Tag: Artificial Intelligence

  • What Education Leaders Can Learn from the AI Gold Rush – The 74

    What Education Leaders Can Learn from the AI Gold Rush – The 74


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    Every week, my 7-year-old brings home worksheets with math problems and writing assignments. But what captivates me is what he creates on the back once the assigned work is done: power-ups for imaginary games, superheroes with elaborate backstories, landscapes that evolve weekly. He exists in a beautiful state of discovery and joy, in the chrysalis before transformation.

    My son shows me it’s possible to discover something remarkable when we expand what we consider possible. Yet in education, a system with 73% public dissatisfaction and just 35% satisfied with K-12 quality, we hit walls repeatedly.

    This inertia contributes to our current moment: steep declines in reading and math proficiency since 2019, one in eight teaching positions unfilled or filled by uncertified teachers, and growing numbers abandoning public education.

    Contrast this with artificial intelligence’s current trajectory.

    AI faces massive uncertainty. Nobody knows where it leads or which approaches will prove most valuable. Ethical questions around bias, privacy and accountability remain unresolved.

    Yet despite uncertainty — or because of it — nearly every industry is doubling down. Four major tech firms planned $315 billion in AI spending for 2025 alone. AI adoption surged from 55% to 78% of organizations in one year, with 86% of employers expecting AI to transform their businesses by 2030.

    This is a gold rush. Entire ecosystems are seeing transformational potential and refusing to be left behind. Organizations invest not despite uncertainty, but because standing still carries greater risk.

    There’s much we can learn from the AI-fueled momentum.

    To be clear, this isn’t an argument about AI’s merits. This is a conversation about what becomes possible when people come together around shared aspirations to restore hope, agency and possibility to education. AI’s approach reveals five guiding principles that education leaders should follow:

    1. Set a Bold Vision: AI leaders speak in radical terms. Education needs such bold aspirations, not five percent improvements. Talk about 100% access, 100% thriving, 100% success. Young people are leading by demanding approaches that honoring their agency, desire for belonging, and broad aspirations. We need to follow their lead.

    2. Play the Long Game: Companies make massive investments for transformation they may not see for years. Education must embrace the same long-term thinking: investing in teacher development programs that mature over years, reimagining curricula for students’ distant futures, building systems that support sustainable excellence over immediate political wins.

    3. Don’t Fear Mistakes: AI adoption is rife with failure and course corrections. Despite rapid belief and investment, over 80% of AI projects fail. Yet companies continue experimenting, learning, adjusting and trying again because they understand that innovation requires iteration. Education must take bold swings, have honest debriefs when things fall flat, adjust and move forward.

    4. Democratize Access: AI reached 1.7 to 1.8 billion users globally in 2025. While quality varies and significant disparities exist, fundamental access has been opened up in ways that seemed impossible just years ago. When it comes to transformative change in education, every child deserves high-quality teachers, engaging curriculum and flourishing environments.

    5. Own the Story, and Pass the Mic: Every day, AI gains new ambassadors among everyday people, inspiring others to jump in. The most powerful education stories come from young people discovering breakthroughs during light bulb moments, from parents seeing children thrive, from teachers witnessing walls coming down and possibilities surpassing imagination. We need to pass the mic, creating platforms for students to share what meaningful learning looks like, which will unlock aspirational stories that shift the system.

    None of this is possible without student engagement. When students have voice and agency, believe in learning’s relevance and feel supported, transformative outcomes follow. As CEO of Our Turn, I was privileged to be part of efforts that inspired leaders and institutions across the country to invest in student engagement as a core strategy. We’re now seeing progress: all eight measures of school engagement tracked by Gallup reached their highest levels in 2025. This is an opportunity to build positive momentum; research consistently demonstrates engagement relates to academic achievement, post-secondary readiness, critical thinking, persistence and enhanced mental health.

    Student engagement is the foundation from which all other educational outcomes flow. When we center student voice, we go from improving schools to galvanizing the next generation of engaged citizens and leaders our democracy desperately needs.

    High-quality teachers are also essential. Over 365,000 positions are filled by uncertified teachers, with 45,500 unfilled. Teachers earn 26.4% less than similarly educated professionals. About 90% of vacancies result from teachers leaving due to low salaries, difficult conditions or inadequate support.

    Programs like Philadelphia’s City Teaching Alliance prove what’s possible: over 90% of new teachers returned after 2023-24, versus just under 80% citywide. We must create conditions where teaching is sustainable and honored through higher salaries, better working conditions, meaningful professional development and cultures that value educators as professionals.

    Investing in teacher quality is fundamental to workforce development, economic competitiveness and ensuring every child has access to excellent instruction. When we frame this as both a moral imperative and an economic necessity, we create the coalition necessary for lasting change.

    Finally, transformation must focus on skill development. The workforce young people are entering demands more than technical knowledge; it requires integrated capabilities for navigating complexity, building authentic relationships and creating meaningful change.

    At Harmonious Leadership, we’ve worked with foundations and organizations to develop leadership skills that result in greater innovation and impact. Our goals: young people more engaged in school and communities, and companies reporting greater levels of innovation, impact and financial sustainability.

    The appeal here is undeniable. Workforce development consistently ranks among the top priorities across political divides. Given the rapid rate of change in our culture and economy, we need to develop skills for careers that don’t yet exist, for challenges we can’t yet imagine, for a world that demands creativity, adaptability and resilience.

    The AI gold rush shows what’s possible when we set bold visions, invest for the long term, embrace learning from failure, democratize access and amplify voices closest to transformation.Our children, like my son drawing superheroes on worksheet backs, are in chrysalis moments. The choice is ours: remain paralyzed by complexity or channel the same urgency, investment and unity of purpose driving the AI revolution. We know what works: student engagement, quality teachers and future-ready skills. The question isn’t whether we have solutions. It’s whether we have courage to pursue them.


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  • A Practical Guide – The 74

    A Practical Guide – The 74

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  • The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2025

    The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2025

    In a journal devoted to U.S. education reform, some recurring themes in its content are expected: student achievement, curriculum, teacher effectiveness, school choice, testing, accountability. Other topics are more contemporaneous, reflecting the functional reality of American schooling in its present context. The latter group may capture just a moment in time and give future education historians a glimpse at what mattered to early 21st century reformers (and seem quaint in hindsight). It may also reflect prescient insights from leaders, thinkers, and scholars—contributions that document the early stages of a significant transformation in education policy and practice (and later be deemed ahead of their time).

