ChatGPT hit the internet in November 2022 during Keon Davis’ junior year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He used it and grew overreliant, but it also worried him. Davis, who was studying marketing, soon watched it automate tasks he handled in a summer internship, like crafting outreach emails and doing consumer research. Seeing how easily he might be replaced was one reason he changed direction a few months before graduating in May 2024. Instead of pursuing marketing jobs, he signed up for Teach for America. He’s in his third year in front of a third grade classroom at a charter school in New York City.

This story was produced by The Texas Tribune and republished with permission. HOUSTON — Fonville Middle School hired learning coaches to help students falling behind in the classroom. It bought new state-of-the-art technology, such as webcams and smart boards. The school days are longer. All that aggressive change earned the north Houston school its first ever A rating, a coveted stamp of approval from the state. It has been a dramatic climb since the state seized control of the district three years ago, when students were so behind in math and reading that the campus received the scarlet F.

The most notable thing about Melissa’s son’s 6th birthday should have been the vacation the family took. Instead, it was the letter waiting for them when they returned home. Her child was assigned to the disciplinary campus in their school district in McKinney, Texas, for 30 days, the April 2024 letter told them, over allegations that the kindergartner had assaulted a teacher about a week prior. Melissa, whose last name is being withheld to protect her son’s privacy, said the incident occurred when the boy had struggled against a restraint, kicking a teacher.

When I graduated from college in December 2025, I crossed a stage I once worried I would never see. In the months since, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how many students start but never finish. Just six in 10 students earn a degree within six years. While that number is bad enough, the figure is even worse for students like me. It took me nearly 10 years and three universities to finally complete my bachelor’s degree. This global challenge is called a “completion crisis” — language that makes it sound as if the problem is with the students who struggle to graduate.

When the state of New Mexico announced it would provide no-cost universal child care last September, Yaneidy Gomez, a nurse, started thinking about starting her own program. New Mexico made it easy: She applied for a child care license in March and by April had passed inspection and welcomed her first family, proving that a motivated provider can move quickly when states streamline the confusing maze of bureaucracy and paperwork. Two things made the decision to swiftly open a home-based child care business possible: New Mexico’s newly expanded child care assistance program and her confidence that state support for home-based child care was here to stay.

With her senior year of college now underway, Mitzie Westgate has begun planning what she’ll do after graduation next spring. An exercise science major, she hopes to go straight to graduate school and pursue a doctorate in occupational therapy so she can open a nonprofit to help children with disabilities like her cousin, who has cerebral palsy. But thanks to unprecedented confusion around federal student loans, she can’t firm up plans or even decide where to apply until she sees how the chaos shakes out. “It’s kind of up in the air whether I’ll be able to pay for college” after this year, said Westgate, a 21-year-old senior at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

The Treasury Department wants to strip tax-exempt status from private schools that factor race into admissions, scholarships, financial aid or athletics. That announcement this month may sound like a straightforward enforcement measure, one that targets colleges engaged in overt discrimination. If finalized, though, the proposal would unfairly punish institutions that welcome students from every background but have a history — and a mission — of expanding access and opportunity for students from communities that higher education has too often excluded. As many as 18,000 private schools and colleges nationwide would be subject to the rule, putting those already operating on thin financial margins in peril.

BRENTWOOD, N.Y. — A former Navy sailor and union laborer from Local 1298 on Long Island, William “Billy” Bishop jumped at the chance to work on the water again when he learned two years ago about job opportunities on offshore wind construction projects. After earning a safety certification from the National Offshore Wind Training Center — a collaboration between Long Island’s Suffolk County Community College, the Long Island Federation of Labor and multinational wind farm developer Orsted — Bishop worked on a wind farm near Rhode Island. Now he’s doing structural inspections and maintenance on Sunrise Wind, which is under construction off the coast of Long Island.

