 largest districts joined the trust. A total of 180 districts opted in, bringing in more than 16,000 employees — far more than the 12,000 required.

This massive pool provided the bargaining power needed to negotiate more competitive rates with hospitals and clinics while effectively buffering against the risk of high-cost claims, Pudelski says.

Long-Term and Short-Term Steps Districts Can Take

Alleviating these pressures is part of a larger system of school funding challenges, explains Rachel White, associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin and founder of The Superintendent Lab, an online research hub focused on the school district superintendency.

“For example, at the federal level, the government must fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Act and Title I to free up local dollars that are currently paying for these unfunded mandates,” White says. “At the state level, legislatures need to continue to modernize funding formulas so they reflect the real rising costs of operating a school — including healthcare. Beyond the K-12 sector entirely, the nation has to have a real conversation about rising pharmaceutical costs.”

In the short term, education systems can explore alternative benefit models that provide employees with greater flexibility while reducing employer exposure to cost risks, Marceau says. One option becoming attractive is shifting from a defined benefit model, similar to a pension, to a defined contribution model, similar to a 401(k). There are emerging forms of this new model from individual coverage and health reimbursement, direct primary care plus catastrophic care and the shift to self-funded plans that permit more flexibility.

Public school systems are some of the largest health insurance purchasers, Marceau continues. States with large education systems and growing populations generate significant revenue for the health system. From this perspective, education systems can engage in negotiations that leverage this purchasing power.

“State agencies aren't in a good position to really drive this forward,” DeSchryver explains. “It falls upon local districts, in regional collaboration and cooperatives, to identify best practices and share benchmarks and examples of what successful organizations look like.”

There are decades worth of research available about performance-based management, Drucker-like approaches to organizational efficiency, and outcomes-based contracting, DeSchryver says. It's not new, but it's something that schools now have to consider incorporating in their own unique way.

When the Algorithm Reaches Its Limit, Who Steps In?

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What happens when a tool works exactly as designed, and still falls short? David Webb, an international school teacher in Jakarta, India, spent a year building LibraryAid, an AI-powered book recommendation app without a computer science background, and discovered precisely where an algorithm ends and an educator begins. Gabe Nitro, a high school teacher in California, watched his school embrace Yondr phone pouches as a solution to classroom distraction and found himself doing the math on how much instructional time the enforcement itself was consuming. Two tools, two classrooms, one question: when the technology reaches its limit, who steps in?

A Year of Vibe Coding, One Unexpected Lesson

Webb describes the process of building LibraryAid through vibe coding, describing what he wanted in plain English and letting AI tools write the code, spending a year marked with near defeats and small breakthroughs. The app now tracks roughly 30 factors to match students to books in their own school library catalog. One student reading two grade levels behind made three times the average reading progress after the app connected him to a book series he loved. Yet Webb found himself returning, again and again, to a line he wrote in his piece for EdSurge: the algorithm had done its job, and what the child needed next was a conversation with a trusted adult. Join us on This Week with EdSurge where we ask what Webb learned about reading, motivation, and the irreplaceable role of the teacher in the loop.

The Pouch Solved One Problem. Then What?

Gabe Nitro is a high school teacher in California whose school uses Yondr pouches to lock students’ phones away for the school day. He is not arguing for phones in classrooms. He is arguing that the pouches are consuming the instructional time they were built to protect, with enforcement eating as many as 49 minutes per school day before a single lesson begins. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found no statistically significant impact on standardized test scores for high schoolers in English, a finding Nitro shared with colleagues who told him they still wanted the pouches anyway. His piece for EdSurge raises a harder question: when the tool does not deliver what was promised, what keeps us holding onto it?

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

Vibe Coding Sparked a Love of Reading in My Classroom by David Webb

I’m a Teacher, and I’m Against Phone Pouches by Gabe Nitro

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletter for more news and analysis on education and technology.

International Society for Transforming Education Expands its “AI-Ready Graduate” Framework

EdSurge Staff — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On June 28, the International Society for Transforming Education — the organization behind the editorially independent news site EdSurge — released an expanded version of its “Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate,” a framework designed to help K-12 educators teach students how to work with artificial intelligence.

