EdSurge Articles

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.”

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.

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

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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.

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.

What Did ISTELive 26 Teach Us About Relational Intelligence?

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.

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?

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

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

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.)

Who Is Really in Charge When Tech Enters the Classroom?

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

Upcoming Event

ISTE+ASCD Live '26 in Orlando, Florida

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.

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.

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.

Before Schools Write the AI Policy, Should They Have a Conversation First?

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Only about one in three students say their school has a school-wide AI policy, yet students across the country are already using AI to complete assignments, study for exams, and make decisions about their daily lives. Aleta Margolis, founder and president of the Center for Inspired Teaching, has spent three decades coaching teachers to ask better questions and listen more carefully to students. She argues in a recent EdSurge piece that the policy conversation cannot come first: the human conversation has to.

What the Classroom Conversation Looks Like Right Now

Margolis describes a growing dynamic in schools where teachers are using AI to generate assignments and students are using AI to complete them, raising a deeper question about what teachers and students are actually there to do together. She says co-creating AI guidelines with students, rather than handing down a list of rules, puts everyone on the same team and draws on knowledge that young people already have.

When the Policy Gap Comes Home

A new NPR and Ipsos poll found that 54 percent of teachers worry AI is hurting students’ critical thinking skills, and nearly three in four believe its impact will be larger than the internet or computers. Sarah McKibben, editor-in-chief of EdSurge and the parent of two middle schoolers, is watching that tension play out at her own kitchen table. She sees both the genuine promise of AI as a learning tool and the corners students are cutting when no one has taught them what responsible use actually looks like.

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

What to Do About AI: Begin by Talking About It by Aleta Margolis

NPR / Ipsos Poll: Teachers on AI and Critical Thinking

RAND American Youth Panel: AI Policy Survey

Upcoming Event

ISTE+ASCD Live '26 in Orlando, Florida

Join us on This Week with EdSurge where we go beyond the policy debate and into the conversations that are already happening in classrooms, living rooms, and school hallways.

Listen to the episode:

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.

5 Things We Did Wrong with Edtech

Sari Weltmann — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the early 2000s, classrooms were simple.

One desktop computer sat in the back of the room, usually reserved for Accelerated Reader quizzes, and a computer lab down the hall hosted weekly keyboarding lessons. When laptop carts arrived, it felt like the future had rolled in on wheels.

My principal believed in slow, intentional adoption. The first month, she handed each teacher a laptop and said, “Keep it on your desk. Turn it on. That is all you have to do.” For most teachers across the country, the shift looked nothing like this. Schools scrambled to adopt technology, sometimes for learning, sometimes simply to keep up.

Debates emerged: Should we still teach cursive if students will be typing anyway? Should computer labs disappear? Should every student have a device? As the years progressed, students arrived more digitally fluent than ever and quickly outpaced teachers despite ongoing professional development. Districts kept adding more software, more platforms, more bells and whistles. Learning management systems became central to instruction. Individually, each tool was an advancement. Collectively, they created noise.

COVID accelerated everything, but it was not the sole cause of technology fatigue. By 2021, 90% of schools had adopted at least one new digital platform, but fewer than half provided sustained professional development to support its use. Teachers were overwhelmed. Parents were unprepared. Students were distracted.

So where did we go wrong, and how do we get back on track?

1. We Adopted Technology Without Guardrails or Purpose

Before adopting any tool, districts must answer a simple question: Is this for learning, productivity, accessibility, or innovation? The distinction matters. Digitizing worksheets is not innovation.

Tools should help students create, collaborate, and solve problems—the very skills the future workforce will require. Guardrails also mean limiting screen time to when it is instructionally essential. Unstructured screen time can reduce attention and retention. Technology should amplify learning, not replace thinking. So how do we make sure we are using tech with purpose? Classroom teachers should decide when, how, and why to use a tech tool.

For example:

If your students are in a 1:1 environment, establish clear norms for when devices should be open or closed, and teach these routines from day one.
A simple visual cue — like a device GO or CLOSED sign — helps students internalize expectations without constant reminders.
Before anyone opens a laptop or iPad, model the steps students will take. This 30-second preview prevents the
“Tech scramble” that derails lessons and keeps the focus on learning instead of troubleshooting.
Start every class with a short, analog bell-ringer in a composition notebook to signal from the very beginning that attention and thinking come first.
When students learn this routine on day one, it becomes clear that devices stay closed until the learning calls for them.
In elementary classrooms, station rotation can quickly become device-heavy if every center includes a screen.
Build in intentional no-tech stations for word work, manipulatives, partner games, writing, or read-to-self so students practice foundational skills without device distraction. This helps young learners build stamina, independence, and social interaction while keeping technology in its proper place as just one part of the rotation, not the default.

2. We Overspent on Redundant Tools Instead of Building Coherent Ecosystems

Schools often pay for multiple tools that serve the same purpose.

Gimkit and Kahoot? Pick one.
Nearpod and Pear Deck? Pick one.
Three reading platforms that all claim to personalize learning? Pick one.

Districts use an average of 2,739 edtech tools per year. A lean ecosystem increases fidelity, clarity, and impact.

This year, model the same intentional learning you want for your students. Choose one tool you truly want to master and commit to it. Consistent use builds coherence, reduces cognitive load, and strengthens instructional impact. Attend professional development, watch videos, learn from colleagues and even your students, and look for ways to integrate the tool across units. Becoming deeply skilled with one platform is far more powerful than dabbling in many. Admin and district tech leaders, work with your curriculum departments to evaluate actual usage data and efficacy of redundant tools. Consider budgets and which tools have the most impact for their cost.

3. We Removed Agency from Teachers and Students

Forced technology use backfires. When a tool does not meet the needs of the teacher or learner, it becomes a barrier rather than a bridge. Teacher autonomy is directly linked to higher instructional quality and student engagement. Agency builds ownership, and ownership builds authentic use.

Teachers, when it’s instructionally appropriate, give students the choice to work digitally or on paper. Choice builds ownership and reduces frustration. For example, some students prefer reading a novel on a device because they rely on accessibility tools, while others focus better with a print copy. Offering both options, when feasible, helps students select the format that supports their learning needs.

Administrators and coaches should classrooms with the intention of learning and gathering information. Pay attention to how long navigation takes, where students get stuck, and when technology supports or interrupts the learning goal.

Use these observations as data to shape coaching and professional development, and give teachers choice within required platforms so they can align tools with their instructional purpose.

4. We Went All-In on Technology Instead of Balancing It with Authentic Methods

In the rush to modernize, we saturated the system with software, tools, and devices. Teachers became device managers. Students became tab switchers. Parents became technology police.

Blended instruction, not technology-heavy instruction, produces the strongest learning gains. Students need both the tactile and the digital, the concrete and the abstract, the human and the automated.

To find it:

Seek clarity on expectations. Professional development on tech does not automatically mean mandatory use.
If a tool feels unrealistic for your students, ask your administrator to clarify how and when it should be used. Alignment with student needs matters more than checking a box.
Set a time limit for digital tasks and compare it to the analog alternative. Choose the method that protects instructional time.
Model the workflow before students touch devices so the focus stays on thinking, not troubleshooting.
Build in device-free moments during the lesson such as discussion, think-pair-share, and modeling to keep the cognitive load on the learning, not the screen.

5. We Failed to Adapt Quickly Enough, Especially to AI

It took years to reach basic technology integration, and now AI has changed everything overnight. AI literacy is now considered a foundational skill. Districts must embrace AI as a learning partner, train teachers to use it for planning and feedback, teach students to use it ethically, and encourage experimentation. Adaptation is the new literacy, and we need to strike while the iron is hot.

Don’t wait for a district policy to start building your own AI fluency. Experiment with low-stakes, everyday tasks such as planning a trip, organizing a grocery list, or drafting a message so you can explore features without pressure. Take advantage of free professional learning from Microsoft Elevate for Educators, Grow with Google, Code.org’s AI 101 for Teachers, and many others.

And the most important thing you can do right now: be open-minded.

The Train Has Not Left the Station

Edtech did not fail us. We failed edtech by implementing it without vision, guardrails, balance, or humanity.

But we can get back on track. We can return to what my early principal modeled: slow, intentional, joyful integration that starts with people rather than devices. We can build systems where technology supports learning rather than drives it.

The future of education is not defined by more devices or apps. It is defined by smarter systems, thoughtful integration, streamlined tools, and curriculum guiding the choices we make.

I Built an AI Grading Tool. Then a Student Thanked Me for Words I Didn’t Write.

Steven Swanson — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two school days. That’s all it took.

In 2024, I chaperoned field trips two days in a row, for two different grade levels, and came back to roughly 450 ungraded assignments.

I knew what to do, I’ve done it before, mark them credit or no credit and move on. Students get something out of that. They did the practice. But if any of them were practicing it wrong, nobody catches it, nobody tells them, and the misunderstanding rides along into the next unit.

That pile of work led me to build an AI grading assistant. And this past April, I removed its most automated feature: the one that could return an AI-generated grade and comment to a student before I had reviewed it.

Building that feature was easy to justify. Removing it taught me which part of grading a teacher can’t hand off.

Most of what students turn in to me isn’t a clean essay. I teach engineering, and my students submit designs, schematics, code, and photos of physical work. That’s part of why many teachers I know still don’t grade with AI. They’ll use it to scaffold a unit or soften an email to a parent, but grading with it usually means pasting work into a chatbot one assignment at a time, which is so slow I can grade it faster myself. So, I built my own tool.

I teach mechatronics, and if mechatronics teaches you anything, it’s that efficiency matters. You optimize the system and eliminate friction. I brought that mindset to the product I built, and the logical endpoint was auto-return. The AI could evaluate the work, draft the grade and comment, and send it back to the student without another click from me, late submissions included. I had spent hours tuning it to grade against my assignment, handouts, instructions, and rubric.

Then a student came up to me one day, happy about the encouraging comment on an assignment. The comment had motivated him to redo the work and resubmit it.

When AI Takes Control

The problem was that I didn’t write the comment. I hadn’t even seen it.

If it had passed by my eyes and I’d confirmed it, edited it, or decided it belonged there, this would be a different story. But in that moment, the student thought the encouragement came from me, and I wasn’t actually in the exchange.

Nothing about the feedback was inaccurate. That almost made it harder to explain. After more than two decades in a classroom, I couldn’t put words to what felt wrong. I just knew it did. The issue wasn’t whether AI could draft useful feedback. It could. The issue was whether a student should receive a teacher’s judgment when the teacher hadn’t made one.

So, I removed auto-return, and the automatic grading of late work went with it. What replaced it is a review dashboard: the AI drafts every grade and comment against my rubric and lays it out in front of me. I can edit, override, reject, or return the feedback in one pass. It’s still fast. But now my eyes and my judgment touch every grade before a student sees it.

That changed how I think about human review. It can’t mean glancing at a score and clicking approve. It must mean checking the student’s work against the rubric and owning the result.

The software can propose a judgment. It cannot own one.

Policy is starting to move the same way. New York City’s public school guidance now says AI must not replace educator decision-making, and other states are weighing rules on human review and student data. The rules will keep changing. The principle shouldn’t; a student’s grade needs a person who is accountable for it.

When I walked one of my administrators through the tool, what he liked most wasn’t the time savings. It was that it requires a rubric. Teachers write rubrics for big projects, but the daily, low stakes work rarely gets one, and that’s exactly the work that gets marked credit or no credit and never comes back with feedback. The trade runs both ways: students get clearer expectations up front and comments on work that used to get a checkmark.

He had two concerns, both fair. Parents and students should know when an AI-assisted tool is grading, so it belongs in the syllabus. And if a student contests a grade, the teacher should re-grade it by hand. We agreed the second should happen anyway, with or without AI. Humans make grading mistakes too.

My students know I built the AI tool. What they care about isn’t the technology. It’s whether the feedback is fast, the rubric is clear, and the grade is fair. A few times the tool has docked points for work it missed, almost always because a screenshot cut off the edge of the page or the writing was too faint to read. Those students came up to me, I looked at the work, and I gave the points back. I want that. A grade should be something a student can question.

What surprised me is that a student will challenge the AI long before he’ll challenge me. A kid will walk right up and say, “The AI got this wrong, I should have full credit.” That same kid won’t tell me, to my face, that I made the mistake and owe him ten points. Both of us can be wrong, but the machine is easier to push back on than the teacher, and that’s good for the student. The grade still passes through me. The draft between us just makes it easier to speak up. If a grading system makes students afraid to challenge the result, the system is wrong.

AI Grading Advice

If your school is wrestling with AI grading, start with the disclosure. Don’t say “AI may be used.” Say what that means: comments and grades are drafted by AI and reviewed by the teacher. Then answer the harder questions. Where does student work go? Is it stored, or used to train models? How secure is the platform, and has anyone independent reviewed it?

We are teachers, not graders. We grade, yes, but we also sit in IEP meetings, call parents, design lessons, and try to notice the student who is quieter than usual. If a grading assistant hands me back the hours I spent marking daily work, and I spend them on better lessons and better feedback, everyone wins.

But when a student asks, “Why did I get this grade?” the answer cannot be, “Because the system said so.”

It has to come from me.

AI Won’t Replace Educators. But It is Changing How Students Learn.

Terri Taylor — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, my kindergartner climbed onto the scale and asked me what dinosaurs also weighed 50 pounds. Thanks to Claude, we quickly learned, to my son’s delight, that he is the size of a juvenile velociraptor.

Artificial intelligence helped me with a question I couldn’t have answered on my own. But it didn’t replace me as a parent or my son’s role as a learner. A few weeks later, I had forgotten the answer, but my son didn’t. He was the keeper of knowledge, and I was the conduit.

Something like this is happening in schools and colleges, too. Information is more easily accessible than ever before. Anyone anywhere can ask an AI tool a question and receive an answer that seems reasonable, at least on the surface. It’s not surprising, then, to see predictions of the demise of traditional schools and colleges.

But education has never been only about access to information. Students need much more to become capable members of society. They need the ability to assess the quality of information, recognize strong work, and connect ideas. Students also need to grapple with the reality that not everyone agrees, and that’s okay. This kind of learning requires human relationships that expose students to the friction of life that sycophantic AI models tend to obscure.

The big question is how to know when AI supports real learning and when it leads to the “cognitive surrender” of accepting AI-generated answers with minimal scrutiny. Recent research findings shed some light on that.

Learning by AI Type

First, learning varies significantly based on the type of AI used. The dangers of cognitive surrender are greater when students use the standard, free versions of LLMs. Those models are designed to be helpful and therefore simply provide answers to the questions they are asked. Brain activity and retained learning are lower when students are working with AI in this way.

In contrast, tools that scaffold learning and support in-person instruction can produce outcomes even more impressive than my son’s memory of the size of teenage dinosaurs. One study of an introductory undergraduate physics course found that students using a carefully designed AI tutor had twice the learning gains of those receiving active, in-person instruction.