    What we can say confidently is that Education Next published a good mix of the classic and the contemporary in 2025, just as it has each year in its quarter century of existence. You can see for yourself below in our annual Top 20 list of most-read articles, which features an assortment of writings by researchers, journalists, academics, and teachers.

    Among the traditional fare, readers turned to EdNext to keep apprised of developments in classroom instruction, from reading to literacy to history. They wanted to know if the U.S. might be better off evaluating schools using the European model of inspections rather than, or in addition to, student test scores. Amid ongoing debates about the merits of using standardized tests to gauge student preparation, readers were drawn to the findings of researchers in Missouri that 8th graders’ performance on the state’s MAP test are highly predictive of college readiness. In the realm of teachers and teaching, proponents of merit pay received a boost by an analysis of Dallas ISD’s ACE program, which was shown to improve both student performance and teacher retention in the district.

    As for school choice, Education Next followed successes like the expansion of education savings account programs, the proliferation of microschools, and the federal scholarship tax credit passed by Congress as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But the stumbles of choice had more of a gravitational pull for readers. There were the defeats of private-school voucher measures in three states—continuing a long string of choice failures at the ballot box. There are the enrollment struggles of Catholic schools, which researchers found are impacted by competition from tuition-free charter schools. And just when Catholic and other private religious schools could have gotten a shot in the arm by being allowed to reformulate as religious charters, the Supreme Court deadlocked on the constitutionality of the question, leaving the matter to be relitigated for another day.

    There was no shortage of timely topics that exploded onto the scene and captivated readers. American education is still grappling with the fallout from the Covid-era school shutdowns, now five years in the rearview. Many harbor consternation about the politics of pandemic closures, as demonstrated by the enthusiasm over a new book that autopsied the decisions of that era and the subsequent book review that catapulted onto this year’s list (an unusual feat!). And now there’s research to corroborate the disaster closures were for public education. Two Boston University scholars find evidence of diminishing enrollment in public middle schools, an indication that families whose children were in the early grades in 2020 are parting for the more rigorous shores of private choice. But the post-pandemic problems in schooling have not been uniform. In one of the most-read articles this year, founding EdNext editor Paul Peterson and Michael Hartney show how, based on recent NAEP results, learning loss was greater among students in blue states that had more prolonged school shutdowns than in red states that reopened more quickly.

    Meanwhile, everyone in education circles continues to grapple with what to do about technology in the classroom. Two writers did so in our own pages, presenting opposite perspectives on Sal Khan’s prediction that AI will soon transform education with the equivalent of a personalized tutor for each student. And one of our favorite cognitive scientists gave readers a different way of thinking about how digital devices affect student attention.

    It is perhaps fitting that our most-read article of 2025 was also the cover story of the last print issue of Education Next. (You can read more about our transition to a web-only publication here.) After Donald Trump reassumed the presidency this year and his administration enacted major reductions to the federal bureaucracy, several education-focused programs (and indeed the entire U.S. Department of Education) came under intense scrutiny. One target was Head Start, in part because Project 2025 called to eliminate the program on the grounds it is “fraught with scandal and abuse” and has “little or no long-term academic value for children.” Paul von Hippel, Elise Chor, and Leib Lurie tested those claims against the research and found little basis for them. Yet they also highlight lingering questions about the program’s impact on students’ long-term success—and opportunities to answer them with new research. As of this writing, the nation’s largest early-education program survives, but the sector is still watching and waiting.

    And so are we all for what will happen next in education. Some issues captured by Education Next this year will continue into 2026. Some will flame out. And others that are unforeseen will arise. Readers can depend on Education Next to lean into all the twists and turns that come in the year ahead.

    The full top 20 list is here:

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  • Texas Universities Deploy AI Tools to Review How Courses Discuss Race and Gender – The 74

    Texas Universities Deploy AI Tools to Review How Courses Discuss Race and Gender – The 74


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    A senior Texas A&M University System official testing a new artificial intelligence tool this fall asked it to find how many courses discuss feminism at one of its regional universities. Each time she asked in a slightly different way, she got a different number.

    “Either the tool is learning from my previous queries,” Texas A&M system’s chief strategy officer Korry Castillo told colleagues in an email, “or we need to fine tune our requests to get the best results.”

    It was Sept. 25, and Castillo was trying to deliver on a promise Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents had already made: to audit courses across all of the system’s 12 universities after conservative outrage over a gender-identity lesson at the flagship campus intensified earlier that month, leading to the professor’s firing and the university president’s resignation. 

    Texas A&M officials said the controversy stemmed from the course’s content not aligning with its description in the university’s course catalog and framed the audit as a way to ensure students knew what they were signing up for. As other public universities came under similar scrutiny and began preparing to comply with a new state law that gives governor-appointed regents more authority over curricula, they, too, announced audits.

    Records obtained by The Texas Tribune offer a first look at how Texas universities are experimenting with AI to conduct those reviews. 

    At Texas A&M, internal emails show staff are using AI software to search syllabi and course descriptions for words that could raise concerns under new system policies restricting how faculty teach about race and gender. 

    At Texas State, memos show administrators are suggesting faculty use an AI writing assistant to revise course descriptions. They urged professors to drop words such as “challenging,” “dismantling” and “decolonizing” and to rename courses with titles like “Combating Racism in Healthcare” to something university officials consider more neutral like “Race and Public Health in America.”

    Read Texas State University’s guide to faculty on how to review their curriculum with AI

    While school officials describe the efforts as an innovative approach that fosters transparency and accountability, AI experts say these systems do not actually analyze or understand course content, instead generating answers that sound right based on patterns in their training data.

    That means small changes in how a question is phrased can lead to different results, they said, making the systems unreliable for deciding whether a class matches its official description. They warned that using AI this way could lead to courses being flagged over isolated words and further shift control of teaching away from faculty and toward administrators.

    “I’m not convinced this is about serving students or cleaning up syllabi,” said Chris Gilliard, co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute. “This looks like a project to control education and remove it from professors and put it into the hands of administrators and legislatures.”

    Setting up the tool

    During a board of regents meeting last month, Texas A&M System leaders described the new processes they were developing to audit courses as a repeatable enforcement mechanism. 

    Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs James Hallmark said the system would use “AI-assisted tools” to examine course data under “consistent, evidence-based criteria,” which would guide future board action on courses. Regent Sam Torn praised it as “real governance,” saying Texas A&M was “stepping up first, setting the model that others will follow.” 