Soon after the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022, students figured out how to use the chatbot as an answer machine, getting it to do their school work for them. Not surprisingly, that shortcut harmed student learning and led to lower test scores. AI enthusiasts sought a solution. The chatbots could easily be instructed to act more like a human tutor, withholding answers, providing hints and guiding students with questions. Khan Academy created one of these “Socratic-method” chatbots, christened it “Khanmigo,” and released it in 2023. But a new study that came out last month suggests that creating an AI tutor is only one hurdle among many in helping children improve their math skills.

Each spring, Patrick Kelly hears the same complaint from teachers in his state of South Carolina: Too many students, particularly in high school, stop doing any schoolwork. Students know they can pass their classes anyway because of school policies known as “grade floors.” Schools adopted grade floors — which require teachers to give students minimum grades, commonly a 40 or 50, instead of zeroes — to keep GPAs from being dragged down by a few missed assignments. But in practice, they’ve allowed students to scrape by all year and still end up with a passing grade, said Kelly, director of governmental affairs with the Palmetto State Teachers Association and a high school government and politics teacher.

Only 3 percent of Black professionals hold executive roles in the tech C-suite. That statistic is not just a number. It is a mirror reflecting opportunity lost, decisions never made and innovations the world will never see. It also highlights a dynamic that we believe can be changed. The three of us — a nonprofit CEO, a founder and principal of a college prep high school and a summit president — met last year over breakfast at an education summit in San Diego and have committed to driving that change.

Bonnie Albrecht’s path to accessing a government child care assistance program was long (the Texas mother spent nearly two years on a waitlist) and bureaucratic (involving seven pay stubs and countless phone calls). Edythe Smith, who lives in Syracuse, New York, juggled full time work with full time caregiving for her infant daughter from her home while she waited for the aid. Barbara Aranda had to call out from her job in Austin so often that she lost crucial income and had to turn to food pantries to feed her three kids.

Every fall, millions of American parents and caregivers make extraordinary sacrifices to send a child to college. They work overtime, postpone retirement, take on debt or set aside other priorities because they believe higher education can create opportunities they never had. Students make sacrifices too. Many work nights and weekends, juggle family responsibilities or borrow against their future because they believe a college degree is worth it. Those sacrifices deserve accountability. And it’s time for colleges to provide it. For too long, colleges and universities have responded to growing public skepticism by defending the value of higher education.

The morning after Edythe Smith gave birth to her daughter, she got some bad news. State funding for a government program that helps low- and moderate-income families pay for child care had just been frozen in Syracuse, New York, where she lives. Smith is a single parent who works full time from home as an auto claims insurance adjuster. When her maternity leave ended last fall, she had no choice but to return to work while continuing to care full time for an increasingly mobile — sometimes perilously curious — baby.

CINCINNATI — The meeting with staff members of Cincinnati Christian Schools began with a prayer. Then they told Mike Grimmer and Linda Kelly that their granddaughter could no longer attend the private school. Annabelle Kelly had enrolled there three months earlier, in August 2025, in a program specifically for students who struggle in mainstream classrooms. Annabelle, 15, has Rett syndrome, a genetic condition accompanied by significant cognitive and developmental delays. Her grandparents, who took legal custody of Annabelle when she was 5, believed that the small, faith-based setting of CCS would be a better fit than the local public school.

Every community college reformer wants to help more students earn degrees and get through college faster. A much-admired City University of New York support program has done that, some say brilliantly — but a recent 14-year study finds that those additional degrees haven't translated into higher earnings. That's a puzzle. College graduates generally earn more than people without degrees. In New York, even completing a two-year degree is associated with $10,000 to $14,000 more earnings a year. So why didn't the extra degrees generated by CUNY’s ASAP program produce bigger paychecks?

In one of Denver’s wealthiest suburbs, where median family income tops $150,000 and nearly every kid is expected to go to college, students are now lining up for trade certifications. Their parents aren’t worried; in fact, most of them are championing the move. For decades, Americans have been treating college as a career plan, spurred by the “college for all” movement — a decades-long educational and political push that aimed to make a four-year college degree the standard expectation and primary goal for all high school students. The data show that it doesn’t work.