Learning Process Matters

Second, the role that AI plays in the learning process matters, and it should be off-limits at times. The authors of the physics course study cautioned that structured AI tutoring may not be appropriate for tasks “requiring complex synthesis of multiple concepts and higher-order critical thinking.” In a larger-scale example, Estonia’s education minister—who is overseeing the country’s ambitious partnership with OpenAI to provide a custom AI platform in upper secondary schools—has described a blended model. Students use handwriting to form memories early in the learning process and, later, use digital tools for feedback and AI-assisted learning. Estonia is not introducing AI in earlier grades so that students can build foundational knowledge and skills first.

Support for Educators Needed

Third, because the outcomes are so far apart between good and bad AI use in learning, educators need support to add AI to their teaching toolkit responsibly. In one study from Sierra Leone, secondary school educators completed a one-day training before adding AI tools in the learning process and only then saw math learning gains equivalent to more than a year of additional schooling.

Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic all offer learning modes and other supports built on these ideas. Still, those features are typically opt-in and getting harder to find for non-enterprise users. OpenAI, for example, launched “study mode” in July 2025 but quietly removed it from the standard ChatGPT interface this spring. The feature remains available to schools and systems with enterprise contracts. These contracts are expensive but drive demand for the types of AI that educators actually want, especially when leaders collaborate across systems and make similar asks of tech companies in procurement.

Schools, colleges, and educators should not be alone in navigating these waters. Philanthropy can help, for example, by supporting training that respects teachers’ expertise, conducting independent research on what works, and advancing advocacy work that counterbalances the size of tech firms. They can also help make enterprise contracts more affordable and support the development of procurement standards that protect learning, student data, and educational institutions’ sovereignty over their own systems.

This fits with philanthropy’s history of helping the benefits of new learning approaches reach everyone. For example, as compulsory schooling laws were passed at the turn of the 20th century, communities benefited from Andrew Carnegie’s 2,509 libraries (many of which served as classrooms) and Julius Rosenwald’s 5,000 schools that educated a third of Black children in the rural South.

Looking even further back in time gives me confidence that humans can weather tech-driven transitions and come out in a better place. German apprenticeship programs are strong today in part because, during the Industrial Revolution, German guilds adapted their models to fit an evolving economy rather than resisting change outright.

Today’s overflowing supply of information began with the printing press, which expanded access to texts and eventually reshaped who could claim expertise. I can capture and share these thoughts with you in part because, very long ago, writing transformed curriculum, credentialing, and information exchange.

Humans may not be as cool as velociraptors, but we have incredible agency and potential to evolve to meet the moment. All of us—including tech providers, educators, and philanthropy—can play an active role in shaping what’s next for students.

What TikTok Is Teaching Future Teachers (That We Aren’t)

Evi Wusk — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I am going to start where no good teacher should start, with a $10 word: epistemology. It refers to a branch of philosophy that explores how we know what we know – something scholars like John Dewey argued is deeply tied to experience, not just information.

This word takes me back to my doctoral graduation when my father-in-law said with good-natured humor, “Well, Ev… there’s a lot of [stuff] you can’t learn from a book.” At the time, I didn’t know what to say, but any teacher worth their salt will tell you: he’s right.

Pre-service teachers – myself included – often lament that they didn’t really learn to teach until the rubber-meets-the-road experience of student teaching or that first job. This is the challenge of teaching pre-service teachers. I’ve been doing it for a handful of years now, and I see a trend – the TikTok way of knowing in education. It’s got me wondering how we adapt our practices based on my experience during my recent final exams with pre-service teachers.

The TikTok Way

For example, I ask my students to make two tangible items to try and circumvent AI. One item is a teacher creed. I hand out “fancy” paper and tell them to create something they might read every teaching day – something to remind them not if, but when teaching gets hard. These are heartfelt, colorful creations. They write things like, I will show up with a good attitude. Even on my worst day, I will be someone’s favorite teacher. I cringe a bit, knowing how more seasoned educators might scoff but that is perhaps why I assign them – to bottle that early hopefulness in a landscape that often doesn’t create it for new teachers.

The second item is to create “One One-Pager to Rule Them All!” Students make non-linear, doodle-style notes throughout the semester, and this final asks them to zoom out and represent everything essential we’ve learned through a map of connections, images, and ideas.

I love this assignment because I can see who is connecting the dots and who is simply regurgitating the text. I sit with each student for five to seven minutes as they “show and tell” the work. As they read their creeds, I am heartened and sometimes even tear up. And in conversation after conversation this semester, I heard the same phrase, almost as a confession mid-conference: “I know it’s not research-y, but in a TikTok I saw…” “I know it’s not the best source, but I saw a reel that said…” “This guy I follow always says…”

Each of these notes expanded or connected my own thinking about course content. Some couldn’t be backed in my mind of research, but others could. So, instead of arguing, I asked questions: Who created that content? What might their motivation be? Why does it matter to you? This kind of questioning reflects what Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle describe as “inquiry as stance” – an orientation where teachers are active investigators of knowledge.

An Epistemological Shift

We are in a shift in epistemology. Future teachers are learning not only through peer-reviewed research or textbooks, but also through short-form video, personality-driven content, and lived teacher experience shared in real time – what media scholars like Henry Jenkins describe as a more participatory culture of knowledge. This is democratizing, the dismantling of the silo that has long held educational research out of reach. But this is also destabilizing.

During my first years of teaching, I cried in my car a lot. If I had had the megaphone of TikTok influencers celebrating how they left education, or even my own content microphone, I’m not sure I would have made it through to my later years of teaching that are still hard but more grounded and fulfilling.

Admittedly, some positions are ones to leave. Yes, at times educator working conditions are not what they should be but how do we help pre-service and early-career teachers move through the baptism-by-fire years while being bombarded by voices – many from people who have left the profession and now narrate it from the outside? Some of the content is helpful. Some of it is not. And all of it is loud.

I wonder if our teacher preparation programs are keeping pace with how knowledge is actually being formed. It leads me to my favorite teacher question, “So what? What do we do now?” How long do we hack away at the plant growing up the wall, and when is it time to embrace the aesthetic of a vine-covered building as something worth studying?

Instead, what if we become weavers of stories? What if we help students craft their own and build connections of knowing? What if we engage lived experience not as secondary to research, but as a complementary form of knowing? When have we had so much access to real-time teacher voices about things that happened to them in the classroom that day?

Just because something is visual, narrative, click-baity, and social doesn’t mean it is missing the mark or doesn’t engage a pedagogical question worth exploring. This TikTok wondering is happening whether we embrace it or not, so what if we see it as a new charge to help future teachers engage these voices critically, rather than pretending they don’t exist?

Here are some ideas I’m playing with. I’m curious what you might add.

Ed Content Fridays. Students bring in content that connects with the week’s readings and learning from their own scrolling. Discuss it in a Spider-Web format that employs elements of a librarian CRAAP test to help students develop habits of mind around credibility and content creator motivation.

Use a C3WP writing strategy that engages reels and posts to kick off class. Start with what students know as a free write and then bring in content to have them expand their arguments and defend thoughts with research from our shared text. If students bring it in, they find it interesting, and we can require a citation connection to the course text or researchers.

Like/Share/Subscribe. Share strong online content that sings from reputable sources with students. Syllabi and course hubs can be places to curate rich content collaboratively.

Have students create their own content. CapCut on a desktop or Edits on a phone are surprisingly easy plug-and-play tools to make short form videos, and we can up the academic requirements with or without student posting. Thoughtful content can grow out of our rich history of educational research, bringing rich, thoughtful voices in among the pervasive ranting. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be about the work of educational reform and that a good rant doesn’t have its place, but this new way of knowing and sharing knowledge is sitting in our desks waiting for us to light the fire.

Yes, my step-dad is right, there is so much we can’t learn from a book, but maybe there is still so much we can learn from our own students in their own ways of knowing, even if we don’t fully understand them ourselves. What if our ways of knowing weave together, creating something beautiful?

Can Schools Afford an AI-First Future?

Mi Aniefuna — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most conversations about generative artificial intelligence in schools eventually zoom in on using AI in the classroom. Before districts redesign teaching and learning around AI, they may need to answer a more fundamental question: Can schools afford an AI-first future?

The question sounds strange because generative AI is often presented as software with free and low cost tiers to individual users. Teachers open a browser window, type a prompt, and receive a response in seconds. The experience feels almost weightless and as simple as a Google search. The infrastructure behind that interaction is much more complicated.

A useful way to think about generative AI is to remember the large desktop computers that once sat in school computer labs. Students interacted with a monitor and keyboard, but much of the important work happened elsewhere inside a massive tower packed with hardware.

Today’s AI systems operate similarly, except the tower has been replaced by massive data centers located hundreds or thousands of miles away — and increasingly in some cases, just a few miles away.

Cost of Compute

An explanation is in order. How do chatbots and the hardware behind them work? Think of the chatbot prompt as the remote control. The hardware stored at the data center is the wiring within a television, and the chatbot’s output is what appears on screen as you watch and flick through channels.

Every student prompt, teacher-generated lesson plan or AI-assisted feedback comment depends on specialized processors, networking infrastructure, electricity, water, and increasingly scarce computing capacity.

Most discussions about AI in education begin after those systems are already in place. However, a growing body of research suggests schools should pay closer attention to the infrastructure itself.

Researchers studying AI adoption in education have largely focused on classroom implementation, AI literacy and governance. Stanford’s review of the evidence base for AI in K-12 education found that adoption continues to outpace rigorous evidence about educational outcomes. At the same time, UNESCO and other organizations have increasingly emphasized governance, transparency and human oversight as schools experiment with AI tools.

A separate body of research examines the infrastructure that makes those tools possible. Urban planners, computer engineers and environmental researchers have begun documenting the physical footprint of artificial intelligence. Their work points to a reality that is largely invisible to educators: generative AI is both software and hardware that requires robust infrastructure to support and scale.

Research by Xiaofan Liang, PhD on data centers describes how AI expansion increasingly shapes land use, energy systems, local planning decisions and community development. Research by Shaolei Ren, PhD on power and water demand demonstrates that large-scale AI deployment carries substantial resource requirements that extend well beyond the technology sector. Researchers and policymakers are now examining how data center growth affects electricity demand, water consumption, electrical grid capacity, and environmental sustainability.

According to estimates cited by the Congressional Research Service, U.S. data centers consumed about 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, roughly 4.4% of all U.S. electricity consumption. Using average residential electricity consumption estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that's enough electricity to power nearly 17 million American homes for a year. The map below shows where the United States sits in the world's energy picture and why AI's growing appetite for power matters.

Attribution: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2020) - “Energy Production and Consumption” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. (archived on May 18, 2026).

Traditionally, districts purchase educational technology such as learning management systems, assessment platforms and instructional software through licensing agreements that can often be forecast years into the future. But generative AI operates differently.

Unlike traditional software, which becomes cheaper to distribute as it scales, generative AI continues generating costs each time users engage with the system. Industry observers increasingly point to what’s called “inference costs,” which are the computing resources required to generate responses. These are some of the major costs of LLMs for consumers and one of the central economic challenges facing AI companies.

For schools, how can a district plan for these costs, and what happens when the costs far exceed expectations? Put another way, it’s unclear whether generative AI is financially feasible for schools.

Many districts are currently experimenting with AI through pilot programs, limited licenses or AI features embedded within existing products. There are few examples of what universal access would actually cost.

What would it mean for every student and their teachers to have access to generative AI every day? Before we address this question, there is another cost variable to consider: data privacy.

Many educators and parents have expressed concerns about student information flowing into commercial AI systems. One response has been to advocate for private deployments, district-controlled systems or locally hosted models that offer greater oversight and protection.

Those approaches may provide stronger governance, but they also require additional investment. That makes student data privacy a matter of policy and infrastructure. The more control schools want over data, the more likely they are to encounter costs related to storage, cybersecurity, hardware, networking and technical expertise.

Understanding the Generative AI Market

Meanwhile, the broader market continues to evolve.

OpenAI, Anthropic and other major AI companies are still competing to define the commercial landscape. Product offerings change frequently. Pricing models continue to evolve. Infrastructure investments remain enormous.

The result is a technology ecosystem with long-term economics that remains uncertain at precisely the moment schools are being encouraged to integrate it more deeply into teaching and learning. This uncertainty arrives during a challenging financial period for many districts.

Federal ESSER funding has expired. States continue debating educational technology spending priorities. District leaders face growing pressure to justify technology investments while responding to staffing shortages, student mental health concerns, and academic recovery efforts post-COVID-19 school shutdowns.

Against that backdrop, AI presents a different kind of procurement question: Do districts understand the long-term commitments they may be making when AI becomes embedded in curriculum, assessment and daily operations?

There is still one more cost factor to consider: community impact around data centers. Data centers are expanding rapidly across the United States. Local governments and residents are increasingly debating the benefits and tradeoffs associated with new facilities. Questions about energy demand, water consumption, environmental exposure and land use have become common features of public meetings and planning discussions.

For educators, these debates may seem distant from classroom practice. But every discussion about AI in schools ultimately depends on the infrastructure being built in communities across the country.

Schools are currently debating how to integrate AI into teaching and learning while the infrastructure, economics and governance systems required to support large-scale adoption are still taking shape.

Before schools decide how deeply AI belongs in classrooms, they may need a clearer understanding of how much it costs and if it’s feasible to maintain the systems that make an AI-ready classroom possible.

What My Students Deserve Shouldn’t Be Radical

Alice Domínguez — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’m not the first to say this, but it’s a strange and heartbreaking time to be a teacher and parent of young children.

As a recent transplant to New Mexico, I admire the ways the state invests in children, regardless of their identities. Seeing these state policies in action has changed my perspective and made me think differently about what students deserve and how much better things would be if we chose to care for students and families more consistently.

There are days when my own children are crawling into my lap with a book while I continue to process footage of children suffering in conflicts on the other side of the world. My high school students are writing the kind of poetry that leaves me speechless, even as I privately wonder about their career options as artificial intelligence receives more investment than the arts. Yet, my experience in New Mexico has shown me that another approach is possible.

I have a unique vantage point, both as a parent and an educator who sees these challenges reflected in the lives of my students and their families. My local school district in New Mexico has yet to pivot to hybrid learning in response to the palpable fear parents felt, while the actions of federal agents created widespread fear in their community. My state is not banning books and restricting curricula. Instead, as a recent transplant to the state, I’m in awe of the ways New Mexico invests in children and our more vulnerable residents.

After the 2024 election, a shockwave swept through my school as students grappled with what another Trump presidency would mean for their futures. At the performing arts school where I teach, we have a high percentage of queer and trans students, a stark contrast to my previous school in California, where most LGBTQ+ students often chose to remain closeted until well after graduation. I grieve for what my previous students lost when they did not acknowledge or affirm their queer and trans classmates. In English class, they missed robust discussions; the depth their queer and trans peers bring to literary discussions, while leveraging queer theory, translates into highly analytical and more engaging coursework. In the scope of a school day, there were countless other ways all students missed a more complete experience, while their queer and trans peers chose safety in an environment hostile to their identities.