    That same day, the board approved new rules requiring presidents to sign off on any course that could be seen as advocating for “race and gender ideology” and prohibiting professors from teaching material not on the approved syllabus for a course.

    In a statement to the Tribune, Chris Bryan, the system’s vice chancellor for marketing and communications, said Texas A&M is using OpenAI services through an existing subscription to aid the system’s course audit and that the tool is still being tested as universities finish sharing their course data. He said “any decisions about appropriateness, alignment with degree programs, or student outcomes will be made by people, not software.”

    In records obtained by the Tribune, Castillo, the system’s chief strategy officer, told colleagues to prepare for about 20 system employees to use the tool to make hundreds of queries each semester. 

    The records also show some of the concerns that arose from early tests of the tool.  

    When Castillo told colleagues about the varying results she obtained when searching for classes that discuss feminism, deputy chief information officer Mark Schultz cautioned that the tool came with “an inherent risk of inaccuracy.”

    “Some of that can be mitigated with training,” he said, “but it probably can’t be fully eliminated.”

    Schultz did not specify what kinds of inaccuracies he meant. When asked if the potential inaccuracies had been resolved, Bryan said, “We are testing baseline conversations with the AI tool to validate the accuracy, relevance and repeatability of the prompts.” He said this includes seeing how the tool responds to invalid or misleading prompts and having humans review the results.

    Experts said the different answers Castillo received when she rephrased her question reflect how these systems operate. They explained that these kinds of AI tools generate their responses by predicting patterns and generating strings of text.

    “These systems are fundamentally systems for repeatedly answering the question ‘what is the likely next word’ and that’s it,” said Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington. “The sequence of words that comes out looks like the kind of thing you would expect in that context, but it is not based on reason or understanding or looking at information.”

    Because of that, small changes to how a question is phrased can produce different results. Experts also said users can nudge the model toward the answer they want. Gilliard said that is because these systems are also prone to what developers call “sycophancy,” meaning they try to agree with or please the user. 

    “Very often, a thing that happens when people use this technology is if you chide or correct the machine, it will say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry’ or like ‘you’re right,’ so you can often goad these systems into getting the answer you desire,” he said.

    T. Philip Nichols, a Baylor University professor who studies how technology influences teaching and learning in schools, said keyword searches also provide little insight into how a topic is actually taught. He called the tool “a blunt instrument” that isn’t capable of understanding how certain discussions that the software might flag as unrelated to the course tie into broader class themes. 

    “Those pedagogical choices of an instructor might not be present in a syllabus, so to just feed that into a chatbot and say, ‘Is this topic mentioned?’ tells you nothing about how it’s talked about or in what way,” Nichols said. 

    Castillo’s description of her experience testing the AI tool was the only time in the records reviewed by the Tribune when Texas A&M administrators discussed specific search terms being used to inspect course content. In another email, Castillo said she would share search terms with staff in person or by phone rather than email. 

    System officials did not provide the list of search terms the system plans to use in the audit.

    Martin Peterson, a Texas A&M philosophy professor who studies the ethics of technology, said faculty have not been asked to weigh in on the tool, including members of the university’s AI council. He noted that the council’s ethics and governance committee is charged with helping set standards for responsible AI use.

    While Peterson generally opposes the push to audit the university system’s courses, he said he is “a little more open to the idea that some such tool could perhaps be used.”

    “It is just that we have to do our homework before we start using the tool,” Peterson said.

    AI-assisted revisions

    At Texas State University, officials ordered faculty to rewrite their syllabi and suggested they use AI to do it.

    In October, administrators flagged 280 courses for review and told faculty to revise titles, descriptions and learning outcomes to remove wording the university said was not neutral. Records indicate that dozens of courses set to be offered by the College of Liberal Arts in the Spring 2026 semester were singled out for neutrality concerns. They included courses such as Intro to Diversity, Social Inequality, Freedom in America, Southwest in Film and Chinese-English Translation.

    Faculty were given until Dec. 10 to complete the rewrites, with a second-level review scheduled in January and the entire catalog to be evaluated by June. 

    Administrators shared with faculty a guide outlining wording they said signaled advocacy. It discouraged learning outcomes that describe students “measure or require belief, attitude or activism (e.g., value diversity, embrace activism, commit to change).”

    Administrators also provided a prompt for faculty to paste into an AI writing assistant alongside their materials. The prompt instructs the chatbot to “identify any language that signals advocacy, prescriptive conclusions, affective outcomes or ideological commitments” and generate three alternative versions that remove those elements. 

    Jayme Blaschke, assistant director of media relations at Texas State, described the internal review as “thorough” and “deliberative,” but would not say whether any classes have already been revised or removed, only that “measures are in place to guide students through any adjustments and keep their academic progress on track.” He also declined to explain how courses were initially flagged and who wrote the neutrality expectations.

    Faculty say the changes have reshaped how curriculum decisions are made on campus.

    Aimee Villarreal, an assistant professor of anthropology and president of Texas State’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said the process is usually faculty-driven and unfolds over a longer period of time. She believes the structure of this audit allows administrators to more closely monitor how faculty describe their disciplines and steer how that material must be presented.

    She said the requirement to revise courses quickly or risk having them removed from the spring schedule has created pressure to comply, which may have pushed some faculty toward using the AI writing assistant.

    Villarreal said the process reflects a lack of trust in faculty and their field expertise when deciding what to teach.

    “I love what I do,” Villarreal said, “and it’s very sad to see the core of what I do being undermined in this way.”

    Nichols warned the trend of using AI in this way represents a larger threat. 

    “This is a kind of de-professionalizing of what we do in classrooms, where we’re narrowing the horizon of what’s possible,” he said. “And I think once we give that up, that’s like giving up the whole game. That’s the whole purpose of why universities exist.”

    The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

    Disclosure: Baylor University, Texas A&M University and Texas A&M University System have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

    This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.


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  • The Trump administration’s biggest impact on education in 2025 

    The Trump administration’s biggest impact on education in 2025 

    by Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report
    December 18, 2025

    Even with a conservative think tank’s blueprint detailing how the second Trump administration should reimagine the federal government’s role in education, few might have predicted what actually materialized this year for America’s schools and colleges. 

    Or what might be yet to come. 

    “2025 will go down as a banner year for education: the year we restored merit in higher education, rooted out waste, fraud and abuse, and began in earnest returning education to the states,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told The Hechinger Report. She listed canceling K-12 grants she called wasteful, investing more in charter schools, ending college admissions that consider race or anything beyond academic achievement and making college more affordable as some of the year’s accomplishments. 