The updated framework, designed with support from the nonprofit Britebound, goes beyond basic literacy to higher-order skills. It identifies six roles the organization says students should fill when using AI tools: Learner, Researcher, Synthesizer, Problem Solver, Connector and Storyteller.

“Today, we are releasing a fully fleshed out version, 30 skills aligned with each of these roles to help model using AI to support our uniquely human skills,” said Richard Culatta, CEO of the organization. “Humans have always used tools to accomplish human tasks. AI is no different, but when we teach AI as a way to support us being better at being human, it is far more relevant and far more meaningful than when we just talk about what AI is.”

The announcement was made at the organization’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida, one year after the initial rollout of the Profile. While the original framework focused on basic technical understanding of AI, the updated version shows what those skills look like in practice — with role-by-role descriptions, classroom examples and articulations for middle and high school.

The framework is intended to layer on to the work educators are already doing and aligns with the International Society for Transforming Education’s existing student standards and “Transformational Learning Principles.”

The updated Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate is available as a free download here.

(Editor’s note: EdSurge is an editorially independent newsroom of the International Society for Transforming Education.)

ISTE+ASCD is Now the International Society for Transforming Education

EdSurge Staff — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

ISTE+ASCD — the organization behind the editorially independent news site EdSurge — announced a new official name on June 28: The International Society for Transforming Education.

The announcement was made at the opening general session of the organization’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida. Jeremy Owoh, president of the International Society for Transforming Education and superintendent of Jacksonville North Pulaski School District, explained that the name change had been in the works for more than a year.

“We knew that the [merger] needed to happen first and then once we grew together as a community then we could take on that [renaming] task,” he said. “This is a change we’re making very thoughtfully.”

Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Transforming Education, told attendees that the name change is intended to reflect a global focus on aligning instructional strategy, technology use and educator practice to improve student outcomes and engagement.

“We believe that this name most effectively captures what both legacy organizations were always about,” he said. “Our new name shifts the focus from how we do it, to why we do it. And it shows how serious we are about transforming learning together.”

Some attendees expressed enthusiasm over the new name. “Oh, I'm excited,” said Elizabeth Diamond, an associate professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. “Words are so important, and those words are where we’re headed as teachers.”

Julie Keller, also a Temple University associate professor, added, “There’s power in the words, and it really brings together what we’re trying to do.”

Other attendees, including legacy-ASCD member Ruth Letang-Horton, vice president of the North American Division of SDA, were less enthusiastic. “I feel like the ASCD part is really lost,” she said. “Your feeling is like, ‘Wait a minute, what about ASCD?’ It’s because I’ve been an ASCD member for decades.”

The new name is the latest phase of the merger between ISTE and ASCD, which happened in 2023. According to Culatta, membership, educator certifications, the ISTE Standards and professional learning programs will continue without interruption under the new brand.

Read the full press release here.

(Editor’s note: EdSurge is an editorially independent newsroom of the International Society for Transforming Education.)

Vibe Coding Sparked a Love of Reading in My Classroom

David Webb — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I have had big ideas before. Ideas that felt urgent and important at 11 p.m. and somehow evaporated by morning. So, when the idea for creating an AI-powered reading recommendation system to generate student excitement about our school’s library catalog came to me, I asked my partner what she thought about me giving up evenings and weekends for a year or two. “Just go for it,” she said.

That conversation was in May 2025. By November, my vibe-coded app was live in my classroom.

Why I Started Vibe Coding

I’m a U.K.-trained primary school teacher with 11 years of experience in international schools across the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Over the years, I have seen librarians carefully curate books only to have them sit untouched on library shelves. This is because there was no systematic way to connect each child to the book most likely to excite them.

Existing solutions were expensive, rigid, and built around proprietary book lists that didn’t match our collection. The more I looked at what was available, the more I realized the problem wasn’t that the technology didn’t exist — it was that nobody had built it for teachers like me, working in schools like mine.

So, I decided to build one myself, using an AI technique that I had read about with increasing interest: vibe coding.