And while New Mexico is much less hostile to trans residents, I still can’t imagine what it would be like to be growing up in a world that constantly demands you to defend and fight for your humanity. Guaranteed care by the state means nothing if authority figures are consistently exposed to negative messaging about transgender people or if your lack of insurance prevents you from getting the life-saving care you need.

And yet, trans students in New Mexico are able to attend school in an environment with teachers who are largely committed to affirming a variety of gender identities, select curriculum that allows LGBTQ students to see themselves, bond with accepting and encouraging peers from across the gender spectrum, and learn from LGBTQ teachers who embody a hopeful future of what it means to be your full self in your career. This is all possible when a school doesn't just accommodate gender and sexual diversity, but embraces it. Extensive research confirms the ways in which affirming environments like ours can be life-saving for LGBTQ teens, especially trans students.

Earlier in my career, I felt optimistic about my queer and trans students’ futures. Today, seeing my trans students grapple with the new political realities has renewed my commitment to making an optimistic future visible for them. In a past article, I reflected on my role as a teacher in presenting a hopeful future for my students during unhopeful times. There is no one for whom this is more crucial than our queer and trans students.

Ultimately, I wonder what it would look like for our world to care about children as much as the state of New Mexico does. What will happen when all children can attend high-quality early childhood education without adding to the financial burden of a growing family? What does it look like when gender affirming care is protected by law? Or when our lawmakers prohibit book and curriculum censorship? Or when we finally decide that school shootings do not have to be a certainty of American life?

I know these questions will remain abstract while we watch students as young as Liam Ramos fear for their lives. But we cannot have a different future if we are not imagining a better one in the present. I’m thankful for my students, past and present, who encourage my imagination.

This story is part of an EdSurge series chronicling educator experiences. These stories are made publicly available with support from the Learning Commons. EdSurge maintains editorial control over all content. (Read our ethics statement here.) This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Podcast: Recess, Screens, and Absenteeism

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Schools have been quietly chipping away at recess for nearly a decade, and a sweeping new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics says it is time to stop. Meanwhile, the federal government has issued a formal advisory on screen time and children, raising urgent questions about how schools, parents, and tech companies should respond.

This week, EdSurge reporters Lauren Coffey and Nadia Tamez-Robledo bring both stories together around a single urgent question: what does it look like when kids get less real-world experience and more pressure?

What You'll Learn:

The American Academy of Pediatrics updated its recess guidelines for the first time since 2013, expanding its recommendations to include middle and high school students.
One Massachusetts high school cut chronic absenteeism from 35% to 23% in a single year after introducing movement breaks, suggesting that belonging and physical activity can drive school attendance in meaningful ways.
The screen time advisory issued by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy calls for bell-to-bell phone bans, warning labels on apps, and the elimination of recommendation algorithms for children, but researchers caution that the evidence linking screen time to negative outcomes is correlation, not proven cause and effect.
Experts warn that broad phone and screen restrictions could inadvertently affect students with IEPs and disabilities who rely on assistive devices, a tension the advisory acknowledges but does not fully resolve.

Listen to the episode:

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Podcast: AI Is in Schools. Teachers Are Not Ready.

EdSurge Staff — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three-quarters of school districts now have AI guidelines, up sharply from just a year ago, yet 82% of teachers say they have never received formal guidance on how to use AI in their work. EdSurge reporter Lauren Coffey breaks down the 2026 CoSN State of Ed Tech report and what it reveals about AI adoption, cybersecurity gaps, and edtech vetting inside K-12 districts. Then host Ira Apfel talks with Joseph South, chief innovation officer at ISTE+ASCD, about why teachers say they feel unprepared to bring AI into their classrooms and what it would take to change that.

What You'll Learn

Why AI adoption in K-12 districts jumped from 54% in 2025 to 75 percent this year, and why most prefer local flexibility over state or federal mandates. Why cybersecurity remains many districts’ top concern even as two-thirds lack the staff and budget to address it, and what the Canvas ransomware attack reveals about the real cost of that gap.
What the Gallup and Walton Family Foundation data actually shows about the teacher guidance crisis: 82% of teachers have received no formal AI guidance, 34% have received no guidance at all, and 69% have received no guidance specifically on using AI for one-on-one instruction or tutoring.
How districts in Long Beach, Gwinnett County, and Fairfax County are building transparency-first AI frameworks, and what the Lighthouse Schools model offers as a replicable path for districts that want to move without waiting for policy from above.

Listen to the episode:

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What to Do About AI? Begin by Talking About It

Aleta Margolis — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:09:48 GMT

For over 30 years I’ve been teaching teachers to engage in meaningful conversations with their students about real things. Strong teachers know how to pose thoughtful questions, elicit questions from students, and listen and engage respectfully with students.

And yet, 30 years in, there are still a shocking number of schools where adults and children fail to discuss important issues. For instance, according to findings recently released by RAND’s American Youth Panel, only about 1 in 3 students say their school has a school-wide policy on the use of AI. Many students say AI policy in their school varies by teacher, and 67 percent of students endorsed the statement, “The more students use AI for their schoolwork, the more it will harm their critical thinking skills.”

The RAND report recommends “direct conversations” with students about the use of AI. So let’s talk about how to do that.

Talking Directly About AI in Schools

According to the Center for Democracy and Technology, approximately 85 percent of teachers and students report using AI for schoolwork. If your school has a clear policy on AI use, great! Discuss it with your students. Ask them how they feel about it; what’s clear and what needs more explanation; what feels fair and what they might want to advocate to change.

If your school does not have a clear policy on AI, talk with your colleagues, and talk with your students. Here are some questions to get those conversations started.

With colleagues, including teachers and school leaders:

Is it our goal to make things easier for students? For teachers? AI can simplify, increase efficiency, and in other ways do the work for us. Is this what we want?
If so, when is this a good thing?
In what types of situations might we want to avoid making things easier?
How can we implement AI and LLM tools in a way that benefits our learning community, i.e. increased efficiency, time savings, ability to gather and analyze more data, etc.?
What guardrails can we put in place to ensure we maintain the learning experiences we value, such as engaging in productive struggle; working through complex problems and devising, testing, and refining solutions?
How are we going to teach students to critically analyze information and “answers” provided by AI tools?
How skillful are our students at identifying bias? Will our students ask, “What’s the source for this information?” “What perspective does this source have?” Can they distinguish fact (i.e. the distance between the Earth and the sun) from opinion (i.e. the filibuster as a tool for promoting democracy)?
What skills do they – and we – need to strengthen in order to ensure that we are the drivers of AI innovation?
Are there other schools or people we trust, admire, and respect who have implemented AI policies? What can we learn from them?
What processes do we have in place (or can we put into place) to include student voice in determining when and how to use AI in our school?

With students:

What is valuable about the work we do together in school? How might AI tools increase this value? How might AI undermine it?
What does integrity mean to us, as individuals and as a school? How can we implement AI in a way that supports integrity in our school?
What do you know about AI? What do you want to know about it?
What are some ways we might use AI in our school? What are the potential benefits and drawbacks?

Aligning AI with School Values

If this seems like a lot of work, and a lot to talk about, that’s because it is. An AI policy isn’t something to overlay on a school, and then continue with business as usual. AI is a powerful tool. It has the power to disrupt. That disruption can be beneficial, such as disrupting inequitable access to information and learning tools. It can also be harmful: AI can fuel complacency and undermine critical thinking and curiosity. So a school’s AI policy needs to be deeply aligned with the school’s values. And that requires thoughtful, school-wide conversations about those values.

During these conversations, make liberal use of the phrase, “I don’t know.” Because we don’t have all the answers. There is so much we don’t yet know about what AI can, or should, do. How it might support, or undermine, critical thinking and curiosity.

When you engage in conversations based on the questions above, you are modeling to your students – and your colleagues – how to puzzle through complex issues. You’re building uncertainty tolerance. You’re teaching problem solving at the highest level.

And isn’t that what we teachers are here to do in the first place?

I’m Trying to Teach Humanity Before It Disappears

Amanda Rosas — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:00:00 GMT

To be an educator and a writer is to inhabit a rollercoaster world of hope; at times, you are filled with the excitement and power of possibilities, and at others, you are terrified of losing it.

During the Voices of Change fellowship, I not only grew as a writer but was also inspired by educators who gave me the gift of “freedom dreaming.” I’ve since sought opportunities to practice freedom dreaming daily in the classroom. Embedding joy and equity into the curriculum and building authentic relationships with students are my north stars. I refer to my students as family, and to highlight that, I have a banner with a quote by Gwendolyn Brooks on my door. It reads, “We are each other’s magnitude and bond.” I’ve placed photos of the students in my classes all around the banner.

I’ve also begun teaching world history. This class energizes me and makes me want to revolutionize and freedom-dream the way history is taught and explore people and stories that matter.” Facing History and Ourselves” and the “Remedial Herstory Project” have been instrumental in helping me find my way and voice as a history teacher.

Despite teaching a new subject that gives me joy, this particular school year has been one of the most emotionally exhausting and difficult for me. I live in Minneapolis, where our 2025-26 school year began with the mass shooting at Annunciation School, a community with close ties to my school. Then, in December, the havoc of ICE removing neighbors and family members from our communities began and culminated in the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. On the hardest days, I held back tears as I tried to instruct my classes. The students and I were scared; our mental health was tested and we were often distracted by everything outside of our school.

I can’t help but feel that one of the first steps to legitimizing the brutal and dehumanizing treatment of Brown and Black people and those protesting against ICE was creating a narrative that DEI is antithetical to academic learning. However, as a Spanish and history teacher, I know that DEI pumps life into the themes and lessons I teach. I believe it is necessary to center women’s voices and Indigenous histories and to honor Black and Afrolatine lives in our curriculum, creating dynamic lessons with more complex, richer perspectives.

Most inspiring to me has been watching neighbors and friends rise up to protect the safety, integrity and heartbeat of our city as we experience the violence and injustice of ICE. Seeing the strength of my community motivates me to eliminate the idea that hope is lost and inspires me to do my part in the classroom.

The students and I work to banish the hate and inequity infiltrating our lives, and freedom dreaming has pushed me to channel the world I want to live in into the curriculum. For example, I built a lesson for my Spanish class entitled “In Times of Crisis, Humanitarian Help.” We learned about the devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa in many Caribbean countries, but focused on World Central Kitchen and humanitarian José Andrés’s work to restore people’s dignity and ability to live after natural disasters by preparing meals for them.

In world history, we spent longer than necessary on the Mauryan Empire and Ashoka’s legacy in Buddhism, highlighting principles of peace, nonviolence, and respect for all creation. One student told me this lesson made her strongly consider converting to Buddhism. For me, it is crucial for students to know that even though politics and society seem rife with conflict, it is possible to lead with peace, love and fierce empathy.

My life as a writer and educator has continued to evolve. After the fellowship, I earned a Pushcart Prize nomination for poetry in 2024. Receiving the Voices of Change fellowship and then the poetry honor gave me the confidence to apply for and receive a summer writers’ residency this year. I’m excited by the opportunity to continue exploring the part of me that wants to write about my experiences in and out of the classroom, no matter how challenging they may be.

Yet, after over 20 years of teaching, what’s remained constant is creating moments of joy, humor and connection in the classroom. Don’t get me wrong, we still build competencies — not just for school, but for life.

My goal is for each school day to be permeated by the unwritten hope of freedom dreaming, so that the students and I — and, by extension, our wider community — believe in the barrier-breaking power of unity and a world thriving on dignity and respect for all.

Report: School IT Officials Worried About AI Adoption, Cybersecurity

Lauren Coffey — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:25:54 GMT

While schools have made progress in technology adoption — from artificial intelligence guidelines to vetting education technology — they still struggle with the lack of resources, funding and expertise, according to a new report.

The annual State of EdTech report from the Consortium for School Networking polled roughly 600 chief technology officers for K-12 schools. One of the biggest takeaways, according to CoSN CEO Keith Krueger: AI adoption is higher than ever. According to the report, nearly three-quarters (79%) of school districts have AI guidelines in place, up from 57% in 2025.

“Given how many school districts we have, given how many small and rural ones there are, it’s shocking at how quickly at least the guidance around responsible use of AI is,” Krueger says. “As a foundational step, we’re seeing movement.”

But respondents repeatedly stated they are running into roadblocks of insufficient staffing and funding.

“There’s never going to be enough training, and we have to make sure the training is quality and meeting administrators with what they want and need,” Krueger says, adding it’s not just about training on a specific tool, but “helping them think in new ways how to use the tools.”

Most of the districts polled are in favor of AI guidelines, either set by the districts themselves or state education agencies, but do not want state or federal mandates. Typically, mandates are formed, then approved, by a board — something that is time-consuming and does not lend itself well in the fast-moving world of AI.

“This week, this month, this year is changing rapidly,” Krueger says. “It doesn’t mean we change fundamental beliefs of what’s cheating (with AI), for example, but things are moving rapidly. You don’t want to have too many solidly, board-approved things which can get locked in when you need to evolve.”

The most common AI initiative among districts is training staff on the use of instruction-focused generative AI tools, with 7 out of 10 respondents saying they do so. Productivity-focused measures focused on instructional staff and teachers followed, with 54% and 53%, respectively, deploying those initiatives. One of the largest jumps was the amount of districts having initiatives focused on AI’s operational purposes, from 37% in 2025, to 64% in 2026.

Less than half (41%) of initiatives focus on using AI for teaching and learning.

“I would say the low hanging fruit is on the operational and teacher productivity side,” Krueger says. “We should continue to explore and think through the great uses that are in the classroom. But, overnight we shouldn’t just wildly go trying to do those things when it's going to take time to figure out the instructional piece.”

Cybersecurity

The largest concern about AI use: cybersecurity attacks. According to the report, nearly all respondents (98%) are concerned that AI can bring in new forms of cyber attacks, with just 2% stating they are “not at all concerned.” That same percentage also has concerns on student data and AI’s effect on its privacy.

While the concern over cybersecurity is strong, two-thirds of respondents state they have insufficient staffing and budget to address those challenges.

Cybersecurity concerns continue to cause schools woe, most recently with the Instructure attack in May that caused several schools to pay a ransom and shut down one of the world’s largest digital education platforms.

“The high visibility breaches and attacks that we’ve seen underscore the real cost to our school system by not investing in better cybersecurity,” Krueger says.

After 17 years of utilizing the State of EdTech report, Krueger says he believes a tipping point may have finally been reached on addressing cyber concerns.

“Certainly those in charge of technology have been yelling loudly that cybersecurity is a problem,” he says, adding the issue has become more well-known among superintendents and school board members. “I think they will start to say, ‘We can’t just have these broadband networks and not have them safe and secure.’ But it’s a huge challenge, given the lack of human capacity in schools for cybersecurity.”

EdTech

Another major finding from the report is an issue that has been bubbling beneath the surface in both tech evangelist and oppositional circles: vetting educational technology.

Edtech vetting has been under consideration amid the screen-time backlash in classrooms, with some states pushing for better review of the vetting process. Oftentimes, schools rely on the vendors’ own data and are unequipped to review the software themselves to ensure children’s safety.