    “Best of all,” she said, “we’ve begun breaking up the federal education bureaucracy and returning education control to parents and local communities. These are reforms conservatives have championed for decades — and in just 12 months, we’ve made them a reality.” 

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    McMahon’s characterization of the year is hardly universal. Earlier this month, Senate Democrats, led by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, called out some of the administration’s actions this year. They labeled federal changes, especially plans to divide the Education Department’s duties across the federal government, dangerous and likely to cause chaos for schools and colleges. 

    “Already, this administration has cancelled billions of dollars in education programs, illegally withheld nearly $7 billion in formula funds, and proposed to fully eliminate many of the programs included in the latest transfer,” the senators wrote in a letter to Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the committee that oversees education. “In our minds, that is unacceptable.” 

    So, what really happened to education this year? It was almost impossible for the average observer to keep track of the array of changes across colleges and universities, K-12 schools, early education and education research — and what it has all meant. This is a look back at how the education world was transformed. 

    Related: Tracking Trump: How he’s dismantling the Education Department and more 

    Higher education

    The administration was especially forceful in the higher education arena. It used measures including antidiscrimination law to quickly freeze billions of dollars in higher education research funding, interrupting years-long medical studies and coercing Columbia, Brown, Northwestern and other institutions into handing over multimillion-dollar payments and agreeing to policy changes demanded by the administration.

    A more widespread “compact” promising preference for federal funding to universities that agreed to largely ideological principles had almost no takers. But in the face of government threats, universities and colleges scrapped diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs that provided support based on race and other characteristics, and banned transgender athletes from competing on teams corresponding to genders other than the ones they were assigned at birth.

    As the administration unleashed its set of edicts, Republicans in Congress also expanded taxes on college and university endowments. And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made other big changes to higher education, such as limiting graduate student borrowing and eliminating certain loan forgiveness programs. That includes public service loan forgiveness for graduates who take jobs with organizations the administration designated as having a “substantial illegal purpose” because they help refugees or transgender youth. In response, states, cities, labor unions and nonprofits immediately filed suit, arguing that the rule violated the First Amendment. 

    The administration has criticized universities, colleges and liberal students for curbing the speech of conservatives by shouting them down or blocking their appearances on campuses. However, it proceeded to revoke the visas of and begin deportation proceedings against international students who joined protests or wrote opinions criticizing Israeli actions in Gaza and U.S. government policy there.  

    Meanwhile, emboldened legislatures and governors in red states pushed back on what faculty could say in classrooms. College presidents including James Ryan at the University of Virginia and Mark Welsh III at Texas A&M were forced out in the aftermath of controversies over these issues. — Jon Marcus

    Related: How Trump 2.0 upended education research and statistics in one year  

    K-12 education

    Since Donald Trump returned to office earlier this year, K-12 schools have lost millions of dollars in sweeping cuts to federal grants, including money that helped schools serve students who are deaf or blind, grants that bolstered the dwindling rural teacher workforce and funding for Wi-Fi hotspots. 

    Last summer, the Trump administration briefly froze billions of dollars in federal funding for schools on June 30, one day before districts would typically apply to receive it. Although the money was restored in late July, some school leaders said they no longer felt confident they’ll receive all expected federal funds next year. And they are braced for more cuts to federal budgets as the U.S. Department of Education is dismembered.

    That process, as well as the end goal of returning the department’s responsibilities to the states, has raised uncertainty about whether federal money will continue to be earmarked for the same purposes. If the state of Illinois is in charge of federal funding for every school in the state, said Todd Dugan, superintendent of a rural Illinois district, will rural schools still get money to boost student achievement or will the state decide there are more pressing needs?  

    As part of layoffs at the Education Department during the government shutdown in the fall, the Trump administration cut loose almost everyone who works in the Office of Special Education Programs, alarming many parents and advocates. About 7.5 million children ages 3 to 21 are served under federal law protecting students with disabilities, and the office had already lost staffers after the Trump administration dismissed nearly half the Education Department’s staff in March. Some worry this additional round of layoffs is a big step toward moving oversight of how states treat students with disabilities to the Department of Health and Human Services.

    Even as the Trump administration attempts to push more control over education to the states, it has aggressively expanded federal power over school choice and transgender student rights in public schools. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will create a federal school voucher program, allowing taxpayers to donate up to $1,700 for scholarships that families can use to pay for private school. The program won’t start until 2027, and states can choose whether to participate — setting up potentially divisive fights over new money for education in Democratic-controlled states. 

    Already, some Democratic-led states have come to the defense of schools in funding and legal fights with the federal government over transgender athletes participating in sports. The U.S. departments of Education and Justice launched a special investigations team to look into complaints of Title IX violations, targeting school districts and states that don’t restrict accommodations or civil rights protections for transgender students. Legal experts expect the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately decide how Title IX — a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education — applies to public schools.

    The federal government directly runs just two systems of schools — one for military families and the other for children of tribal nations. In an executive order signed in January, the president directed both systems to offer parents a portion of federal funding allocated to their children to attend private, religious or charter schools. 

    And as part of the dismantling of the federal Education Department, the Interior Department — which oversees 183 tribal schools across nearly two dozen states — will assume greater control of Indian education programs. In addition to rolling out school choice at its campuses, the department will take over Indian education grants to public schools across the country, Native language programs, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian programs, tribally controlled colleges and universities, and many other institutions. — Ariel Gilreath and Neal Morton

    Related: Trump administration makes good on many Project 2025 education goals

    Early education

    Early education was not at the top of Trump’s agenda when he returned to office. On the campaign trail, when asked if he would support legislation to make child care affordable, he gave an unfocused answer, suggesting tariff revenue could be tapped to bring down costs. Asked a similar question, Vice President JD Vance suggested that care by family members was one potential solution to child care shortages. 

    However, many of the administration’s actions, including cuts to the government workforce and grants, have affected children who depend on federal support. In April, the administration abruptly closed five of 10 regional offices supporting Head Start, the free, federally funded early childhood program for children from low-income families. Head Start program managers worried they would be caught up in a freeze on grant funding that affected all agencies. Even though administration officials said funds would keep flowing to Head Start, some centers reported having problems drawing down their money. The prolonged government shutdown, which ended Nov. 12 after 43 days, also forced some Head Start programs to temporarily close. 