Learning to Build an App

Vibe coding is a practice where people use AI tools to generate software code by describing what they want in plain language to the tool, with little to no traditional programming knowledge required. So, I started vibe coding and telling a large language model what I was trying to build.

Progress was painfully slow — a day forward, three days back. Over the summer months I nearly quit several times. The early architecture decisions haunted me: I was working on a 12-year-old Mac I hadn’t upgraded, and just getting the right development environment installed felt like a full-time job. The worst moment came when several files of code were deleted with no backup. Hours of work, gone. I sat staring at the screen for a long time.

One of the most painstaking phases involved book cover images — I wanted to display covers for our library’s 10,000 books using freely available API calls, without scraping the information, to stay on the right side of copyright laws. Writing the code for this was exhausting. When it finally worked imperfectly, I built a separate page to manually evaluate every cover — AI searching for the ones that hadn’t loaded correctly. That process took weeks. Then the page itself failed completely, and I had to start from scratch.

Switching from Copilot to Claude made a significant difference. It was still prone to errors and loops that would, as I put it to colleagues, drive me absolutely crazy. But it was more reliable than what I’d had before.

What strikes me now is how much has changed — what took me days and weeks in late 2025, I can now accomplish in hours. The rate of improvement in LLMs is frankly frightening.

How It Works

If you’re interested in building a similar tool, the steps are simple: A teacher uploads their school’s library catalog as a CSV file — no re-cataloging required. The teacher then creates student profiles and runs a short reading assessment to gauge their reading level and interests. The AI analyzes the catalog against each student’s reading level, interests, favorite authors and curriculum topics, and generates a personalized reading list from the books already on the shelves.

Student profiles include name, reading age, reading interests, favorite authors, preferred genres, and current class topic. These profiles power the AI recommendations. Progress data includes books read, reviews written, points earned, and comprehension quiz scores. Student profiles and progress data are only visible to their class teacher and school librarian — not to other students.

When students log in, they see their recommendations — typically 50 books ranked by how well the books match their profile. Students can mark books as “reading,” “finished,” or “want to read.” When they finish a book, they write a teacher-verified review and answer AI-generated reading comprehension questions. Correct answers earn genre-specific points which unlock accessories for their animated worm companion — one accessory category per genre across 21 genres, so reading widely is rewarded, not just reading a lot. Student reviews are fed back into the recommendation engine — so a hidden gem that one child discovers becomes visible to the whole school community over time.

The recommendation engine in the app draws on a “master books” list I built from more than 1,000 award-winning and highly rated children’s titles across various categories. It’s not just matching reading levels — it’s actively surfacing books that most children would never stumble upon independently.

Sometimes a recommendation worked because it was an award-winning book the child had never heard of. Sometimes it was simply a genre they hadn’t tried before but which sat under a topic they’d listed as an interest — opening their eyes to a new corner of the library. Other times it was a natural next step: a similar author, a continuation of a series, a book that built on something they’d already loved and rated.

For data protection, LibraryAid is COPPA and GDPR compliant. Student data is stored securely in Google Firebase. No student email addresses are collected — students log in via a school-issued code and PIN, with no personal email required. Data is never sold or shared with third parties.

Positive Feedback From Colleagues and Family

Early on I told a colleague what I was trying to do. What she said, and the sincerity with which she said it, gave me more confidence than any tutorial or documentation. She said she genuinely believed I could make it work, and that I should not give up. Feedback from other teachers proved equally invaluable. It was frank and occasionally humbling. So far, one colleague has integrated the app into her class and found it very useful.

My 12-year-old son, however, became perhaps my most enthusiastic supporter. He spent considerable time testing the system, told his own school about it and, in what felt like a distinctly contemporary parenting moment, told me he’d asked an LLM whether LibraryAid had a high chance of being successful and it responded with an enthusiastic “yes.”

What My Students Thought

When my tool went live with my students, something shifted in them. Children who had been unenthused about the library before suddenly became excited to explore it. Finding their recommended book became a treasure hunt. Students began venturing into new series and authors they would never have chosen independently.