“There is nobody right now that is confirming these products are safe, effective and legal,” Kim Whitman, co-lead for Smartphone Free Childhood US, said in a previous interview with EdSurge. “It should not fall on the district’s IT director; it would be impossible for them to do it. And the companies should not be tasked with doing it — that would be like nicotine companies vetting their own cigarettes.”

According to the report, most schools now have a process for vetting free edtech tools before they’re used in schools, either through IT or a list of approved vendors.

But that process still has some gaps: only 29 percent require information about if the product is inclusive and accessible for all learners. That is particularly worrisome for accessibility advocates who already fear they are being left out of the conversation.

“Parents with children who have a disability must have a seat at the table,” Sambhavi Chandrashekar, global accessibility lead for D2L, an online learning platform, said in a previous EdSurge interview. “Blanket rules that are blind to fundamental human differences will do more disservice than good to students at the margins.”

And while more than half (55%) of the edtech processes require vendors to provide information about safety, that leaves roughly 45% not addressing safety concerns.

“It’s a huge warning sign; there’s a whole lot of progress and work that has to happen in this area,” Krueger says.

He suggested reviewing the five quality indicators for edtech and AI products, with districts benchmarking their current status and set it as a priority to push forward.

“One of the biggest powers we have is procurement, so getting serious about how we buy them, and when,” Krueger says. “Whether or not we move forward will depend on if we set it as a priority and get serious about the awareness, the training and the policies.”

Why College Degrees Matter in the Age of AI

Rita Finkel — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:26:59 GMT

For the past few years, our nation has been flooded with headlines declaring the demise of the college degree. This trend was exacerbated by COVID-19, which accelerated a decline in college interest.

I understand, really, I do. Tuition costs are rising. Student debt is real.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is also reshaping white-collar work by automating routine cognitive tasks, changing hiring patterns and increasing the use of AI tools in professional occupations. A 2025 Gallup survey found that AI use at work among U.S. employees nearly doubled from 21% in 2023 to 40% in 2025.

This is drawing many to a simple conclusion: a four-year college degree is no longer worth the time or money.

But the data, and the broader reality of how careers and life actually unfold, tell a different story.

Yes, the labor market for recent graduates has become more competitive. Yet college graduates still consistently outperform non-graduates in employment, earnings and long-term career resilience, according to new national data from the College Board Education Pays 2026 report.

But more importantly, a degree from a competitive college with a high graduation rate cultivates the ultimate asset in a rapidly changing economy: the ability to think critically. This includes being able to understand AI, as those who do will be better positioned to shape how it’s used ethically and responsibly.

That matters now more than ever.

Recent analysis from the Federal Reserve and labor economists shows that while the wage gap between graduates and non-graduates has narrowed, college graduates still maintain lower unemployment rates overall and stronger long-term job stability. A 2025 analysis from the St. Louis Fed found that from 2000 to 2025, workers with only a high school diploma consistently faced unemployment rates at least 2.3 percentage points higher than workers with bachelor’s degrees.

Even amid a softer hiring market, the advantage remains clear. Data cited by Goldman Sachs and other labor researchers showed unemployment for young non-college workers hovering around 7% in 2025, compared with roughly 4.6% for recent college graduates.

That is not a meaningless difference. In a large economy, a few percentage points represent millions of jobs.

Critics often focus narrowly on whether college guarantees a job immediately after graduation. That framing misrepresents the real purpose of higher education. College is not merely vocational training. It is preparation for a lifetime of economic and intellectual change.

The modern workforce is evolving too quickly for any technical skill to remain permanent. Entire industries now transform within a decade. Many students entering college today will eventually work in jobs that do not yet exist. In this environment, being able to think critically becomes the ultimate career skill.

A strong college education teaches students how to analyze information, communicate clearly, solve unfamiliar problems, conduct research, collaborate with different kinds of people, and learn independently. Those capacities transfer across different industries and technologies.

Ironically, the rise of AI may make these human skills even more important. Employers increasingly value workers who can think critically, interpret nuance and make judgments machines cannot easily replicate, according to Western Governors University, which surveyed more than 3,000 employers. Technical skills may evolve every few years; the ability to learn and think critically endures. According to McKinsey, “Human skills will matter more in the age of AI.”

The ability to think and process information is also why college graduates tend to weather recessions better over the course of their careers. Historically, workers with higher educational attainment have experienced lower unemployment during recessions and often recover faster in labor market recoveries, though this advantage varies by industry, age, and economic cycle. In 2024, unemployment for bachelor’s degree holders was 2.5%, compared with 4.3% for high school graduates and 6.1% for people without a diploma, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Of course, higher education must confront legitimate concerns about affordability and workforce alignment. There’s nothing wrong with questioning college directly after high school if a student is interested in pursuing a low-demand degree with high debt or if the student has yet to define a clear career goal.

But seeing college as only a trade school, in my opinion, is the wrong way to look at it. There are tremendous educations available where financial aid is available to help those who need it to meet the demands of higher education costs. There are wonderful State Schools and City Schools that are great choices for students.

This is an endorsement of a 4-year college degree, at a competitive school, to learn how to think critically, for a lifelong ability to learn new things. One thing we do know about the future is that we will need a population that has the ability to synthesize information quickly and accurately.

The real question is not whether college guarantees success. Nothing does.

The question is whether developing analytical ability, communication skills, flexibility, and intellectual independence still matters in an uncertain economy.

I am here to say they do. Perhaps more than ever.

The future will belong not simply to people who know things, but to people who can keep learning new things. College, at its best, remains one of the strongest environments for building that habit.

A college degree and a stable career can benefit generations. Earning a college degree is linked to longer, healthier lives, higher incomes, greater civic participation and better career alignment. While economic benefits are substantial, the lifestyle advantages extend to health, social engagement and personal fulfillment.

And that is why it is still worth it.

Recess Took a Break in Some Schools. A Push is On to Bring It Back.

Lauren Coffey — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:01:57 GMT

Increased attendance, better attention in classrooms, stronger friendships, and more engaged citizens – these are not a long wishlist of preferred traits in an elementary school student. They are what some advocates believe are a direct impact from recess.

Recess, long a staple in children’s school days, has been put on the back burner or cut entirely by some districts as the push for more class time, higher academic performance, and increased test scores take center stage.

Recess advocates are pushing back in their efforts to guarantee a playtime each day. They argue adding in more structured play time benefits children’s academic, social and emotional well-being.

“It’s not that we don’t need hard work and concentrated effort, but when you hit a wall, you take a break,” says Catherine Ramstetter, who co-authored a new report for the American Academy of Pediatrics touting the importance of structured play. “That’s where I think, systematically, we’re kind of broken; that we expect little kids to be like little robots.”

The Push for Play

The AAP recently affirmed its 2013 stance that not only is recess important for children’s cognitive, physical and emotional well-being but expanded the recommendations to include middle and high school students too.

“I don’t know many high school teachers that are studying or deep into play,” Ramstetter says, pointing out early childhood teachers typically receive training in structured play. “Also, culturally in older grades, rigor is somehow equated with your nose to the grindstone –- when in reality, when we want to attain rigor, we have to have breaks.”

Similar to a push against screentime – specifically cell phones – in the classroom, grassroots efforts have formed to bring back recess. More than a dozen states, largely led by the nonprofit Yes to Recess Movement, are pushing for 60 minutes of play per day and ensuring it is not used as a bargaining chip for good or bad behavior.

“There has been a lot of evolution of the understanding of the value of recess over 30 years,” says Elizabeth Cushing, CEO of PlayWorks, a nonprofit that helps schools implement evidence-based play tactics.

“What might have been perceived as a ‘break’ is now seen as a critical part of the school day,” she adds. “It’s enabling kids to be in connection with each other in a way that’s fun, with low stakes, to build a community.”

Pushing for state or federal bills have yielded mixed reactions. Each advocate interviewed points out that they have never come with an allocation of funding to help facilitate the implementation, and also had concerns with a lack of other resources, namely helping teachers find time to accommodate the recess breaks. Deborah Rhea, founder of the Let’s inspire innovation ‘N Kids (LiinK) Project, suggests each local district tackles it by deciding what is best for its own schools and students.

“I think we have made more strides than I ever thought possible,” says Rhea, who also serves as a professor of kinesiology at Texas Christian University. “But at the same time, we’re limping along. We’re not being successful with momentum. Doing this propels them forward academically.”

But Ramstetter says introducing those minutes alone is not enough.

“I think policy can help support practice, but to make it quality playtime — something that doesn’t feel like an onerous task on a school — you have to spend some time planning,” she says. “Similar to introducing a new curriculum on English. It’s treating it like the crucial instructional time that it is.”

The Benefits of Play

In addition to benefiting younger students, the boost in social skills like teamwork and inclusion, along with physical benefits can be particularly important as students get older, Cushing says.

“The opportunities and skill building that happens in elementary school around cooperation, teamwork and how to include everyone in a game are easily done at that age,” she says. “They follow into middle and high schools where technology and social pressures require they have those skills already. If we want to develop citizens who work in a team and make friends, we have to start early.”

Experts added that recess can also boost attendance, a particularly important factor given high rates of chronic absenteeism sweeping the nation. Massachusetts-based Bedford High School offered “movement breaks” during lunch and saw chronic absenteeism decrease from 35% to 23% within its first year alone.

“There’s a lot of focus on recess to help with belonging and source of positive, joyful feelings about school,” Cushing says, adding schools with the PlayWorks framework saw lower chronic absenteeism rates than those without it.

Rhea of LiiNK listed multiple benefits she’s seen across the roughly 25,000 students that underwent her programming: cortisol levels (tested by hair samples) went down; academic assessment scores went up; off-task behavior in the classroom dropped 40 percent, and schools found offering the programming could be used as a recruitment tactic.

“The only time I had to convince parents was the first year I started this,” she says. “After that, word of mouth spread.”

There still is the uphill battle of convincing schools to find time in their day. Not every district can afford to roll out a system similar to Rhea’s or Cushing’s, either financially or with spare time.

The Future of Play

However, Cushing pointed out even with little resources, children tend to thrive with simple, structured play.

“Recess is the only time in the school day where children naturally know they have mastery,” she says. “The beauty of recess is that kids will play everywhere. Despite all the complexity there’s a real beauty in the universality of it.”

However, students do need some resources, like a jump rope and designated play areas, otherwise they may not receive the full benefits of recess even if they are outside.

“If you look at a playground where there’s no frame for it, you’ll see a majority of kids standing around the outside of the playground,” Cushing says. “They’re too afraid or shy to jump in and don’t know if it’s going to be fun or not. It’s not that they don’t want to play, they just need the conditions created to do it.”

While cell phones are less common in elementary school settings, experts added a lack of screens could improve play conditions.

Schools have pushed for more tech-free time, specifically with “bell to bell” bans that require cell phones remain untouched for the entirety of the school day, including during lunch, recess and passing periods.

The AAP study did not explicitly mention the use of technology. However, Ramstetter says the implication was “yeah, get it out of the way,” she adds.

“Don’t give them to kids at recess: Encourage them to connect, give them quiet places to sit. to run around, to dig in the dirt,” she says, comparing the ban to other forms of consent. “If I tell you I don’t want to play anymore, I need to mean it. Otherwise it gets muddy.”

She adds sometimes simple is best, pointing toward schools that just have a jump rope, chalk, and Four Square – things that allow children to make their own rules. “Everyone agrees recess is beneficial, but you have to do it well to reap the benefits,” Ramstetter says. “If we all believe it's beneficial, let’s take a step back to see how can we better tap into some of this time, preparing to do it well.”

Surgeon General Advisory Wants Kids to Live ‘Beyond the Confines of Screens’

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:34:04 GMT

The U.S. Surgeon General’s office issued a warning yesterday about the harms of extended uses of screens on children, raising concerns about its impact on academic performance, physical health and mental well-being.

The advisory follows a contentious debate over screen time that has been fraught in recent years as schools that implemented 1-to-1 device ratios amid the pandemic now struggle with student attention, behavioral and mental health issues that took root around the same time.

The latest advisory urges kids to pursue — and for the adults in their lives to encourage — a “broader world, beyond the confines of screens,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an opening letter. The role of U.S. surgeon general has been vacant since January 2025, but the advisory was issued by a committee led by Kennedy Jr.

The report encapsulates what researchers and education experts have been long saying: Excessive time in front of devices like smartphones and tablets can worsen mental health and academic outcomes for students.

The American Academy of Pediatrics took a more nuanced approach to a similar report it released, Whitney Raglin Bignall, associate clinical director of The Kids Mental Health Foundation, tells EdSurge. Researchers rolled back their specific limits on screen time in favor of “family media plans” that set boundaries for media consumption.

The Surgeon General’s advisory calls on schools to implement plans that many districts are already adopting or considering: bell-to-bell cellphone bans, or bans that do not allow the use of phones during the entirety of the school day, including passing periods and lunchtime. It also proposes screen time limits. The advisory specifies that screen time limit exceptions should be made for students who have individualized education programs or other needs for assistive devices — something about which disability advocates have expressed worry.

It also urges schools to teach digital citizenship and digital literacy along with offering students social and physical activities that don’t involve screens.

The report hits back against tech companies, like those that recently lost a California civil case over social media addiction. They were called by the advisory to eschew designing their apps for engagement in favor of user well-being by incorporating warnings about harmful screen use every time a user opens the app. The advisory also calls for tech companies to encourage children to socialize with friends and play outside, and get rid of features like recommendation algorithms and notifications.

Correlation, Not Causation

Raglin Bignall, associate clinical director of The Kids Mental Health Foundation, cautions that while research has found a correlation between screen time and poor mental health, there’s not yet cause-and-effect evidence.

“There might be kids who need less [screen time], or those who are doing lots of different types of things with that content that's interactive that is not harmful,” Raglin Bignall says. “Nevertheless, it should be monitored. By doing that, we make sure that we're not doing too much [with screens], and that whatever we are doing is beneficial.”

Teachers might notice students being distracted, not listening, being irritable or having a hard time being away from screens, Raglin Bignall says. Fatigue or lack of sleep among students may also be signs of too much screen time. She adds that screen time should especially be monitored for children who have attention or hyperactivity disorders.

Not all screen time or content is equal, Raglin Bignall says. Teachers don’t need to rush to boot quality, evidence-based education apps from their lesson plans.

The warning calls attention to harmful online behaviors like bullying and gambling. The content children encounter on these platforms can encourage risky behaviors like self-harm and substance use, the advisory claims, or put them in the path of exploitative strangers.

In general, good content is educational, slow-paced and isn’t trying to market any products, Raglin Bignall says. Adults should pay special attention to what teens and tweens are seeing online, as those who struggle with confidence could be particularly vulnerable to harmful content like accounts that promote eating disorders.

“I wouldn't want to make it seem that all screen time is bad,” Raglin Bignall says. “I often recommend co-watching with adults during those younger ages. As kids get older, it's still important for adults to monitor the level of content and what is being offered to them.”