SEWARD, Alaska — It was 2018 when Casie Warner first realized there was a major problem in this popular cruise port, nestled on an inlet about a two-hour drive south of Anchorage. At the time, Warner worked as a home visitor, providing advice, support and resources to low-income parents with young children. Time and time again, Warner would hear the same story from parents: “‘I wasn’t able to make my medical appointments. I didn’t have child care,’” said Warner. “‘I couldn’t pick up an extra shift at work because of child care.’” …

For 15 years, we let children carry cellphones into most of our classrooms. By the time states began ordering the phones out, a generation had spent its childhood inundated by screens. We had protected everything about the arrangement except for the children. Similarly, during the rise of the commercial internet, we wrote rules to protect the privacy of platforms and the people profiting from them. The protections we later built for children, like the rule that a website must get a parent’s permission before collecting a child’s data, would never have been able to make up for the ground we had already ceded.

Choosing a college? Check out our tracker to make sure your favorite schools dont have shaky finances. LYNCHBURG, Va. — Nalia Mutz started her freshman year at the University of Lynchburg in 2022 knowing exactly where she wanted to be four years later: right on track toward her dream of becoming a doctor. When the university eliminated a dozen majors in 2024, the resulting layoffs left fewer professors to teach the science courses she needed to graduate. She began to fear earning her biomedicine degree the way she’d planned could take two extra years.

I was supposed to be dancing, but instead I had been chatting incessantly. The teacher sat me under the piano so I could focus. From that tucked-away spot, I could see nothing but feet. Sneakers and socks sliding across the floor, heels lifting and landing in time with the music. “Focus on their feet,” he told me. “Rejoin your friends when you’re ready.” I watched. I listened. And slowly, something shifted. The rhythm pulled me in. The movement entranced me. I quieted. When I stepped back in, I was fully engrossed in a way I had not previously experienced.

Mikiah Roberson expected to receive her federal $6,700 student loan disbursement sometime between May 27 and June 3, just in time to make her rent and car payments. Instead, June 3 came and went. Days, weeks and finally over a month passed. Roberson, a graduate student in University of Maryland Global Campus’s digital forensics and cyber investigation program, said the stress only compounded as her eight-week summer semester continued without any of her expected financial aid. As a disabled veteran, Roberson’s tuition is covered, but she relies on federal student loans to pay for living expenses while in school.

Over the past few years, Ginger Williams has watched the number of children learning English inch up at the six Head Start sites she runs across Snohomish County, Washington, just north of Seattle. The federally funded preschool program has long been required to provide special support for what it calls “dual language learners.” If a majority of children in a program speak a language other than English, that program must have at least one staff member who also speaks that language — a regulation in place since the 1970s. Teachers are also required to focus both on teaching students English and helping their development in their home language.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reprinted with permission. This fall, 54 million K-12 students are headed back to the classroom for another year of lessons in all the classic subjects: math, English, history, biology. But there’s another subject that’s been sneaking into school curricula: plastics. A new report from the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition documents the many ways the plastics industry has been inserting its agenda into classrooms across the U.S. — including through lesson plans and worksheets, hands-on science experiments, and a program called “PlastiVan” that travels from city to city teaching students about “

SPOKANE, Wash. — One week after evacuating from the wildfires that devastated parts of this eastern Washington city, Mareesha Backman handed over her youngest son to a stranger and took her first deep breath of relief. Spokane Public Schools was hosting what has become a growing part of disaster response: a day camp for children of survivors. Backman showed up that first day feeling “stunned,” she said: hot, poorly showered and underslept. Thanks to the camp’s volunteers, she was able to go to a doctor’s appointment, run errands and simply sit in the air-conditioned quiet of a friend’s home.