    Though the shutdown is over, Head Start advocates are still worried. Many of the administration’s actions have been guided by the Project 2025 policy document created by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 calls for eliminating Head Start, which serves about 715,000 children from birth to age 5, for a savings of about $12 billion a year. 

    The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained some perks for parents, including an increase in the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200. The bill also created a new program called Trump accounts: Families can contribute up to $5,000 each year until a child turns 18, at which point the Trump account will turn into an individual retirement account. For children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, the government will provide a $1,000 bonus. Billionaires Michael and Susan Dell have also promised to contribute $250 to the account of each child ages 10 and under who lives in a ZIP code with a median household income of $150,000 or less. 

    That program will launch in summer 2026. — Christina A. Samuels

    Contact staff writer Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, on Signal at NirviShah.14 or [email protected].   

    This story about the Trump administration’s impact on education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/how-education-changed-in-one-year-under-trump/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

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  • Transform Your Instructional Coaching with Notebook LM Today

    Transform Your Instructional Coaching with Notebook LM Today

    Jeffrey D. Bradbury
    Latest posts by Jeffrey D. Bradbury (see all)

    TL:DR – Key Takeaways

    • NotebookLM for Instructional Coaches revolutionizes resource management by allowing coaches to use their specific materials instead of generic AI outputs.
    • The tool helps create professional development materials quickly, enabling coaches to synthesize various sources effortlessly.
    • NotebookLM offers unique features like audio overviews, video explanations, and infographics, enhancing the way coaches present information.
    • Coaches can organize notebooks by purpose, rename their sources for clarity, and customize responses for different audiences.
    • Joining communities like GEG helps coaches share strategies and stay updated on innovative practices using NotebookLM.

    As an instructional coach, you’re constantly juggling multiple responsibilities—supporting teachers, creating professional development materials, organizing resources, and staying current with educational technology. What if there was a tool that could help you synthesize information, create engaging content, and save hours of prep time? Enter NotebookLM, Google’s AI-powered workspace that’s revolutionizing how coaches work with information.

    What Makes NotebookLM Different for Coaches?

    Unlike general AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini that pull from the entire web, NotebookLM gives you complete control over your sources. You choose exactly what information goes in—whether it’s your district’s strategic plan, professional development materials, curriculum documents, or teacher resources—and NotebookLM works exclusively with that content.

    This is a game-changer for instructional coaches. You’re not getting generic advice or hallucinated information. You’re getting insights, summaries, and resources based on your specific materials, aligned to your district’s goals, and tailored to your teachers’ needs.

    Real-World Applications for Instructional Coaches

    Creating PD Materials in Minutes

    Imagine this scenario: You’ve gathered resources about implementing Google Workspace tools in the classroom. You have PDFs, website links, video tutorials, and Google Docs with implementation guides. Instead of manually synthesizing all this information, you can upload these sources to NotebookLM and ask it to create a newsletter for teachers, generate a quick-start guide, or develop talking points for your next coaching session.

    One coach recently used NotebookLM to record a 40-minute lesson observation, uploaded the audio as a source, and asked it to create professional development slides with detailed presenter notes. The tool generated beautiful, comprehensive slides that captured the key teaching strategies demonstrated in that lesson—all without the coach spending hours creating materials from scratch.

    Building Notebooks for School Leaders

    Several coaches are now creating custom notebooks for their school leaders that include strategic plans, policy documents, and instructional frameworks. School leaders can then interact with these notebooks to get quick answers, generate reports, or explore connections between different initiatives—all while staying grounded in the district’s actual documents.

    Powerful Features That Save Coaches Time

    Audio Overviews (The Podcast Feature)

    One of NotebookLM’s most popular features creates AI-generated podcast discussions from your sources. Upload your curriculum materials, coaching protocols, or meeting notes, and NotebookLM will generate a conversational audio overview that makes complex information more digestible. These “deep dive” or “brief” options let you control the length and depth—perfect for sharing with busy teachers who prefer audio learning.

    Video Overviews with Visual Styles

    The newest feature generates explainer videos complete with visuals, making it easier to create engaging PD content. You can choose from multiple visual styles and customize what the video focuses on—ensuring the content stays relevant to your coaching goals rather than pulling in extraneous information.

    Infographics and Slide Decks

    Need to create professional-looking materials quickly? NotebookLM can generate infographics in landscape, portrait, or square formats, and create slide decks in both detailed and presenter modes. The image generation has improved dramatically, producing visuals that look polished and professional—often better than what many of us could create manually in the same timeframe.

    Smart Strategies for Instructional Coaches

    Organize by Purpose

    Should you create one massive notebook with all your coaching resources, or multiple smaller ones? Most coaches find success with focused notebooks organized by purpose—perhaps one for Google Workspace training, another for literacy coaching, and another for new teacher support. This approach allows you to keep sources relevant and responses targeted.

    Rename Your Sources

    When you upload documents, rename them to something meaningful for your audience. Instead of “Google_Docs_Editor_Help_Final_v3.pdf,” rename it to “How to Create a Google Doc for Teachers.” This becomes especially important when sharing notebooks with teachers who need to understand what sources are included.

    Customize for Your Audience

    The new “Configure Chat” feature lets you set how NotebookLM responds. You can create prompts that tell the tool to speak at a second-grade reading level, communicate with teachers who aren’t tech-savvy, or address cabinet-level administrators. This customization ensures the responses match your audience’s needs.

    Share Strategically

    In education domains, you can share notebooks within your district, either giving full access or chat-only access (with Google Workspace for Education Plus). This makes it easy to create resource hubs that teachers can explore independently, reducing the number of repeat questions you field.

    Ready to explore NotebookLM with fellow instructional coaches? Join the Google Educator Group (GEG) for Instructional Coaches—a global community of nearly 500 coaches who share strategies, resources, and support.

    Our community hosts monthly meetings, shares practical demonstrations, and provides ongoing support as you implement new tools and strategies in your coaching practice.

    Getting Started with NotebookLM

    The best way to understand NotebookLM’s potential is to experiment with it. Start small:

    1. Record a coaching conversation or PD session and upload the audio
    2. Gather 3-5 documents on a topic you’re currently coaching on
    3. Upload them to a new notebook and ask NotebookLM to summarize key themes
    4. Try the audio overview feature to see how it synthesizes your sources
    5. Share it with a trusted colleague for feedback

    Remember, this tool continues to evolve rapidly. Features that launched just weeks ago are already more powerful, and new capabilities are added regularly. The key is to start using it, share what works with your coaching community, and stay curious about new possibilities.