VR Gives North Dakota Kids an Early Career Jump Start

Lauren Coffey — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:35:36 GMT

As one fourth grader peers over the top of a 300-foot-tall wind turbine, a classmate stands next to surgeons operating in an emergency room. Nearby, another fourth grader shuffles through an autobody shop.

They are not visiting high-risk job sites, at least not in real life.

These experiences are the result of a series of investments into virtual reality in North Dakota.

The state hopes that putting VR headsets with career-focused software in classrooms will eventually boost local employment. While many schools across the country are looking to limit screen time, North Dakota is pushing for increasingly younger students to use these digital tools.

Because North Dakota is largely rural, students’ face significant travel hurdles to visit job sites that could be several hours away, says Mackenzie Tadych, director of Northern Cass School’s college career and readiness program.

The VR investment "was an attempt to engage students at an earlier age and develop an awareness of [the careers] the state has to offer,” says Wayde Sick, state director for the Department of Career and Technical Education. “This is the first glance to show what is out there without throwing a bunch of students on a bus where you drive two hours for a field trip and two hours back.”

Tech to Supplement Lower Resourced Areas

In North Dakota, the virtual reality program works directly with employers in the state in an effort to bring awareness to careers and fields students may be unfamiliar with or have misconceptions about, such as manufacturing.

The statewide program first started in 2023, after the North Dakota state legislature passed a bill that allotted a half-million dollars to the state's Department of Career and Technical Education to purchase virtual reality headsets that would be used by middle and high schools. Late last year, that was expanded to all elementary schools in the state.

While more traditional career exploration modes – like career aptitude tests – are still used, VR is a way for more children to literally visualize potential new careers. The initiative, which is an expansion on the RUReady ND career exploration program, offers 118 different modules for students through Fargo-based CareerViewXR.

Ann Pollert, a career exploration coach, has a mobile van that visits schools at every level throughout six counties in the northeastern part of the state. Her bus is outfitted with seven headsets and she works on average with five students at a time, helping find their interests and guiding them through the modules.

“I would go into classroom after classroom and give a 50-minute spiel, but they had no visual,” Pollert, a former diesel technician recruiter, says. “With this, I could take it to the school and show those kids what it means to replace an excavator. It helps me identify the students I need to further encourage.”

She says the headsets as a whole are not meant to replace guidance or career counselors, particularly in high schools. As those counselors find themselves with increasingly higher workloads and less time, this is seen as a supplement.

“We still need career counselors, work-based learning counselors and great teachers that notice something about a student, saying, ‘You would be good at this,’” Pollert says, adding that some smaller schools do not have the resources for those counselors. “It’s everything together to make it work. It’s not the van that’s solving the problem.”

So, is it working?

Future Tech — And Potential

Sick, the state director, says it’s too early to measure the impact of these programs, including whether it’s increased the number of students staying in the state to work post-graduation.

Most of the efforts are focused on students who have yet to graduate high school, he points out. But he does believe this program serves as a starting place for younger students to explore their interests at an early age.

“In my eyes, this content is most important for elementary and middle school-aged kids, so the high school students have seen those experiences, have an idea of what they want to pursue and can do so in a series of courses based on what they have seen in virtual reality as a fifth or sixth grader,” he says.

Sometimes in VR, the students find what they dislike.

Tadych, of Northern Cass School, recalls a student vehemently reacting to a virtual reality module that placed them in a high-stress operating room.

“It’s just as beneficial being able to find what you don’t want to do,” she says, adding that the district also requires students to job shadow before graduation, following around professionals as they go through their work day.

And as the VR experiences get more lifelike, students will get more useful information about possible careers.

For example, Sick believes the technology could evolve down the road to include augmented reality, where students would be able to more fully interact with their environment. He believes the interactions will not only alert children of more local career opportunities, but keep them in the state upon graduating.

“We’re a rural state, and my goal is to make sure every student has the best experience they [can] have, to find what they should become, and try to help them figure it out sooner,” he says. He adds that the only way to do that is to provide a rich variety of experiences that start at the elementary level.

Amid School Techlash, Accessibility Advocates Worry About Exclusion

Daniel Mollenkamp — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:50:41 GMT

Keri Rodrigues, a mother of five boys, knows the value of screens.

For her boys, four of whom receive school accommodations, screens serve a practical purpose at school.

“When you get a kid who's got [a learning plan] for anxiety and a substitute teacher that hasn't read his 504 [plan] and there's nobody there to de-escalate him, he's got to use his phone to call mom so I can FaceTime with him and do a breathing exercise,” Rodrigues says.

But this use of screens bumps against a new concern. Fueled by distress over the mental health impacts of too much screen time, lawmakers have begun to pass device bans and other restrictions for schools, in a rising “techlash” across state capitols.

Now, as the country wrestles with restricting screens, some parents and disability advocates are beginning to express concerns about whether students who rely on accessibility tools are being excluded from the rulemaking process. Some of these advocates say they agree that new tech restrictions are necessary, but they are calling for careful consideration in how these rules are written.

Many neurodiverse students need assistive technologies for learning, and it’s common for digital tools to be prescribed in the plans schools use for these students. Assistive technologies support functional and social needs for these students’ daily lives, argued Sambhavi Chandrashekar, global accessibility lead for D2L, an online learning platform, in a series of emails to EdSurge.

Chandrashekar and others worry that lawmakers aren’t consulting families with neurodiverse students enough when crafting new restrictions, and that screen time laws could impinge on accessibility tools. They worry that the gains these students have made are becoming swept up in larger political battles.

Advocates are calling for a proactive approach to avoid potential problems down the road, and EdSurge has not yet found an example of a student blocked from using an assistive device because of these new bans.

Students with ADHD might use screens for reminders, alarms, timers, or even medical alerts, says Rodrigues, the mom. Students with autism use it for self-regulation, and students with anxiety, epilepsy, asthma, or vision and hearing differences rely on specific accessibility features on their phones. One of her own sons, a senior in high school, uses a meditation app to de-escalate, she says.

In her position as president of the advocacy group National Parents Union, Rodrigues wants caution from lawmakers. The new legislation is “really well intended,” she says. But: “We've got to make sure we're not stomping on kids that are actually utilizing these devices for really important reasons.”

“Phones aren't just toys for kids,” Rodigues says.

Inclusion as the Norm

Disability laws such as the Individual with Disabilities Education Act guarantee students the right to assistive technologies, sometimes including screens.

But the new restrictions occur at a particularly tense time for these families.

Mass firings and funding cuts under the Trump administration have cast doubt on the reliability of federal civil rights protections and processes, some argue, leading to an increase in accessibility-related lawsuits, as families look to protect their rights. For instance, according to a nonpartisan government watchdog report, the Trump administration’s cuts to the office which reviews civil rights complaints contributed to a 90 percent dismissal of student civil rights complaints in the later months of 2025.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice delayed a long-anticipated deadline that required schools and vendors to meet widely accepted accessibility guidelines, after it became clear that schools and governments were not ready.

And advocates have already called attention to bills that would subject students with disabilities to surveillance cameras in classrooms, in the hopes of curbing physical restrains against these students, as EdSurge has reported.

‘Unintentional Segregation’

As for the latest screen restrictions, many of the bills note that they do not apply to students with disabilities under law. For example, laws from Alabama and Tennessee carve out blanket exemptions for students with disability plans. And Tennessee’s bill also includes an explicit exception for literacy and dyslexia screenings.

Still, advocates are concerned.

Local and regional policies can limit access to tools like screen readers and predictive text software even if they don’t mean to, argues Andrew Kahn, an associate director for Understood, a support organization for people with learning differences. But these tools can be necessary for those students to keep up in class. It’s not obvious to everyone that these tools can help students, even some who don’t have formal plans, Kahn says.

Typically, when these rules mention students with disabilities, they will exclude anyone covered by disability law, says Lindsay Jones, CEO of CAST, a nonprofit focused on assistive technology and learning. But they are still relying on local school districts or other agencies within the state to provide guidance about how to implement the law, she adds.

Without sufficient guidance, a concern is that teachers might become uncomfortable working with students who need screens for accessibility reasons and might restrict these tools because of that, Jones says. For instance, advocates fear that a teacher, wary of breaking the new law, might tell a student not to use a screen, even though it was prescribed by an individualized education program, or IEP.

“It’s not typical that a student [with disabilities] is sitting alone at a screen, which I think is what seems to be driving much of the concern,” Jones says.

But even if students with disabilities aren’t prevented from using the screens, there’s unease about whether these new rules will contribute to shaming or separation.

Reading some of these laws without guidance, it’s unclear how to implement them without banning screens in the classroom, Jones says. In order to follow these rules, it’s possible that students who are exempt from the bans could be moved into another room, she worries.

“That's immediately going to bring — or raises our concerns about — stigma for these kids,” Jones says. “One of the beautiful things is when technology is built into systems that we're all using, and we can use them together, and it reduces the feeling that you're separate and different in a way that can be especially harmful.”

It's an apprehension that others in the space share.

“You would be restricting [students with disabilities] because the access to technology is creating that stigma and that segregation,” says Kahn of Understood. “Anything that leads to difference between kids, that accentuates and magnifies, has the really strong potential to further stigmatize and make these kids feel singled out.”

Education should always take place in the least restrictive environment possible, he adds.

Rodrigues says that she and other parents also worry about whether students will become reluctant to use their disability tools because of the stigma. “Kids might actually choose to suffer rather than being singled out socially,” she says.

But ultimately, for some proponents of accessibility tech, the disquiet is largely about who gets consulted for new rules and how they get enforced.

It’s not that these restrictions shouldn’t be pursued, but that families of students with disabilities should be more thoroughly included in the rulemaking process, these advocates argue.

“Parents with children who have a disability must have a seat at the table,” Chandrashekar wrote: “Blanket rules that are blind to fundamental human differences will do more disservice than good to students at the margins.”

The Pandemic Hindered English Learners' Literacy. This Ohio District Is Turning the Tide.

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:43:32 GMT

Elementary school is tough.

There are playground politics, multiplication tables and learning to read.

Imagine dealing with all that in a new language — or even a whole new country.

That’s the added challenge for kids who are learning English at the same time they’re learning everything else as their peers.

It’s an issue that Sarah Walters and her colleagues were determined to tackle in Troy City Schools, a public school district made up of nine campuses roughly an hour north of Cincinnati. The area is home to an automotive manufacturer that brings some employees — and their families — over from Japan.

Roughly 3 percent of the 4,000 students have primary languages like Spanish, Ukrainian and Japanese, a relatively small population compared to the most recent national average of 11 percent.

But that small group is making big gains. Looking to close the literacy gaps that have plagued schools since the pandemic, the district took a big swing to increase literacy among its English learners. It trained 116 staff members — including every elementary teacher, intervention specialist, paraprofessional and principal — in the Orton-Gillingham approach, which folds movement and touch into reading instruction.

They say it’s paying off.

Walters, a literacy instructional support specialist, says that helping multilingual students master their grasp on English is vital. Like any other student, the foundation that they lay in reading and math will affect their learning from that point on.

“We want to help the students continue to thrive, and really everything that we're thinking about with our student services is equitable learning opportunities,” Walters says.

Moving Toward Equity

Federal data shows that English learners' achievement scores lag far behind their peers on average, and have made little improvement over the past two decades.

Troy City Schools was eager to close widening literacy gaps that surfaced after the onset of the pandemic, Walters says, which was particularly hard on English learners like those at Concord Elementary. A big hurdle was phonics, the letter sounds that make up words.

“We were seeing a lot of student frustration and wanting to give up,” Walters recalls. “Students being very withdrawn, those social-emotional impacts.”

Back in 2020, English-language instruction was inconsistent and fragmented across classrooms.

Yet, even with the desire to boost English learner scores, the program took some time.

Following the pandemic, Troy City Schools mulled over the changes for three years before it had enough funding to deliver on it, according to Danielle Romine, director of elementary teaching and learning for the district. The effort was funded through post-COVID relief grants and budget allocations made by the district’s leaders.

As a literacy specialist, Walters became certified in the Orton-Gillingham method through the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education. She’s now responsible for supporting and training staff to successfully use the techniques.

Walters says teachers and staff were trained to utilize drills that connect literacy concepts through visuals, sound and movement. Students might use flash cards as a visual element or tap their fingers to each letter as they spell out a word. Students also learn the origin and history of words to strengthen their ability to decode them. For example, a “red word” is one that does not follow phonics rules.

“Our multilingual learners love it because no longer are they being told, ‘That's just the way it is,'” Walters says.

After an initial summer training on the Orton-Gillingham approach, teachers spoke so highly of the method that requests for training grew among staff.

Initial Promise

“In a school district, if you want to get something out, just tell a teacher, because it [will] spread like wildfire,” Romine says.

And the data are showing promising results, Walter says. The district-wide third grade reading proficiency had plummeted to 56 percent in 2021-22 but had risen to 81 percent by 2023-24 — slightly higher than its pre-COVID achievement rate. The most recent state data shows Concord Elementary far surpassed its target goal for English proficiency among multilingual students.

Walters has heard from teachers who say that the approach has helped some English learner students make lightning-fast gains in reading. One educator told her that two students from Japan who joined the elementary school in the fall were conversing in English by December. Another student’s phonics diagnostic score shot up by 38 points in the same timeframe.

Now, the district is working to spread the method beyond its own campuses.

“Eventually, our goal is to support the entire community, or the entire county because Sarah having that training [enables her] to support teachers from other districts, as well,” Romine says.

But for English learners, ensuring they’re on grade level in reading goes beyond measuring their success in the classroom.

Walters says that the district is thinking about long-term learning for children who, for example, may be in the U.S. for a few years before returning to Japan.

Now, the district is working to spread the method beyond its own campuses.

“Eventually, our goal is to support the entire community, or the entire county because Sarah having that training [enables her] to support teachers from other districts, as well,” Romine says.

But for English learners, ensuring they’re on grade level in reading goes beyond measuring their success in the classroom.

Walters says that the district is thinking about long-term learning for children who, for example, may be in the U.S. for a few years before returning to Japan.

“We want students to have success across math, science, everything,” Walters says. “So it's important that we get them up to speed as quickly as possible, because those long-term impacts could really be harmful for them. That early literacy is key.”

Latest Canvas Attack Shows Schools Still Struggle With Cybersecurity

EdSurge Staff — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:29:33 GMT

A cyberattack against one of the world’s largest digital education platforms has forced attention onto the vulnerability of U.S. schools’ data.

Instructure, the company behind Canvas, a learning management system used by thousands of schools which has 30 million active users, had its service interrupted late last week. According to a company statement, hackers breached Instructure’s “free for teacher” account, or those specifically offered to give teachers access to Canvas courses.

The criminal hacking group ShinyHunters claims to have stolen 275 million records from roughly 9,000 educational institutions around the world, per reporting from Security Week.

In the latest, at the beginning of this week, Instructure published a note saying that it had reached a deal with the hackers to return the stolen data and had received digital confirmation of data destruction, along with assurance that none of its customers would be extorted. The note did not mention what Instructure gave in return. But the note announced a webinar with “Instructure leadership” scheduled for Wednesday.