MONTPELIER, Vt. — All red brick and white trim and dating from as far back as the 1870s, the buildings that frame a grassy quad on a hill above Vermont’s capital city comprise the quintessential college campus. Behind the scenes, this holdover from the 19th century is where a group of business, college and government leaders is working on the task of reinventing higher education for the 21st. An entirely new college is being planned here to not only change how higher education is delivered, and at what price, but to highlight ways the current business model no longer works — yet is so deeply entrenched that the easiest way to fix it is to begin again from scratch.

Universities across the country are investing in artificial intelligence literacy. Students are attending workshops, experimenting with generative AI tools and earning certificates meant to show that they are ready for an economy shaped by AI. The problem is that we don’t know if these programs help students solve workplace problems, if they open doors to job opportunities, or both. We also don’t know if they give students from different institutions a fair chance to compete. Higher education has an AI pilot program problem. Much of the evidence for “successful” programs still comes…

Before Kris and Matthew Ferderer could take their 9-month-old daughter, Elliott, home for the first time, they had to receive specialized training to manage her oxygen equipment, feeding tubes and a catheter that delivered medication directly to her heart. Elliott, now 6, was born with a rare heart defect requiring a transplant before she was old enough to roll over. Complications caused seizures and two strokes, leaving her with cerebral palsy and limited mobility. She also lost blood flow to her right foot the night of the transplant, resulting in the loss of her toes and heel.

More than a decade of data from schools across the U.S. shows stark divides in who is held back: Boys are more likely than girls to repeat a grade, and Black boys are held back at nearly three times the rate of white boys. Overall, schools are holding back fewer students than they were more than a decade ago, according to data from 2011-12 to 2021-22 analyzed by Big Local News at Stanford University, in partnership with The Hechinger Report. Despite retention rates falling, the gap between Black boys and white boys stayed consistent.

Cori Space spent her freshman year of high school in Madison, Alabama, trying to keep up with her coursework while managing her celiac disease and other health problems that her school wouldn’t accommodate. For her sophomore year, her family opted for the Alabama Destinations Career Academy, a public, virtual school that promised a jump-start on an occupation. Run by the publicly traded company Stride Inc., it advertises five career tracks and the chance to earn industry-recognized credentials. But in Cori’s year at the academy, staff never spoke with the family about enrolling her in a career path, said her mother, Hilary Space.

FOLSOM, Calif. — At Folsom Lake College’s main administrative building, a flyer on the wall tells undocumented students, “You can still go to college in California even with the current political climate.” “Keep going,” it says. “You are not alone.” Nearby is Alicia Alejo’s office at the Undocu-Falcons Center, where the student support specialist helps undocumented students access pro bono legal consults, mental health appointments, food pantries and financial aid. But during the second Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, she said, students are keeping a low profile, sometimes opting for online-only classes and rarely getting involved with campus life — making it harder to reach them.

Something essential has been missing from the national conversation about what it will take to improve and sustain early childhood education. We are not producing nearly enough leaders with the specialized expertise to turn good policy ideas into lasting systems that work. Early childhood policy decisions are made every day by people who care deeply about children but were prepared to do something else entirely. The consequences show up in systems that don’t talk to each other, investments that don’t reach the families who need them most and reforms that look good on paper but collapse when the programs are designed and put in place.

Forget fun runs, PTA bake sales and Saturday morning car washes. The future of public school fundraising may soon look more like a payroll deduction. Or perhaps door-to-door campaigns each tax season asking filers to earmark donations to support nearby public schools. When President Donald Trump’s tax overhaul known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year created the first national school voucher-style program to help families pay for private schools or homeschool costs, it also allowed public schools to benefit as well. According to U.S. Treasury guidelines released in June,

CHICAGO — Midway through her graduate nursing program, Yesenia Raithel Vargas made a desperate plea to a Facebook group for other moms in Chicago: Does anyone know a licensed therapist willing to let her sit in on sessions and work with their clients under their supervision? It was a strange ask in the therapy world, which is one reason Raithel Vargas had resorted to Facebook. “I must have sent 50 emails, or made phone calls, just trying to figure this out,” recalled Raithel Vargas, a 45-year-old mother of four who is studying to become a nurse practitioner specializing in psychiatry.