    Take Your Coaching Impact Further

    As you explore new tools like NotebookLM to enhance your coaching practice, consider diving deeper into frameworks that amplify your impact. My book, Impact Standards, provides actionable strategies for educators and coaches who want to make a lasting difference in their schools and districts.

    Get Impact Standards

    Want to stay connected and receive regular insights, tools, and strategies for instructional coaching? Subscribe to my newsletter for exclusive tips that will help you continue growing as an educational leader.

    The future of instructional coaching involves smart use of AI tools that amplify—not replace—the human connections at the heart of our work. NotebookLM is one more tool in your coaching toolkit, helping you spend less time on content creation and more time on the relationships and conversations that truly transform teaching and learning.

    Upgrade Your Teaching Toolkit Today

    Get weekly EdTech tips, tool tutorials, and podcast highlights delivered to your inbox. Plus, receive a free chapter from my book Impact Standards when you join.

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  • Advocates warn of risks to higher ed data if Education Department is shuttered

    Advocates warn of risks to higher ed data if Education Department is shuttered

    by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
    November 10, 2025

    Even with the government shut down, lots of people are thinking about how to reimagine federal education research. Public comments on how to reform the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Education Department’s research and statistics arm, were due on Oct. 15. A total of 434 suggestions were submitted, but no one can read them because the department isn’t allowed to post them publicly until the government reopens. (We know the number because the comment entry page has an automatic counter.)

    A complex numbers game 

    There’s broad agreement across the political spectrum that federal education statistics are essential. Even many critics of the Department of Education want its data collection efforts to survive — just somewhere else. Some have suggested moving the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to another agency, such as the Commerce Department, where the U.S. Census Bureau is housed.

    But Diane Cheng, vice president of policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increasing college access and improving graduation rates, warns that shifting NCES risks the quality and usefulness of higher education data. Any move would have to be done carefully, planning for future interagency coordination, she said.

    “Many of the federal data collections combine data from different sources within ED,” Cheng said, referring to the Education Department. “It has worked well to have everyone within the same agency.”

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    She points to the College Scorecard, the website that lets families compare colleges by cost, student loan debt, graduation rates, and post-college earnings. It merges several data sources, including the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), run by NCES, and the National Student Loan Data System, housed in the Office of Federal Student Aid. Several other higher ed data collections on student aid and students’ pathways through college also merge data collected at the statistical unit with student aid figures. Splitting those across different agencies could make such collaboration far more difficult.

    “If those data are split across multiple federal agencies,” Cheng said, “there would likely be more bureaucratic hurdles required to combine the data.”

    Information sharing across federal agencies is notoriously cumbersome, the very problem that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11.

    Hiring and $4.5 million in fresh research grants

    Even as the Trump administration publicly insists it intends to shutter the Department of Education, it is quietly rebuilding small parts of it behind the scenes.

    In September, the department posted eight new jobs to replace fired staff who oversaw the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the biennial test of American students’ achievement. In November, it advertised four more openings for statisticians inside the Federal Student Aid Office. Still, nothing is expected to be quick or smooth. The government shutdown stalled hiring for the NAEP jobs, and now a new Trump administration directive to form hiring committees by Nov. 17 to approve and fill open positions may further delay these hires.

    At the same time, the demolition continues. Less than two weeks after the Oct. 1 government shutdown, 466 additional Education Department employees were terminated — on top of the roughly 2,000 lost since March 2025 through firings and voluntary departures. (The department employed about 4,000 at the start of the Trump administration.) A federal judge temporarily blocked these latest layoffs on Oct. 15.

    Related: Education Department takes a preliminary step toward revamping its research and statistics arm

    There are also other small new signs of life. On Sept. 30 — just before the shutdown — the department quietly awarded nine new research and development grants totaling $4.5 million. The grants, listed on the department’s website, are part of a new initiative called, “From Seedlings to Scale Grants Program” (S2S), launched by the Biden administration in August 2024 to test whether the Defense Department’s DARPA-style innovation model could work in education. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, invests in new technologies for national security. Its most celebrated project became the basis for the internet. 

    Each new project, mostly focused on AI-driven personalized learning, received $500,000 to produce early evidence of effectiveness. Recipients include universities, research organizations and ed tech firms. Projects that show promise could be eligible for future funding to scale up with more students.

    According to a person familiar with the program who spoke on background, the nine projects had been selected before President Donald Trump took office, but the formal awards were delayed amid the department’s upheaval. The Institute of Education Sciences — which lost roughly 90 percent of its staff — was one of the hardest hit divisions.

    Granted, $4.5 million is a rounding error compared with IES’s official annual budget of $800 million. Still, these are believed to be the first new federal education research grants of the Trump era and a faint signal that Washington may not be abandoning education innovation altogether.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about risks to federal education data was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-risks-higher-ed-data/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

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  • The new AI tools are fast but can’t replace the judgment, care and cultural knowledge teachers bring to the table

    The new AI tools are fast but can’t replace the judgment, care and cultural knowledge teachers bring to the table

    by Tanishia Lavette Williams, The Hechinger Report
    November 4, 2025

    The year I co-taught world history and English language arts with two colleagues, we were tasked with telling the story of the world in 180 days to about 120 ninth graders. We invited students to consider how texts and histories speak to one another: “The Analects” as imperial governance, “Sundiata” as Mali’s political memory, “Julius Caesar” as a window into the unraveling of a republic. 

    By winter, our students had given us nicknames. Some days, we were a triumvirate. Some days, we were Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades. It was a joke, but it held a deeper meaning. Our students were learning to make connections by weaving us into the histories they studied. They were building a worldview, and they saw themselves in it. 

    Designed to foster critical thinking, this teaching was deeply human. It involved combing through texts for missing voices, adapting lessons to reflect the interests of the students in front of us and trusting that learning, like understanding, unfolds slowly. That labor can’t be optimized for efficiency. 

    Yet, today, there’s a growing push to teach faster. Thousands of New York teachers are being trained to use AI tools for lesson planning, part of a $23 million initiative backed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic. The program promises to reduce teacher burnout and streamline planning. At the same time, a new private school in Manhattan is touting an AI-driven model that “speed-teaches” core subjects in just two hours of instruction each day while deliberately avoiding politically controversial issues. 