According to Instructure, this is the second data breach within the year. The latest included a breach of customer — including teacher and students’ — email addresses, usernames, enrollment information and course names.

The attacks happened around finals for many colleges. Canvas was back online as of Saturday, according to a note about the incident on Instructure’s website. But at least six universities and school districts in a dozen states sent out alerts noting they had been impacted by the attack, according to reporting from CNN. Prior to Instructure's deal, CNN noted that ShinyHunters had set a Tuesday deadline for schools to “negotiate a settlement.”

The education sector is an attractive target for hackers, with experts describing it as “target rich, resource poor.”

The breach comes amid immense frustration and legislative pushback against the extent schools have become reliant on edtech since pandemic closures forced schools to rush to embrace digital instruction and tools. Some wonder whether the attacks raise thorny questions about trust and the ability of schools to respond when outside vendors are targeted.

While this latest incident has renewed attention, cyber attacks against schools are not a new concern. Cybersecurity was even identified as a top concern in EdSurge’s 2025 trends forecast.

Indeed, the frequency of attacks has increased dramatically in recent years against both higher ed and K-12 schools, and some experts worry that AI is making attacks more sophisticated.

The figures are startling. For example, 82 percent of K-12 organizations reported a cyber security incident, according to a 2025 report from the Center for Internet Security, which noted 9,300 confirmed incidents.

Schools have struggled to figure out how to respond to new cybersecurity threats. Here are some notable highlights from the past few years:

2022: A cyberattack against Illuminate Education made the rounds. In 2018, the European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, providing clarity into what data protection parents, teachers and students should get. But a few years later, during the Illuminate attack, experts noted that the U.S. lacked a national consensus, though states were beginning to pass legislation.
2022: Later that year, after a major attack against Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the largest in the country, experts warned EdSurge that schools represent “honey pots of highly sensitive information.” In that attack, a ransomware gang dumped 500 GB of files, including sensitive student and teacher information, on the dark web when the district refused to pay.
2025: Early into the Trump administration’s second term, experts noted that coordinated federal attacks had been impacted by cuts, weakening federal support for schools. At the time, districts noted that they were operating “in the dark” with an uncertain future around cybersecurity issues.
2025: In a two-part EdSurge series, “Under Siege: How Schools Are Fighting Back Against Rising Cyber Threats,” reporter Ellen Ullman tracked how districts around the country are responding to AI’s rise in cyber incidents. Ullman’s reporting found that many schools remain weak on the fundamentals of cybersecurity, with small schools becoming attractive targets for cyber criminals. Schools are having to learn that the first line of defense against scams is humans, Ullman notes.

Some argue that the latest attacks are a sign that institutions need more meaningful expectations around cybersecurity, since the audits and certifications they currently rely on are failing to safeguard student data.

“Too often they serve as compliance theater and as weak shields against liability,” wrote Douglas Levin, national director of K12 Security Exchange Information, on social media.

Over the years, cybersecurity experts have shared a range of tips for schools to stay secure — from educating staff and students to seeking outside help to deal with the mounting threat.

With increasingly sophisticated attacks, there’s more than ever pressure for schools to secure student data despite all the challenges.

LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health Is Suffering, but Schools Are Poised to Help

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Fri, 08 May 2026 23:30:50 GMT

Bullying. Isolation. Stress.

Everyone experiences these on the journey from adolescence to adulthood, but new data on the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth shows the additional pressures they face increases their risk of suicide compared to their peers.

The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth, has released its most recent survey of 16,000 LGBTQ+ young people 13 to 24. Among the most concerning figures was one in 10 participants reporting that they had attempted suicide during the previous year. And more than one-third seriously considered suicide.

Experts also tell EdSurge that the strain of mental health issues and unwelcoming school settings directly harm students’ ability to thrive in, or even attend, their classes.

Despite the sobering results of the survey, the data also reveals solutions — including a role for schools.

“One of the most important findings is that when adults, institutions, and communities become more affirming, the suicide risk of LGBTQ+ young people goes down,” Ronita Nath, the Trevor Project’s vice president of research, says. “Schools play a life-saving support by creating environments where LGBTQ+ young people feel safe, accepted and supported.”

Feeling the Pressure

With 2026 on track to be another record-breaking year for anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced at the state and federal levels, a vast majority of survey respondents said they felt stressed, anxious or unsafe due to the policies and the debates surrounding them.

When those young people are caught in the crossfire of heated political debates, Nath says the negative rhetoric that trickles down has real consequences. Youth who reported experiencing victimization due to their gender identity or sexual orientation — like bullying, physical harm or exposure to conversion therapy — were three times as likely to attempt suicide as their peers.

Those risks dropped among survey participants who said their school affirmed their identity. Support can look like adopting curriculum that counters anti-LGBTQ+ bias and increasing access to mental health services.

Forty-four percent of survey participants said they couldn’t access the mental health services they needed. Some of the barriers to those services were tangible, like not being able to afford transportation to see a counselor. But many were not: they cited fear of their mental health problems not being taken seriously, not being understood by a mental healthcare provider, or past negative experiences that made young people hesitant to seek services again.

Nath encouraged schools to offer gender and sexuality alliances (GSAs), ensure anti-harassment policies were in place and provide professional development for educators to help ease students’ discomfort. “We know [that] not only improves mental health and well-being for LGBTQ+ youth, but for all their peers,” she says.

Strain on School Success

Research shows that well-being, engagement and a sense of belonging go hand-in-hand with students’ ability to thrive in school, according to Megan Pacheco, executive director of Challenge Success. The group is a nonprofit focused on increasing student well-being, engagement and belonging that’s based in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.

The stress that gender-diverse students — including transgender, non-binary and gender-queer youth — experience can become an obstacle to their academic success. If they feel their identity is threatened or lack a sense of belonging, Pacheco says, they’re less likely to reach out for help.

“It's going to affect their participation, how they show up in the classroom, and it's going to affect their well-being,” she says.

Challenge Success’ large trove of survey data on the school experiences of middle and high school students reveals that students who identify as transgender, non-binary or gender diverse report more stress than their peers who identify as boys and girls, says Sarah Miles, director of research for Challenge Success.

“Instead of two or three sources of stress — family pressure, or peer relationships, or social media — it is just all the above,” Miles says. “In order to be able to function, use your working memory, be present, be engaged … if you have all those things on board that you're worrying about, you're just not able to attend to school in the same way.”

Among LGBTQ+ youth who are in school, about 85 percent said they had at least one adult at school who is affirming of their identity, according to the Trevor Project data. More than half of respondents said school was an affirming place, second to online spaces.

Matthew Rice, who chairs the science department at a New Jersey high school, tells EdSurge that students don’t judge safety by a school’s mission statement — they judge it by how adults respond to situations like harassing comments made in the hallway, classroom jokes, pronoun use and whether discipline is applied consistently among varying groups of students.

Rice has published research on the experiences of transgender and nonbinary educators, but the overall lessons gleaned from his work apply to students as well.

“Students notice who is allowed to exist authentically in schools,” Rice said via email. “Representation is not symbolic: It changes students’ perception of what futures are possible and who belongs in intellectual spaces. For many students, the first openly LGBTQ+ adult they meet is an adult at school.”

When it comes to supporting gender-diverse students, Miles of Challenge Success says she wants to dispel the belief that helping them thrive is a zero-sum game.

“I think there's sometimes a misconception that if we give these students support, then other students aren't getting support,” she says. “What's really important is that, by giving students who identify as gender diverse support, everyone benefits, because all students then feel safe to show up — whatever their identities.”

Screen Time Concerns Lead to Backlash Against Edtech Vetting Process

Lauren Coffey — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:07:40 GMT

Among the increasing concern about screen time in school comes a new culprit: the vetting process for school software.

A growing group of parents and teachers has spent the last few years fighting against cellphones in the classroom, with some extending that to all digital devices. But the school-issued laptops, and the software accompanying them, have been left largely unscathed.

“A lot of the issues with personal devices can move to the district-issued devices,” said Kim Whitman, co-lead for Smartphone Free Childhood US, in a previous interview with EdSurge. Whitman explained that when students do not have cellphones, they can still message with friends on their Chromebooks, or through tools like Google Docs. “There are definitely issues with school-issued devices as well.”

Proposals in three states – Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont – are now tackling these concerns.

Better Vetting Processes

At the start of this year’s legislative session, all three states concurrently proposed reviewing the vetting process of education software.

In most districts, school boards, IT personnel and administrators choose vendors, often relying on the vendors’ own data to prove the products' safety and efficacy.

“There is nobody right now that is confirming these products are safe, effective and legal,” Whitman said in a previous interview. “It should not fall on the district’s IT director; it would be impossible for them to do it. And the companies should not be tasked with doing it — that would be like nicotine companies vetting their own cigarettes.”

The proposed legislation is looking to change that.

Vermont

Bill: An act relating to educational technology products

Status: Passed by the House March 27; currently before the Senate Committee on Education

This bill proposes to require that providers of educational technology products register annually with the state. It also requires the secretary of state to create a certification standard and review process for these products before schools can use them.

Any provider of an educational technology product — specifically student-facing tools that are used for teaching and learning in schools — must register with the secretary of state, pay a registration fee of $100 and provide its most up-to-date terms and conditions and privacy policy.

The secretary of state would work with the Vermont Agency of Education to review registrations.

Criteria for certification include:

The product’s compliance with state curriculum standards
Advantages of using it versus non-digital methods
Whether it was explicitly designed for educational purposes
Design features, including artificial intelligence, geotracking and targeted advertising

While the initial bill proposed that any edtech provider not certified by the state, but continues to operate, could be liable for fines of $50 a day up to $10,000, that language was struck by the final bill passed from the House.

If passed by the Senate, the bill would go into effect July 1, 2026. By November 2027, the Agency of Education would submit a written report on which state entities should be involved in the edtech certification and any other recommendations for certification.

Utah

Bill: Software in Education

Status: Signed into law on March 18

The bill requires the Utah Board of Education to study the use of software and digital practices in public schools, review best practices and provide guidance for responsible use.

The state also passed a Classroom Technology Amendments bill tackling screen time at every grade level, banning it entirely from kindergarten through third grade, except for computer science and assessments. Middle school students must have their parents "opt-in" to taking devices home and high school students will be allowed to bring home devices unless parents "opt-out."

“We’re not anti-technology,” Rep. Ariel Defay (R-UT) said in a statement. She is a sponsor of the Classroom Technology Amendments bill. “We just want to ensure that education technology is used intentionally and actually helps students to learn.”

Rhode Island

Bill: The Safe School Technology Act of 2026

Status: Passed by the House April 14; currently in the Senate Education Committee

This bill, proposed by three Rhode Island representatives who are also mothers, is part of a six-bill package focused on protecting children from social media, artificial intelligence and digital platforms.

The Safe School Technology Act bill would be enacted this August if approved, banning software providers from activating or accessing any audio or video functions on a device outside of school-related activities. It also bans the use of location data.

The initial bill lists a litany of concerns that the “lack of regulation” caused, including increased screen time, and “marketing commercial products as educational with no accountability; children being given devices without proof of developmental appropriateness and parents being excluded from decisions about their child’s digital exposure.”

But the main concern, argued by state Representative June Speakman (D-RI), who sponsored the bill, is that a majority of school districts’ technology policies do not have limits on tracking student devices. She added roughly two-thirds of districts also do not limit school-issued device's ability to activate audio and video.

“Passing this bill will provide clear, consistent protection across all schools in the state that assures students and their families that their devices cannot be used to invade their privacy or track their activities,” Speakman said in a statement.

“They deserve to feel confident that their privacy is protected when they use technology that is required for school,” she added.

Tech Pushback

Several technology proponents have pushed back.

The Software and Information Industry Association spoke out against the Rhode Island bill in March, saying if the bill passed it would make the state be one of the most restrictive in the nation.

In an open letter to Joseph McNamara, chair of the Rhode Island House Education Committee, Abigail Wilson, director of state policy at the Software and Information Industry Association, said the bill “proposes an overly restrictive regulatory framework that will severely disrupt classroom instruction, impose massive unfunded administrative burdens on local schools, and deprive Rhode Island students of critical, evidence-based learning tools.”

Keith Krueger, CEO of the nonprofit Consortium for School Networking, told NBC News that the proposed legislation “does keep me up at night.”

“I think some well-intentioned policymakers ... are rushing so quickly that they haven’t thought through the implications,” he said.

ISTE+ASCD Names 2026-27 Voices of Change Fellows

Cobretti Williams — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

AI and technology are fundamentally changing what it means to teach and learn, and schools across the country are reimagining their instructional approaches, roles and systems to ensure students receive an education that meets the demands of today — and tomorrow.

To navigate this shift, the ISTE+ASCD Voices of Change Fellowship empowers the people closest to the classroom to lead the conversation. By highlighting first-person essays and multimedia stories on EdSurge, the program provides a platform for K-12 educators and school leaders to share how they are tackling these challenges in real-time. During the application process for the 2026-27 cohort, we heard from countless applicants who are already guiding their communities toward innovative practices that will define the future of learning.

That vision is reflected in the educators selected for this year’s fellowship. As the program editor, I am thrilled to announce our sixth cohort: six exceptional educators who will share their expertise and insights throughout the 2026-27 academic year.

Meet the Fellows

Educators: Why Are You Thinking of Leaving the Field?

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:47:02 GMT

School’s (almost) out for summer.

When it comes time to throw open campus doors for the new school year in the fall, research tells us one out of every seven teachers won’t be returning — either because they moved schools or left the profession entirely.

But when the going gets tough, teachers don’t necessarily want to leave. Even when they’re burned out, they still love what they do.

So, the concerning data throughout the country tells a story about how stark the conditions of the teacher workforce are. In Wisconsin, for instance, teachers say they are exiting the profession at the highest rate in 25 years thanks to a range of issues, from poor leadership to safety concerns like students bringing guns to school.

Worse, shrinking student populations and rising costs have forced school districts like Portland Public Schools to make staff cuts in the face of astronomically high budget gaps. Early career teachers are thinking hard about whether they even want to continue in their chosen field.

That’s why we at EdSurge want to hear from educators who have recently left or plan to leave their jobs for another sector: What was the deciding factor? What could your school (or district or state-level leaders) have done differently to change your mind?

Your responses will help shape our coverage, and we may be in contact for an interview.

Global Math Gains for Girls Are Slipping, Report Finds

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Fri, 01 May 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Global data on math achievement is revealing a dismaying trend: Girls are doing worse than boys — and the margins are huge.

In 2023, fourth-grade boys outperformed their female peers in a vast majority of schools, growing the gender gap that existed prior to the pandemic, according to an international study released last week.

Among eighth-graders, the rate of boys scoring higher than girls increased exponentially since 2019, rolling back gains in math equity that had been shaping up for more than a decade. Matthias Eck, a program specialist for UNESCO’s Section of Education for Inclusion and Gender Equality, tells EdSurge that prior data showed girls were catching up with boys in math achievement.