We want to know how artificial intelligence use is changing your class time and assignments. Students and teachers at all levels of education are using it, even as researchers work in real time to analyze its effects on learning, good and bad. A majority of students and instructors report using AI regularly, with equal numbers saying that it improves and that it harms learning. Recent research indicates that its unregulated use is eroding math skills. And there’s widespread concern that it is cutting into students’ ability to analyze problems and think critically.

Like many parents, I remember visits to the pediatrician’s office in my daughter’s earliest years as overwhelming — a swirl of weights and measurements, rushed conversations about sleep training, breastfeeding and tummy time, all while trying to keep the featured attraction (my wiggly baby) from derailing everything. The visits felt especially cramped when someone handed me a heavy electronic tablet with prompts to answer what seemed like an endless list of questions about my daughter. Was she sitting up? Making eye contact? Naming objects? Crawling? Talking? Sleeping? Many parents like me take for granted the slightly bothersome, yet very necessary, rite of passage that involves filling out developmental screening questionnaires, typically during the nine-month, 18-month and 30-month pediatrician visits.

Had Florida’s high school marine biology students read the original draft of their textbook, they would have learned about research that found climate change is killing at least 150,000 people per year, and another 1 degree Celsius of warming would double that. Instead, they learned that “human health will also be affected by the increase in CO2 and another 1 degree Celsius will further increase the impact." In another spot in McGraw Hill’s Marine Science book, “climate change” was altered to “changes in the environment.” An environmental science textbook by publisher Cengage removed the word “polluting” in front of “coal burning power plants.” And it cut a reference to students at the University of Washington in Seattle voting to pay higher fees to help the school buy electricity from renewable energy sources.

High school came with more responsibility and less accountability for Josiah Ulukita. Courses were much harder, teachers were less strict about attendance, and it was easier to skip school with friends or go on his phone during class, said 16-year-old Ulukita, who attends Kaimuki High School in Honolulu. He went from easily passing middle school to failing freshman English and social studies. After missing roughly half of his freshman year due to poor attendance, he found out he needed to repeat ninth grade. Ashamed, he began to skip more school, he said — until his counselor warned him that he may not graduate on time.

Artificial intelligence makes many tasks faster and easier. But a new study suggests that students may learn more when AI makes them slow down. In an experiment involving more than 6,000 middle schoolers in Tennessee, students learned slightly more math when an AI tutor walked them through their mistakes and then required them to demonstrate the same skill correctly three times in a row before moving on. Academic researchers tested four approaches to practicing fractions. Students were randomly assigned to receive either conventional computer-based instruction or the same software with an AI tutor.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — During the first year and a half of her son’s life, Valerie Gregory did everything she could to help him thrive: She read to him, talked to him, showed up for wellness checks, and whenever possible took him to a weekly playgroup, where both mother and son had the chance to socialize with peers. At one of these gatherings, organizers brought along a standardized developmental questionnaire that helps gauge if children are hitting rough milestones for their age, like making eye contact, sitting up and waving goodbye. …

The nation was distracted by other things when a quiet warning sounded: Support was diminishing for American academic research that had led to breakthroughs and innovation. That familiar-sounding worry came not this year, but near the end of World War II, in a pivotal government study by the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development. The response then: infusions of government cash that would propel the U.S. higher education system into international preeminence over the subsequent decades. American colleges and universities rose to the ranks of the best in the world.