One student, an English learner reading approximately two grade levels below his current placement, made 3x the average reading progress of his classmates once he was matched to books that genuinely interested him at the right level. The technology didn’t fix his reading struggles, but it connected him to books worth the effort of reading.

I also read aloud to my class, ending the school year with “Swimming Against the Storm” by Jess Butterworth, which has a strong environmental theme. The impact of reading that book last year was striking: suddenly the majority of the class was searching the app for adventure stories with a similar feel. That moment reinforced something I believe deeply about the app — it works best alongside human influence, not instead of it. The app surfaces the right books for students, but the teacher or librarian sparks the interest.

What Vibe Coding Taught Me

Debugging code and diagnosing why a student isn’t understanding a concept require surprisingly similar thinking. For both, you need to be systematic, patient, and hypothesis-driven. Writing algorithms that adapt to different reading patterns made me think more clearly about differentiation. And spending months building something that real children would use every day gave me clarity into why so much edtech misses the mark. At least in my own experience, most education technology is built for administrators, not teachers. It optimizes for reporting and data dashboards rather than the daily reality of 30 children with 30 different relationships with reading. The products that work are the ones built by people who have stood in a classroom and felt the gap between what exists and what’s needed.

Although my tool surfaces an array of enticing books for children, there is no guarantee the recommendations will inspire them to take action. I remember a moment I had with one child this term, who showed me her curated list with a lost expression and eyes that were pleading for guidance. Her list had hidden gems and well-known classics, all with appealing covers — some in her comfort zone and some designed to stretch her thinking. However, the only one that interested her was a familiar series she already knew. The algorithm had done its job. What she needed next was a conversation with a trusted adult.

There isn’t a recommendation engine in the world that can replace the moment a child says, “I’m not sure about any of these,” and looks to their teacher or librarian for a nudge. The trust a child has for the person standing in front of them can’t be coded.

My advice to any educator considering building their own edtech tool: build something that extends what teachers do rather than replaces what they do. The technology should handle the matching but let the children’s learning guides handle the moment. LibraryAid has turned out to be the most useful thing I have ever built, perhaps even eclipsing some of my lessons.

Who Is Really in Charge When Tech Enters the Classroom?

EdSurge Staff — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What happens when the tools teachers build start making decisions teachers have not reviewed? And what happens when the knowledge shaping future educators does not come from research or curriculum, but from a social media feed? On This Week with EdSurge, two educators are wrestling with technology that is moving faster than their institutions are prepared to handle.

When TikTok Becomes the Teacher

Evi Wusk, Ed.D., teaches the people who will become teachers, and she noticed something during final exams that she could not ignore: her students kept referencing TikTok videos and social media reels, then apologizing for it. Wusk wrote about the experience for EdSurge, and her conclusion is not what you might expect. She is not calling for a ban or a warning label. Rather, she is asking whether teacher prep programs need to reckon with where professional knowledge is actually forming right now, and what it means if those teaching are the last ones to find out.

The Grader Who Was Not in the Room

Steven Swanson teaches high school engineering, and after two consecutive days of field trips he came back to 450 ungraded assignments. So he built a solution: an AI grading assistant that drafted grades, generated comments against his rubrics, and returned everything to students automatically. Then a student thanked him for feedback he had never read. Swanson wrote about what happened next for EdSurge, and the story is less about the technology malfunctioning than about what it revealed: even when the AI is accurate, the grade still needs to belong to someone.

Join us on This Week with EdSurge where we dig into what both of these educators decided to do next, and what their answers might mean for every teacher feeling pressure to let technology take over.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

What TikTok Is Teaching Future Teachers That We Aren't by Evi Wusk

I Built an AI Grading Tool. Then a Student Thanked Me for Words I Didn't Write. by Steven Swanson

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This Week with EdSurge is produced by the EdSurge newsroom. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletter for the latest in education news delivered straight to your inbox.

Outgrowing the Chromebook: Why Advanced STEM Demands Better Student Tech

Shawn Chang — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Across the United States, K-12 schools have spent the past decade building one-to-one device programs. These initiatives have established an essential baseline for digital access, making it easier for students to complete daily schoolwork across grade levels and subjects. By putting a device in the hands of every learner, districts have created a standard foundation for digital literacy, research and everyday classroom engagement.