“But in the latest data, we see that the gap is widening again between girls and boys, and that's at the detriment of girls, which is quite concerning,” he says.

This international trend echoes what U.S. analysts saw when data from the Nation’s Report Card was released last year.

The latest analysis is based on data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a global study published every four years that measures math and science achievement among fourth- and eighth-grade students. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement performed the analysis in partnership with UNESCO.

Widening Achievement Gaps

The new data is part of the first set of TIMSS results that measure student performance following the onset of the pandemic. The analysis shows that among top performers in fourth grade, 85 percent of counties’ results skewed toward boys. Slightly over half of the countries and territories from which data was collected have an advanced math achievement gap that favors eighth-grade boys, while none are lopsided toward girls in either grade.

Eck, one of the report’s authors, argues the data shows a correlation between longer school closures and higher rates of learning loss in math, with some variation among countries and territories. “One of the hypotheses is really that those disruptions during the pandemic may have exacerbated existing disparities and have reduced learning opportunities for girls, and potentially those that were at risk of low achievement have been more affected,” Eck says. “The fact that girls were out of school and were not in the learning environment, it could have impacted their confidence, but that's just the hypothesis.”

But the numbers contain other alarming signals.

For example, the share of regions with a gender gap among fourth-grade students who are failing to reach basic math proficiency is on the rise, and most of them have a higher proportion of struggling girls, according to the report. And while the gender gap in underperformance among eighth-graders is shrinking, the proportion of countries and territories where girls have a higher failure rate spiked.

Researchers are being cautious when it comes to drawing conclusions about the causes behind the results, but girls’ experience of gender stereotypes and confidence in their math abilities can play a role.

“Boys and girls are equally able in mathematics, but these learning outcomes can be shaped by a range of factors,” Eck explains, “and that can be persistent gender stereotypes, but also teacher expectations — and they're based, of course, on those gender stereotypes.”

Targeted Solutions

UNESCO is pushing education systems across the globe to take a hard look at whether their gender equity strategies are working, especially efforts aimed at younger students.

Eck notes that the consequences of girls' achievement in math can have far-reaching effects in their lives — and very real consequences in societies writ large. “We know that mathematics is quite foundational to learning across the school subjects, it's also critical for pathways into science, technology, engineering, mathematics careers,” he says. “These sectors are at the center of innovation, technology advancement, inclusive growth and sustainable development, so that's quite concerning in terms of those sectors.”

But there’s no widely accepted solution to this problem.

Increasing girls’ math performance will take work at the national policy level, local communities, within families and the culture of classrooms, Eck says. And changes have to include challenging gender stereotypes that limit how far girls think they can go in mathematics, he adds.

“I think what is really critical is that we see those large gaps emerging early, at the fourth grade level when students usually are around 9 or 10 years old,” he says. “That means that whatever we do, the action we take to address the issue must start quite early and must be very targeted.”

Quality Concerns Remain as States Invest More Than Ever in Preschool Programs

Lauren Coffey — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:21:04 GMT

More four-year-olds are enrolled in state-funded preschools than ever before, but the quality and availability of preschool programs have experts concerned about creating a system of haves and have-nots.

“If providing high-quality preschool education to all 3- and 4-year-olds were a race, some states are nearing the finish line, others have stumbled and fallen behind, and a few have yet to leave the starting line,” an annual report from the National Institute of Early Education Research states.

With the amount of funding and quality varying by state, it means that access for families in states that aren't investing still widely varies.

The report, titled “State of Preschool: 2025 Yearbook,” breaks down the annual spending, quality and enrollment numbers across early childhood education programs in the U.S. The latest found states hit an all-time high for both spending and enrollment, but the quality of the programs remains a concern.

“We’re trying to make sure states are also thinking about quality,” Allison Friedman-Krauss, an associate research professor at NIEER, says. “Right now, it’s more about access. And we don't want them to forget about quality.”

More Funding – But Not Always More Quality

The report found funding peaked at nearly $14.4 billion, though that was largely driven by a handful of states: $4.1 billion in California alone, along with $1.2 billion in New Jersey and $1 billion in New York. Those three states accounted for nearly half (45 percent) of all state pre-K spending.

More than two dozen states also increased their preschool spending, which can go toward things like improving teacher-to-student rations and improving teacher compensation, the latter which has long been a concern.

While states still increased their spending on pre-K this year, the rate at which states are investing is slowing down. Adjusted for inflation, each state spent an average of $45 more per child than the 2023-2024 year. However, last year’s increase in spending was 16 times as large.

New Jersey, Oregon and the District of Columbia gave more than $15,000 in state funding per child enrolled in preschool. Six other states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, New Mexico, and Washington) spent more than $10,000 per child enrolled in pre-K. Twenty eight states overall spent more funding per child, adjusted for inflation, than past years.

Seventeen states spent less on preschool in 2024-2025 than they did in 2023-2024, when adjusted for inflation. The researchers attributed the spending decline in part to overall state deficits and falling enrollment across many states.

However, that’s not always the case. New Jersey had a budget deficit but invested an additional $100 million into expanding preschool programs for all.

Pointing toward this, Steve Barnett, director of NIEER, argues that it’s all about state priorities: “That’s a conscious decision to say we’re going to spend less,” he says. “And you have to ask if the declining enrollment – even if not intentional – is a way to reduce spending [in the sector]. As opposed to, ‘Maybe we should work on getting parents to enroll their kid.’”

The boost in funding did not always correlate to better early childhood education programs. Only six states met all of NIEER’s 10 quality standards benchmarks, which includes a maximum class size of 20 students, a requirement that teachers have bachelor’s degrees and a classroom ratio of at least one staff member for every 10 students.

States looking to enhance preschool quality should focus on class size and teacher pay, Barnett argues.

Teacher pay and class sizes account for most of the money, and once states have improved those, other metrics, like curriculum supports and health screenings, are easier to pay for later, he adds.

But changes won’t happen overnight.

“It does take time. You can’t just wave a magic wand and have classroom size and teachers’ pay magically fixed,” Barnett says.

NIEER's Friedman-Krauss, pointed to Alabama and Georgia as examples of slowly, but surely, increasing preschool quality. Georgia hit all 10 quality benchmarks this year. Friedman-Krauss credits the improvement to a $97.6 million investment by the state, which helped lower classroom size from 22 to 20 and increased teacher pay.

“We make a big deal of it because it’s serving most of the 4-year-old [children] and hitting all the benchmarks,” Barnett says. “It’s a state that lost them and came back even stronger; that’s a good sign.”

Lion’s Share of Enrollment Only in a Few States

Enrollment, similarly to funding, reached an all-time high nationally last year, with 1.8 million children during the 2024-2025 school year. But roughly half of that comes from four states: California, Texas, New York and Florida.

Notably, a dozen states had more than half of their four-year-olds in state-funded preschool programs, with the District of Columbia topping the list: 94 percent of four-year-olds were enrolled in their state programs. California’s enrollment gains were buoyed in part due to the state’s universal pre-K promise.

However, twenty states enrolled fewer preschoolers in 2024-2025 than the prior year. Some could blame the dip on declining birth rates. But when adjusted by population percentage, 21 states still saw a dip.

For some states, the enrollment decline was steep. Indeed, six states (Arizona, Florida, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin) decreased enrollment by more than 1,000 children.

Three-year-old students made up only 9 percent enrollment across the nation, up from 5 percent a decade earlier. Some states are acting to counter this. For example, Illinois and New Jersey are both focusing on expanding preschool programs for three-year-olds, Friedman-Krauss says. However, she and Barnett expect a slow mass adoption of three-year-olds in state-funded programs.

“I think there will be more attention paid to that group – how much more, that’s the hard part,” Barnett says. “Nine percent is better than when we started, but it’s very lumpy. It’s still 0 percent in lots of places.”

I Built Radical Possibility in Schools — and It Nearly Broke Me

Deaunna Watson — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:00:00 GMT

In my application to the Voices of Change Fellowship, I quoted musician Olu Dara’s words to his son, the rapper Nas:

These words stunned me as an educator and student who understands the stakes confronting Black youth in education. Nas’ conversation with his father did not feel unfamiliar, nor did it feel cavalier; it carried the audacity Black folks have had to nurture and maintain to survive.

Before I began writing for the fellowship, I reflected on the roots of my educational lineage. What led my father to leave school before graduating? What pushed my mother out of the schoolhouse? What was the quality of education for my grandparents and great-grandparents, and who said it was fit for their learning needs? I wondered if, maybe for them, quitting school was saving their own lives, too, so that future generations would not have to endure the challenges they faced.

I’ve had similar questions that have followed me throughout my education journey. I’ve climbed through the tacks and splinters of multiple presidencies that mocked the humanity of anyone not born white, able-bodied, heterosexual, male, wealthy or a citizen. I’ve climbed through the torn-up boards of heart-wrenching grief after laying every elder in my immediate lineage to rest. I’ve climbed through the dark of a global pandemic that exposed the violent systems Black and Brown folks have been screaming about for centuries — systems engulfed in flames.

As a Voices of Change fellow, I sought to present the classroom as a radical space of possibility. In August 2023, I published my first essay, which explored the freedom-dreaming power of Black literature. In my second essay, I reflected on the emancipatory power of radical Black joy. For my third essay, I tackled the impact of discriminatory school policies targeting natural hair textures on Black students. And last, for my fourth and final essay, I settled into my role as director of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging at a preK-8 Catholic Montessori school in Cincinnati. I shared the collaborative goals that outlined my school's strategic plan to embrace DEI and the work taking place to meet those goals.

But there is a price to be paid for bringing radical possibility to life. All too often, Black women in education and leadership ignore the signs of burnout until it is too late. I am in community with these women: I coach these women; I am one of these women.

One day, I woke up and realized I hadn't taken a full week off from work in three years. I woke up mourning the deep misalignment I felt in my attempt to transform systems designed to resist me at every turn. I woke up wishing that I could remain asleep, unhappy and unfulfilled with my life. Though I was celebrated for my accomplishments with awards, I was tired. I am tired.

I was paying the price for radical possibility with my mental health and my life.

Nas once said, “I didn’t care about America. I didn’t believe that [America] believed in me.”

In a radical act of self-preservation, Nas crossed the threshold of his liminal space and walked into the promise of his own freedom dreams. He did not wait for the permission of a society that did not believe in him.

As I navigate my own liminal space, I am granting myself the permission to set myself free and save my own life. With a pocket full of freedom dreams, healing-centered entrepreneurship and the audacity to claim rest and renewal as an enduring freedom practice, I am trusting myself to boldly claim ownership of my life.

Districts Relying More on Data to Identify Gifted Students

Lauren Coffey — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:02:00 GMT

A group of third grade students gather around a board game on a Wednesday afternoon in a Charleston classroom, grabbing game pieces, discussing potential moves and reading out playing cards. The games are not Monopoly, Sorry, or any others of yore – they’re focused on identifying, and boosting, students’ strengths and weaknesses.

It’s part of a shift in school districts’ gifted and talented programs. While many programs focused on a small group of high achieving students, instructors across the nation are now focusing more on inclusion, using data to help them zero in on students’ talents, a method that has the potential of capturing more students for advanced instruction.

For Vanessa Hill, the gifted education coordinator for Amphitheater Public School District in Tucson, Arizona, focusing on strengths and weaknesses helps to solve what she sees as a universal problem with gifted identification.

“Something I’ve been thinking deeply about that tends to be a universal problem is that gifted identification does not match the metrics of your district,” says Vanessa Hill, the gifted education coordinator for Amphitheater Public School District in Tucson, Arizona. “I’m constantly thinking of that, so our demographics can get closer. This new tactic is about exposure to critical thinking and reasoning – what does that look like, how to reason through a problem?”

Re-assessing the methods and ultimately changing the definition of “gifted” comes as some question the value of standardized tests and a push-and-pull to diversify programs.

The Shift In Gifted and Talented

The gifted and talented programs run the gamut of names and acronyms depending on the district, including advanced learning program, TAG (talented and gifted), LEAP (Learning Enrichment Alternative Program) or REACH (Realizing Excellence through Academic and Creative Help), among others.

Regardless of the name, the program has undergone several major shifts over the last few decades. Schools previously often only selectively tested students, often at the behest of involved parents or by a teacher recommendation. That brought a large amount of inequity in the programs, with many moving to a universal screening practice. Some states, including Washington and Missouri, made it a state mandate to test all students while in elementary school. The screening practice itself evolved from an IQ test to aptitude and ability tests, though how accurate those are is up for debate.

“Society is really unequal along socioeconomic and racial and ethnic lines, and these tests are just reflecting that,” says Scott Peters, director of research consulting at NWEA, a nonprofit education assessment organization. “You can change tests all day long, but at the end of the day, you can't give some kids three years of $40,000-a-year preschool and also wonder why this kid that's never been to school until first grade doesn't do as well.”

Often, schools’ gifted and talented programs do not represent their overall school population and instead skew heavily toward white and Asian students. Zohran Mamdani, the widely-watched mayor of New York City, made it part of his platform to phase out gifted and talented programs because of the inequity.

“Ultimately, my administration would aim to make sure that every child receives a high-quality early education that nurtures their curiosity and learning,” he said in a 2025 statement to the New York Times.

There is no silver bullet test that accounts for inequality and a child’s upbringing, although Peters said when factors such as income, race and other equity gaps are controlled in tests, most inequities disappear.

“This isn't a factor of, ‘Oh, there are students of color scoring high, but they're still not getting in,’” he says. “It's that there's not enough students of color scoring high because of that larger societal inequality issue.”

Because of the often-skewed gifted and talented population, schools are shifting toward “talent development” with all students, versus focusing on strengthening some students’ already solid skills.

“Because of the baggage of the past, we’re moving toward a new perspective where we’re identifying the strengths of students — whether academic, social or emotional — versus people for a program,” says Kristen Seward, clinical professor in gifted, talented and creative studies at Purdue University. “And I think this twist in how we approach education as gifted researchers is going to benefit everybody.”

Using Data for ‘Talent Development’

Developing talent for gifted programs, much like the name itself, varies depending on the district. Seward says many teachers have enriched curriculums, which enhance things like vocabulary, science and social studies — topics that have been put on the back burner over the years in favor of standardized testing. Teachers are trained to spot students’ strengths and respond to those, which in turn, helps with students’ weaknesses.

For example, if a student has a strong vocabulary but struggles in math, the teacher might focus on math vocabulary during math class to put the lesson on a level the child understands.

“I don’t want it to turn into a thing where the teacher is the gate, and if they don’t open the gate, then the students don’t get identified – which has been a problem,” Seward says. “We have to train teachers to be talent scouts, presenting the enriched curriculum. Hopefully it's not something additional, but something they’d naturally do in their role.”

Elizabeth McLaurin Uptegrove, now the assistant academic director in Charleston County School District, created a “stretch or support” system that involves the games the students played in the aforementioned classroom. When Uptegrove first arrived in Charleston’s school district, South Carolina used to require all second grade students be tested for the gifted and talented program. But after that year, selection changed to a nomination system.