    Marketed as innovation, this stripped-down vision of education treats learning as a technical output rather than as a human process in which students ask hard questions and teachers cultivate the critical thinking that fuels curiosity. A recent analysis of AI-generated civics lesson plans found that they consistently lacked multicultural content and prompts for critical thinking. These AI tools are fast, but shallow. They fail to capture the nuance, care and complexity that deep learning demands. 

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.  

    When I was a teacher, I often reviewed lesson plans to help colleagues refine their teaching practices. Later, as a principal in Washington, D.C., and New York City, I came to understand that lesson plans, the documents connecting curriculum and achievement, were among the few steady examples of classroom practice. Despite their importance, lesson plans were rarely evaluated for their effectiveness.  

    When I wrote my dissertation, after 20 years of working in schools, lesson plan analysis was a core part of my research. Analyzing plans across multiple schools, I found that the activities and tasks included in lesson plans were reliable indicators of the depth of knowledge teachers required and, by extension, the limits of what students were asked to learn. 

    Reviewing hundreds of plans made clear that most lessons rarely offered more than a single dominant voice — and thus confined both what counted as knowledge and what qualified as achievement. Shifting plans toward deeper, more inclusive student learning required deliberate effort to incorporate primary sources, weave together multiple narratives and design tasks that push students beyond mere recall. 

     I also found that creating the conditions for such learning takes time. There is no substitute for that. Where this work took hold, students were making meaning, seeing patterns, asking why and finding themselves in the story. 

    That’s the transformation AI can’t deliver. When curriculum tools are trained on the same data that has long omitted perspectives, they don’t correct bias; they reproduce it. The developers of ChatGPT acknowledge that the model is “skewed toward Western views and performs best in English” and warn educators to review its content carefully for stereotypes and bias. Those same distortions appear at the systems level — a 2025 study in the World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews found that biased educational algorithms can shape students’ educational paths and create new structural barriers. 

    Ask an AI tool for a lesson on westward expansion, and you’ll get a tidy narrative about pioneers and Manifest Destiny. Request a unit on the Civil Rights Movement and you may get a few lines on Martin Luther King Jr., but hardly a word about Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer or the grassroots organizers who made the movement possible. Native nations, meanwhile, are reduced to footnotes or omitted altogether. 

    Curriculum redlining — the systematic exclusion or downplaying of entire histories, perspectives and communities — has already been embedded in educational materials for generations. So what happens when “efficiency” becomes the goal? Whose histories are deemed too complex, too political or too inconvenient to make the cut? 

    Related: What aspects of teaching should remain human? 

    None of this is theoretical. It’s already happening in classrooms across the country. Educators are under pressure to teach more with less: less time, fewer resources, narrower guardrails. AI promises relief but overlooks profound ethical questions. 

    Students don’t benefit from autogenerated worksheets. They benefit from lessons that challenge them, invite them to wrestle with complexity and help them connect learning to the world around them. That requires deliberate planning and professional judgment from a human who views education as a mechanism to spark inquiry. 

    Recently, I asked my students at Brandeis University to use AI to generate a list of individuals who embody concepts such as beauty, knowledge and leadership. The results, overwhelmingly white, male and Western, mirrored what is pervasive in textbooks.  

    My students responded with sharp analysis. One student created color palettes to demonstrate the narrow scope of skin tones generated by AI. Another student developed a “Missing Gender” summary to highlight omissions. It was a clear reminder that students are ready to think critically but require opportunities to do so.  

    AI can only do what it’s programmed to do, which means it draws from existing, stratified information and lags behind new paradigms. That makes it both backward-looking and vulnerable to reproducing bias.  

    Teaching with humanity, by contrast, requires judgment, care and cultural knowledge. These are qualities no algorithm can automate. When we surrender lesson planning to AI, we don’t just lose stories; we also lose the opportunity to engage with them. We lose the critical habits of inquiry and connection that teaching is meant to foster. 

    Tanishia Lavette Williams is the inaugural education stratification postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, a Kay fellow at Brandeis University and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].  

    This story about male AI and teaching was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.  

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-the-new-ai-tools-are-fast-but-cant-replace-the-judgment-care-and-cultural-knowledge-teachers-bring-to-the-table/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

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  • Students Love AI Chatbots — No, Really – The 74

    Students Love AI Chatbots — No, Really – The 74

    School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here.

    The robots have taken over.

    New research suggests that a majority of students use chatbots like ChatGPT for just about everything at school. To write essays. To solve complicated math problems. To find love. 

    Wait, what? 

    Nearly a fifth of students said they or a friend have used artificial intelligence chatbots to form romantic relationships, according to a new survey by the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology. Some 42% said they or someone they know used the chatbots for mental health support, as an escape from real life or as a friend.

    Eighty-six percent of students say they’ve used artificial intelligence chatbots in the past academic year — half to help with schoolwork.

    The tech-enabled convenience, researchers conclude, doesn’t come without significant risks for young people. Namely, as AI proliferates in schools — with help from the federal government and a zealous tech industry — on a promise to improve student outcomes, they warn that young people could grow socially and emotionally disconnected from the humans in their lives. 

    In the news

    The latest in Trump’s immigration crackdown: The survey featured above, which quizzed students, teachers and parents, also offers startling findings on immigration enforcement in schools: 
    While more than a quarter of educators said their school collects information about whether a student is undocumented, 17% said their district shares records — including grades and disciplinary information — with immigration enforcement. 

    In the last school year, 13% of teachers said a staff member at their school reported a student or parent to immigration enforcement of their own accord. | Center for Democracy & Technology

    People hold signs as New York City officials speak at a press conference calling for the release of high school student Mamadou Mouctar Diallo outside of the Tweed Courthouse on Aug. 14 in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
    • Call for answers: In the wake of immigration enforcement that’s ensnared children, New York congressional Democrats are demanding the feds release information about the welfare of students held in detention, my colleague Jo Napolitano reports. | The 74
    • A 13-year-old boy from Brazil, who has lived in a Boston suburb since 2021 with a pending asylum application, was scooped up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after local police arrested him on a “credible tip” accusing him of making “a violent threat” against a classmate at school. The boy’s mother said her son wound up in a Virginia detention facility and was “desperate, saying ICE had taken him.” | CNN
    • Chicago teenagers are among a group of activists patrolling the city’s neighborhoods to monitor ICE’s deployment to the city and help migrants avoid arrest. | NPR
    • Immigration agents detained a Chicago Public Schools vendor employee outside a school, prompting educators to move physical education classes indoors out of an “abundance of caution.” | Chicago Sun-Times
    • A Des Moines, Iowa, high schooler was detained by ICE during a routine immigration check-in, placed in a Louisiana detention center and deported to Central America fewer than two weeks later. | Des Moines Register
    • A 15-year-old boy with disabilities — who was handcuffed outside a Los Angeles high school after immigration agents mistook him for a suspect — is among more than 170 U.S. citizens, including nearly 20 children, who have been detained during the first nine months of the president’s immigration push. | PBS