As STEM programs continue to grow and mature, however, school leaders are beginning to encounter new questions about how well those devices support more advanced coursework. Pathways in fields like robotics, engineering, cybersecurity and data science increasingly rely on specialized professional applications that reach well beyond general-purpose classroom software.

In many cases, students can successfully complete introductory work on school-issued devices. But as instruction progresses, the tools required for STEM programs place different demands on student computing resources. As a result, educators and technology directors are taking a closer look at how hardware capacity can keep pace with shifting curricular needs.

STEM Tools and Computing Demands

While web-based applications work well for introductory coursework and daily assignments, many expanding STEM pathways introduce entirely different technical requirements. Courses in engineering, 3D modeling, cybersecurity and data science rely on industry-standard applications that demand substantial local computing capacity, robust memory and dedicated graphics processing.

A prime example is SolidWorks, a professional computer-aided design (CAD) platform used in both higher education and engineering industries. When students build detailed, multi-part models or run stress-test simulations, the performance of the device they’re using directly affects how efficiently they can work. Insufficient hardware can lead to severe rendering delays, software lag or sudden crashes that disrupt the entire classroom flow.

This reality highlights a practical procurement consideration for districts: As STEM curricula mature beyond basic web-browsing activities, classroom devices must have sufficient local processing power to keep up.

A Robotics Program in Practice

To see how these hardware dynamics play out in a real classroom, consider the experience of the Firebots robotics team at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, California. The team competes each year in the FIRST Robotics Competition, a global program where students design, build and program large robots to complete complex engineering challenges under tight, real-world constraints.

The work inside a competitive robotics program closely mirrors a commercial engineering environment, spanning mechanical design, fabrication, electrical systems and software development. Students use CAD tools to design components from scratch, test digital iterations and refine mechanisms on a tight competition timeline.

To support this technical workflow, the Firebots use ASUS TUF Gaming laptops. In robotics programs like this, student devices are not just tools for looking up information; they are central workbenches used across multiple stages of the design process. Students rely on them for modeling, code compilation, data logging, documentation and coordination among subteams.

Reliable on-device performance eliminates a common source of classroom friction. When software runs consistently and responsively, students can spend their limited class time troubleshooting their designs rather than troubleshooting their devices. Free from technical slowdowns and long file loads, they can focus on testing solutions and iterating on ideas. Ultimately, the Firebots’ systematic approach and focus on execution earned the company the FIRST Excellence in Engineering Award, which recognizes strong engineering design and system integration.

What This Means for STEM Instruction

The experience of programs like the Firebots raises a broader question for school leaders and instructional technology directors: How should district-wide device strategies evolve as STEM instruction becomes more technically demanding?

One-to-one computing programs continue to serve as the foundation for most day-to-day classroom learning, providing the baseline connectivity and performance needed for a modern education. At the same time, STEM courses can reveal distinct moments where standardized, general-purpose devices reach the limits of demanding software and workflow requirements.

In many districts, this variation is already being managed through a mix of approaches. Some schools rely on shared physical lab spaces equipped with higher-performance workstations dedicated to specialized software. Others use cloud-based streaming solutions where possible, while reserving more resource-intensive local applications for specific instructional settings.

The goal is not to dismantle existing one-to-one initiatives, but to recognize where a single hardware standard may limit technical pathways. As STEM education continues to expand and diversify, school leaders find themselves balancing the competing priorities of deployment consistency, procurement cost and instructional fit. In this changing landscape, device planning is no longer treated as a separate IT purchasing decision. Instead, it is increasingly part of a larger conversation about how schools design learning environments that accurately reflect the kinds of hands-on work students are being asked to do.

I’m a Teacher, and I’m Against Phone Pouches

Gabe Nitro — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A recent craze in education that has garnered the attention of students and teachers alike is the ever increasing presence of phone pouches, or more specifically for my school, Yondr pouches, These small, neoprene packs have a firm magnetic seal that can only be released by tapping it against an unlocking base. Their main purpose is quite simple: stop students from accessing their phone during the school day. The rationale is that the less time students spend on their phone, the more time they will spend learning.