“Which sounds elitist, and it is,” she says, adding white, affluent children were three times more likely to be in the programs.

She pushed for universal testing again for all fourth grade students, which yielded three times as many students identified as gifted, jumping from 40 fourth graders to 150 across the district. Several schools across the country have adopted similar stretch-or-support systems.

But Uptegrove’s efforts go beyond identifying candidates for gifted programs through teacher observation: her game-based system uses data. With the aptitude test, there are verbal, quantitative and nonverbal subsections. The tests indicate if a child is low or high achieving in those areas. Then the children are placed in groups with those of similar abilities to play games that can enhance those skills.

“Typically a teacher is not very well-equipped to come up with activities or lessons that can actually reach their level of thinking ability and games do that really quickly, in a way that's not as boring for children as a typical worksheet,” Uptegrove says. “That’s where the magic of the games comes in. We’re making rigorous, hard thinking almost irresistible so students are willing to do the activity for longer.”

Hill, the Arizona-based education coordinator, initially implemented Uptegrove’s game strategy across third grade classrooms in five schools: three Title 1 schools and two non-Title 1. She says the schools that have the strength or stretch program in place have higher passing rates of “proficient” or “highly proficient” scores than those who do not.

“To me, it’s the difference between being a passive learner and active learner; by being able to engage in the games, it’s more active learning,” Hill says. “You raise the exposure to critical thinking and are taught to apply those skills to any situation, whether it’s on an achievement test or on the playground with a friend.”

The Future of the Program

Both researchers and teachers acknowledge the “talent development” approach to gifted and talented programs is far from perfect. It is often costly, whether it is buying the games, instilling teacher training or taking out time from testing. Hill pointed to four schools within her district that are closing this year because of financial constraints.

“Ordering the games is no small cost; I feel so blessed it’s that level of importance that we will find the funds,” she says. “As far as critical thinking games, yes that was missing. It is a hole we were filling. I think that while the core curriculum is doing its best, it can oftentimes be a bit surface level.”

Uptegrove agrees, saying she believes the talent development method is becoming more popular, but “there’s a long way to go in belief and funding for it.”

Peters, who has long studied the best educational methods and practices, believes the shift in gifted and talented is a good step. But he has concerns about the larger moves needed for lasting impact.

“It’s easy to have a 30-minute gifted program; it’s hard to have a second through eighth grade math development pipeline involving everyone in the school,” he says. “And advanced learning isn’t enough of a priority for most schools.”

Returning to What it Means to Make School Human Again

Jennifer Yoo-Brannon — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:00:00 GMT

In 2021, I was a demoralized educator: not burnt out, but demoralized. As I shared in my first article for EdSurge, demoralization occurs when teachers “encounter consistent and pervasive challenges to enacting the values that motivate their work.”

That year, the pervasive challenges seemed obvious and communal. We were all navigating online platforms, figuring out how to replicate student services virtually and struggling to make up for lost time in instruction, social-skill development and relationship-building for when students returned to in-person schooling.

When I think about what feels most pressing now, it seems those challenges persist but are perhaps less obvious to society at large. As the authors of “Going the Distance: The Teaching Profession in a Post-COVID World (2024)” wrote:

Right now, I believe teaching is the most important thing we can do. When the world is on fire, what feels most pressing is teaching students to claim their humanity and helping educators understand how much the communal learning experience matters. Five years later, I have come full circle.

This time, I return to that same claim with a broader and deeper understanding of what makes a school. We use that old adage, “It takes a village…” More and more, I see that we, as school communities, are the village and the villagers that we need right now. What really makes a school more human is not just the principals and teachers, but the child welfare staff, paraeducators, campus supervisors, guidance counselors, cafeteria workers, coaches, librarians, custodians and secretaries. The list is long, but it feels necessary to name the people on campus who make students feel like they belong, support them and have their backs when students need it. These are the colleagues who have shown me what it is like to truly model humanity to our students.

The truth is that the onus is on all of us to create an environment in which mutual respect and empathy are the baseline expectations. So, as an instructional coach, as a leader and as a voice of change in this context, what can I do? How do I communicate to teachers that, while they have been beaten down and blamed for society’s ills, they also have the herculean task of helping students learn how to be human together?

In 2021, I said that I was demoralized. In 2026, I am revitalized and committed to my role as an educator, instructional coach and teacher advocate.

Since participating in the inaugural cohort of the Voices of Change fellowship, I have contributed essays to The California Educator, Edutopia and EdSurge. I have joined podcast panels to talk about social-emotional learning, culturally responsive teaching and civil discourse in the classroom.

This fellowship showed me the power of personal writing for representation and advocacy. I have started to write children's books about my own neurodivergent children. I have presented at local and state conferences and will continue to use my voice and my words to advocate for students, for educators, for quality professional development and schools that model the best of humanity. Writing for the Voices of Change fellowship has helped me claim my voice, my humanity and my power.

DOJ Extends Website Accessibility Deadline. Will It Help Schools Get Ready?

Daniel Mollenkamp — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:00:00 GMT

As the clock ticked down, schools were simply unprepared to be graded on their assignment.

Federal disability law has required local governments to make their websites accessible for decades.

Two years ago, during the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice published a “final rule” spelling out how schools could measure whether their websites and mobile apps were accessible for students with disabilities, relying on widely accepted guidelines. The agency also set enforcement dates based on population size. For states and local governments with a population over 50,000, the first date would have taken effect later this week.

Experts told EdSurge at the time that it was an important milestone that shifted the burden of responsibility from families of students with disabilities — who often have to labor to even access class materials — and onto schools and the vendors that work with them. In the years after the pandemic’s forced switch to remote learning, it seemed even more vital.

But Monday, the DOJ published an “interim final rule” that postpones the compliance date to next year.

Disability advocates and policy experts had expected an extension. The federal government had been holding meetings about the rule, as EdSurge recently reported. Testimony revealed that governments were not going to be able to meet well-advertised deadlines, as EdSurge noted.

The extension will “ensure that covered entities better understand the rule's substance to achieve compliance to the benefit of persons with disabilities,” according to a notice from the Justice Department.

To disability experts, that’s crucial.

The extra time is “not an invitation to pause” attempts to make sure websites and mobile applications are accessible to all, but rather a chance to get accessibility right, argues Glenda Sims, chief information accessibility officer at Deque Systems, a digital accessibility company.

Digital accessibility is in a different cultural moment than when the original enforcement deadlines were issued.

Schools are facing widespread fatigue and skepticism over their reliance on tech.

Plus, under the Trump administration, shredded grants, mass firings and shifting priorities mean that students with disabilities cannot rely on federal support. For instance, a nonpartisan government watchdog group noted federal actions have led to the dismissal of 90 percent of student civil rights complaints, including from students with disabilities.

Lately, accessibility lawsuits have surged, with more than 3,000 filed last year.

For schools and vendors, there’s still pressure to be proactive, experts argue.

Taking the next year to invest in accessibility will set institutions up to avoid an endless cycle of accessibility audits and remediation, according to Sambhavi Chandrashekar, global accessibility lead at D2L, which operates a learning management system. That means putting money into procurement systems, training for those who create course content, and tools that produce accessible content by default, she explained in a note to EdSurge. But that could prove useful. For example, a U.S. district court recently dismissed an accessibility lawsuit against a website for an eyeglasses vendor, which Chandrashekar attributes to the company’s ability to show it had a documented and ongoing accessibility program.

Right now, most schools are not accessible because they started too late, argued Sims of Deque, in a note to EdSurge. If schools interpret the DOJ’s extension as permission to delay accessibility efforts, they will fall farther behind, she added.

Schools that use this time to build resilient systems and treat accessibility like other responsibilities, such as security and privacy, will fare the best, Sims said.

The Digital Accessibility Deadline Is Here. Schools Aren’t Ready.

Daniel Mollenkamp — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

A big civil rights deadline that impacts schools and vendors will hit this month.

Federal law has required accessibility for people with disabilities for decades, says Glenda Sims, chief information accessibility officer at Deque Systems, a company that specializes in digital accessibility.

But two years ago, the federal government finally gave schools a way to measure whether their websites, mobile apps and digital content were accessible under law when it released a “final rule.”

In essence, the final rule updated 2024 Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a federal law concerning equal opportunity, setting out standards for public institutions around website and mobile app accessibility. When the deadline was put in place, disability experts told EdSurge that the rules provided clarity for schools and edtech vendors, and also set a ticking clock for when they would have to make changes. The rule set varying deadlines for school districts and state and local governments — in April 2026 or April 2027, based on population size.

On April 24, the first deadline will hit. By then, institutions have to make their web content and mobile apps comply with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, a widely recognized accessibility standard that includes accommodations such as a minimum contrast ratio and a requirement for audio descriptions.

But with the well-advertised deadline just days away, schools are well behind schedule.

Some advocates worry that digital accessibility is being swept up in broader political trends. So, what happens when the deadline hits?

Not Ready for Prime Time

Only 14 percent of districts had completed the accessibility updates required by law, according to a survey from the National School Public Relations Association released last December. The survey also found fewer than half of districts prioritized digital accessibility or had procedures for vetting vendor accessibility, which is required by the rule.

It's not just about course content, but also the apps that a school may use, says Sambhavi Chandrashekar, global accessibility lead at D2L, a company that runs a widely used learning management system. “I doubt if a single K-12 district in the U.S. or anywhere else has an inventory today of all the web apps and forms and content that they have that are not accessible,” Chandrashekar says.

Figuring that out requires performing an audit, which most schools likely haven’t done and which can be expensive, she adds.

At EdSurge’s request, AAAtraq, a company that sells disability-related legal compliance services, surveyed around 20 of the largest schools across a number of states — in California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New York, Texas and Washington state. Many school websites and online PDFs failed along “basic accessibility fundamentals,” based on a benchmark the company uses to assess legal exposure. Alt text was missing, there was not enough color contrast and many websites didn’t have an accessibility statement, the company reports. The company found that 88 percent received an “F,” the lowest possible grade.

The company uses AI in its assessments, which do not cover all of the WCAG technical guidelines, and its assessment was meant only as rough barometer. In some cases, the use of AI in accessibility is controversial.

“Title II should have been a wake up call,” said AAAtraq CEO Lawrence Shaw in an emailed comment, referring to the major disability law behind the “final rule.” Yet many schools, including some of the largest in the country, have left themselves open to legal action.

Digital Exhaustion

Schools’ relationship to technology has also changed since two years ago, from rushing to embrace it to trying to limit it.

These days, beset by digital exhaustion and regret over the reach of tech into children’s lives, schools have sought to restrict screens in schools.

But it’s important for schools and lawmakers to distinguish between meaningful tech and doomscrolling on social media, says Luis Pérez, senior director of disability and accessibility for CAST, a digital access advocacy group. Students are under more pressure to manage their own attention, Pérez says, but those with disabilities and multilingual learners rely on certain digital tools, such as text-to-speech and adjustable text sizing to navigate daily learning. When used correctly, digital tools that expand accessibility can foster a sense of belonging, especially for underrepresented groups.

He worries that screen time laws that lump all screens together could make digital accessibility harder.

K-12 schools may be having the toughest time. Universities are usually more prepared for digital accessibility than state or local governments, which run K-12 public schools, says Sims of Deque. That’s partly because students with disabilities represent a more identifiable group in universities and that allows them to advocate for accommodation, she says.

These schools are heavily reliant on vendors for accessibility, Sims says.

It doesn’t help that there’s uncertainty at the moment.

Old Rules, New Rulers

While the accessibility deadline is still in place, the intentions of the federal government have become murky.

Last year, the Department of Justice signaled that it might issue a new “interim final rule” that would impact the deadline. And recently, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — a federal agency that is usually not involved with accessibility — has been holding meetings on the rule, as “credible rumors” have circulated that the rule is in danger of getting delayed or scrapped.

Yet, the federal government has not publicly released information about its intentions, according to Jarret Cummings, senior adviser for policy and public relations at Educause.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs did not immediately respond to a question from EdSurge about whether a delay is expected.

However, some documents related to the meetings are publicly accessible, giving a glimpse into what they are hearing.

A group representing more than 800 Minnesota cities argued in written testimony that none of the Minnesota cities that would be impacted by the rule are fully compliant with the law. The letter states that the cost of compliance would squeeze small government budgets. In a similar argument, testimony from the National Association of Counties estimated that it would cost small counties about $32,000 to fix problems with accessibility on their sites, and large counties as much as $700,000.

Cummings’ organization, Educause, has also argued that two years was not enough time for most higher-ed institutions to make changes. It suggested that the government alter the timeline.

In contrast, Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, testified that the rulemaking process has been ongoing for decades, with ample time for comment. The bill represents a compromise that clarifies rules, while reducing the burden of those under the law by providing exceptions and generous timelines, Riccobono argued.

Politically, the national mood has changed since the rule was issued a couple of years ago.

The affiliation of accessibility with diversity, equity and inclusion has politically backfired under the Trump administration. The administration has shredded grants it has identified with “radical” DEI ideology, and mass firings have gutted agencies like the Education Department, which the administration is actively trying to dismantle.

For students with disabilities, it means that there’s no guarantee of federal support, even when a federal complaint is filed.

“I would say that so many of the places that were reasonably staffed… have been reduced to almost bare bones, nothing. And so even if there are complaints coming in, there's no way to truly handle them,” says Sims, of Deque.

Indeed, mass firings have led to 90 percent of all student civil rights complaints, including from students with disabilities, being dismissed by the federal government in the second half of last year, according to a nonpartisan government watchdog report published in January.

In the absence of federal help, people with disabilities have turned to the courts. There were more than 3,000 accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court last year, according to legal analysis of court data.

Long-term Goals

Pérez of CAST maintains that advocates should keep on track, focusing on long-term strategy, no matter what happens at the federal level. Accessibility benefits everyone, regardless of their background or disability status, he says.

Sims, of Deque, has also made a “business case” for considering accessibility during the design of products, suggesting that as schools embrace accessibility, the vendors that can show they build accessibility into their products will be rewarded.

Some hope that artificial intelligence tools will help students with disabilities access information on their own, and point toward tools like Aira, an AI tool that aids in remote video interpretation for people with visual impairment.

But even there, disability law experts insist that the federal rule hasn’t actually changed. “The rule is the rule until it isn’t,” wrote Lainey Feingold in early March.

What Makes Edtech Work for Students [Infographic]

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:55:00 GMT

Even the most well-intentioned edtech can fall short if it does not meet students where they are. After several years studying the usability of edtech for teachers, the research team at ISTE+ASCD turned its attention to students — examining how the technical and pedagogical design of digital tools shapes their learning experiences.

In partnership with In Tandem and Sesame Workshop, researchers spoke with high school students across the United States to understand how they actually use edtech in real learning contexts. The findings identify five areas that matter most to students and offer guidance for educators and product designers seeking tools that are intuitive, meaningful and engaging.

A full framework and guidance for edtech buyers and product providers will be released in 2026.