Morgan County, Tennessee, is a rural community shaped by strong relationships, deep attachment to place and a shared commitment to its future. Its public lands and tourism economy are part of that story, as are the intergenerational ties, civic commitment and local institutions that hold the community together. Like many rural areas, Morgan County also faces real economic challenges: More than half of its population struggles to afford basic household necessities, and 15 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. That’s why the efforts of Roane State Community College…

Stepping into the schoolyard at the Adolph S. Ochs public school in Manhattan’s bustling Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, you’re greeted by a canopy of trees. Painted sea turtles and birds adorn the pavement. Summer school kids run along the track encircling the green turf field, tossing balls back and forth. Other kids shoot hoops or decompress in the shade. After walking down nearby Ninth Avenue in the blistering heat, one finds it noticeably cooler here. This schoolyard wasn’t always like this. Eleven years ago, it resembled many other city playgrounds: an open, unshaded expanse of black asphalt.

School purchasing can seem like an administrative backwater, far removed from the heart of teaching and learning. But the way schools buy products and services like educational software or tutoring programs can influence whether students actually learn, some policymakers argue. Instead of paying vendors simply for delivering these tools, school districts are experimenting with a new approach to purchasing, called outcomes-based contracting, in which part of a vendor's payment depends on whether students actually use the service and meet agreed-upon academic goals. The idea is to share risk between schools and vendors — and create incentives for both sides to pay closer attention to whether an intervention is working.

Listen to the whole series TRANSCRIPT Justice Stephen Breyer, a Harvard Law alum with judicial roots in the Boston area, including helping create this federal court. Bella Ramirez is a high-achieving student who hustles. As an undergrad at Boston University, she worked as a resident assistant on campus. Boston has very high costs of living, so that was definitely helpful. And I also did a bunch of different paid internships. So I worked actually with NBC for a few years for different semesters, did a different freelance work around Boston since I was a journalism major.

How do kids learn how to kick a ball? If you think that’s a silly question — kids just kick things, don’t they? — you are thinking like me: Old school. Recently Ginny Yurich, host of the “1000 Hours Outside” podcast, sent me some pages from a pre-K curriculum she’d seen at a conference last year. Kicking is just one of the skills it offers instructions for. And it’s not just, “Give ’em a ball and get out of the way.” No, the guidance is much more granular. Teachers facing the complex and detailed task of teaching kids to kick are told to first “invite” kids outside, earnestly discuss safety issues (kids must stand…

Soon after Alma Guerrero’s youngest child started Head Start in Washington’s Skagit County, one of his teachers pulled the mother of three aside. The boy wasn’t talking, unlike other toddlers his age who are typically using simple words and phrases. Had Guerrero noticed that too? That observation ultimately led to speech therapy for her son, now almost 3. Guerrero said she’s amazed at how much his vocabulary has blossomed. “He comes home and he’s got something new to share,” Guerrero said. Guerrero credits her son’s progress to his participation in Head Start, the federally funded program for low-income infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

Each year, we get a pretty good idea of how kids across the country are doing with their math and reading skills. But writing? That’s a different story. Few states test students on how well they can write, and the country hasn’t published national writing test results for elementary-age children since 2002. Regardless, experts say they have a sense of how it’s going: “The word on the street is that kids can’t write,” said Vicki McQuitty, a professor in Towson University’s elementary education program and director of the Maryland Writing Project, an initiative aimed at improving writing instruction.

When I was an assistant principal in Chicago, I would post a job opening for a physics teacher and get 20 applications. A call for an English teacher might yield 150. That was the late 1990s. By the time I left the district, the same postings were lucky to bring in one or two qualified candidates. Principals were calling the central office and saying, “Send me whoever you have.” What happened to all the candidates? That question has never been fully answered in the national conversation about teacher shortages, in part because too much of that conversation has been devoted to arguing over whether a shortage exists at all.

Pssst — wanna buy a college campus? There’s a sudden market in abandoned campuses, an outgrowth of the accelerating rate of colleges closing in the face of falling enrollment, rising debt and other problems. More than 440 of the nation’s private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities are now at risk, based on enrollment trends, debt and other measures, according to projections by Huron Consulting Group. That’s a quarter of the total. Among the most endangered: small, rural and religiously affiliated institutions. And how to dispose of the real estate is among the least of the challenges facing shuttering campuses and the students they serve.