Recently, the response from students and teachers seems to be fairly divided, with most students vehemently opposing it and most teachers earnestly welcoming it. Indeed, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, a majority of U.S. teenagers oppose banning phones during the school day. On the contrary, a separate survey of 1,098 adults found that 93% of adults support cell phone restrictions. This survey is part of the Understanding America Study (UAS), which was conducted last year by the University of Southern California Center for Economic and Social Research.

While common sense dictates what side I should take as a teacher, I can’t say I’m a fervent supporter of phone pouches.

The Problem with Storage

On the surface, phone pouches promise to create distance between the phone and their pupil. Ultimately, this distance may improve learning outcomes by helping minimize phone-fueled distractions. Indeed, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), U.S. teenagers already spend approximately 70 minutes using their phones during the school day. Those 70 minutes lost could’ve been used to advance a student’s understanding of content, cultivate their ability to work with others or simply finish a recent assignment. Thus, with a Yondr pouch, those are an additional 70 minutes teachers like myself have to work with. However, what most don’t seem to understand is that implementing phone bans with a product like Yondr pouches has its drawbacks.

My district uses phone pouches because our policy prohibits students from using their phones the entire school day. Students are required to put their phones in these packs before their first class of the day. Every teacher and administrator has an unlocking station magnet that unlocks the pouches at the end of the school day.

At the beginning of every class, I spend roughly the first seven minutes walking around to check each student’s Yondr pouch. It’s a routine that provides me (as well as my colleagues) reassurance that every phone is truly sealed away. Considering a standard school day lasts seven class periods, that is already 49 minutes of instructional time a student has lost on Yondr pouches. But the worst part is, that’s only a conservative estimate. It doesn’t account for the additional time wasted on further surveillance.

Monitoring Student Activity

Oftentimes, as I monitor students, I see them attempting to circumvent this restriction on phones entirely. Whether students are scrambling to put their phone away since it was never locked up, messing with the seal so it appears to be untampered with or gritting their teeth because they have a fake phone in the pouch that they hope will deceive their teachers by tricking them that their real phone is in their pouch. For instance, some students instead put a calculator or a broken, “fake” phone instead of their real phone to subvert the policy. Because they have a fake phone in the pouch that they hope will trick their teachers, it still costs time.

I have seen students intentionally arrive late to school to avoid phone checks, use pencils to jam open the lock or simply steal magnets teachers use to unlock the pouches. Ultimately, each of these infractions add up. Now, instead of prioritizing learning through meaningful instructional time, teachers have adopted an additional role of policing the phone policy.

And what benefits, really, do the pouches have? A recent paper, “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” found that Yondr pouches have no statistically significant impact on standardized scores for high schoolers in English. And the impacts in math are modest at best

Bans Backfiring

Fundamentally, what makes these pouches unsuited for education is not that they don’t stop phone use; rather, it’s because that’s all they accomplish. As educators, we often can’t see the forest for the trees. We get so caught up in locking up phones and villainizing students who pull them out during classtime, that we forget why they’re being used in the first place. We forget that there was once a time when students entered the classroom with the sole intention to learn something new, and to learn it well.

So, if promoting learning is truly the goal, a phone pouch isn’t the way to do it. Rather, addressing the underlying reasons why these pouches were needed in the first place will.

I would suggest that school districts approach the rollout of phone pouches with curiosity, not with blanket enforcements. This can mean dedicating several class periods during the first week of school to discuss this topic. Instead of walking through the various parts of your syllabus, have an open conversation with your students about the impacts of phones in their daily lives: When do you use them? How do you use them? What do you use them for?

From there, you can introduce them to what the research shows on the impacts of phone use in the classroom, bringing new meaning to a seemingly harmless (and leisurely) way of spending the day. This way, rather than pure enforcement, you can cultivate a culture where students “buy in” to this new phone practice, promoting both better learning outcomes and student agency.