    Trigger warning: After a Washington state teenager hanged himself on camera, the 13-year-old boy’s parents set out to find out what motivated their child to livestream his suicide on Instagram while online users watched. Evidence pointed to a sadistic online group that relies on torment, blackmail and coercion to weed out teens they deem weak. | The Washington Post

    Civil rights advocates in New York are sounding the alarm over a Long Island school district’s new AI-powered surveillance system, which includes round-the-clock audio monitoring with in-classroom microphones. | StateScoop

    A federal judge has ordered the Department of Defense to restock hundreds of books after a lawsuit alleged students were banned from checking out texts related to race and gender from school libraries on military bases in violation of the First Amendment. | Military.com

    More than 600 armed volunteers in Utah have been approved to patrol campuses across the state to comply with a new law requiring armed security. Called school guardians, the volunteers are existing school employees who agree to be trained by local law enforcement and carry guns on campus. | KUER

    Sign-up for the School (in)Security newsletter.

    Get the most critical news and information about students’ rights, safety and well-being delivered straight to your inbox.

    No “Jackass”: Instagram announced new PG-13 content features that restrict teenagers from viewing posts that contain sex, drugs and “risky stunts.” | The Associated Press

    A Tuscaloosa, Alabama, school resource officer restrained and handcuffed a county commissioner after a spat at an elementary school awards program. | Tuscaloosa News

    The number of guns found at Minnesota schools has increased nearly threefold in the last several years, new state data show. | Axios

    More than half of Florida’s school districts received bomb threats on a single evening last week. The threats weren’t credible, officials said, and appeared to be “part of a hoax intended to solicit money.” | News 6

    ICYMI @The74

    RAPID Survey Project, Stanford Center on Early Childhood

    Survey: Nearly Half of Families with Young Kids Struggling to Meet Basic Needs

    Education Department Leans on Right-Wing Allies to Push Civil Rights Probes

    OPINION: To Combat Polarization and Political Violence, Let’s Connect Students Nationwide

    Emotional Support

    Thanks for reading,
    —Marz


    Did you use this article in your work?

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  • Can AI Keep Students Motivated, Or Does it Do the Opposite? – The 74

    Can AI Keep Students Motivated, Or Does it Do the Opposite? – The 74

    Imagine a student using a writing assistant powered by a generative AI chatbot. As the bot serves up practical suggestions and encouragement, insights come more easily, drafts polish up quickly and feedback loops feel immediate. It can be energizing. But when that AI support is removed, some students report feeling less confident or less willing to engage.

    These outcomes raise the question: Can AI tools genuinely boost student motivation? And what conditions can make or break that boost?

    As AI tools become more common in classroom settings, the answers to these questions matter a lot. While tools for general use such as ChatPGT or Claude remain popular, more and more students are encountering AI tools that are purpose-built to support learning, such as Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, which personalizes lessons. Others, such as ALEKS, provide adaptive feedback. Both tools adjust to a learner’s level and highlight progress over time, which helps students feel capable and see improvement. But there are still many unknowns about the long-term effects of these tools on learners’ progress, an issue I continue to study as an educational psychologist.

    What the evidence shows so far

    Recent studies indicate that AI can boost motivation, at least for certain groups, when deployed under the right conditions. A 2025 experiment with university students showed that when AI tools delivered a high-quality performance and allowed meaningful interaction, students’ motivation and their confidence in being able to complete a task – known as self-efficacy – increased.

    For foreign language learners, a 2025 study found that university students using AI-driven personalized systems took more pleasure in learning and had less anxiety and more self-efficacy compared with those using traditional methods. A recent cross-cultural analysis with participants from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Spain and Poland who were studying diverse majors suggested that positive motivational effects are strongest when tools prioritize autonomy, self-direction and critical thinking. These individual findings align with a broader, systematic review of generative AI tools that found positive effects on student motivation and engagement across cognitive, emotional and behavioral dimensions.

    A forthcoming meta-analysis from my team at the University of Alabama, which synthesized 71 studies, echoed these patterns. We found that generative AI tools on average produce moderate positive effects on motivation and engagement. The impact is larger when tools are used consistently over time rather than in one-off trials. Positive effects were also seen when teachers provide scaffolding, when students maintain agency in how they use the tool, and when the output quality is reliable.

    But there are caveats. More than 50 of the studies we reviewed did not draw on a clear theoretical framework of motivation, and some used methods that we found were weak or inappropriate. This raises concerns about the quality of the evidence and underscores how much more careful research is needed before one can say with confidence that AI nurtures students’ intrinsic motivation rather than just making tasks easier in the moment.

    When AI backfires

    There is also research that paints a more sobering picture. A large study of more than 3,500 participants found that while human–AI collaboration improved task performance, it reduced intrinsic motivation once the AI was removed. Students reported more boredom and less satisfaction, suggesting that overreliance on AI can erode confidence in their own abilities.

    Another study suggested that while learning achievement often rises with the use of AI tools, increases in motivation are smaller, inconsistent or short-lived. Quality matters as much as quantity. When AI delivers inaccurate results, or when students feel they have little control over how it is used, motivation quickly erodes. Confidence drops, engagement fades and students can begin to see the tool as a crutch rather than a support. And because there are not many long-term studies in this field, we still do not know whether AI can truly sustain motivation over time, or whether its benefits fade once the novelty wears off.

    Not all AI tools work the same way

    The impact of AI on student motivation is not one-size-fits-all. Our team’s meta-analysis shows that, on average, AI tools do have a positive effect, but the size of that effect depends on how and where they are used. When students work with AI regularly over time, when teachers guide them in using it thoughtfully, and when students feel in control of the process, the motivational benefits are much stronger.

    We also saw differences across settings. College students seemed to gain more than younger learners, STEM and writing courses tended to benefit more than other subjects, and tools designed to give feedback or tutoring support outperformed those that simply generated content.

    There is also evidence that general-use tools like ChatGPT or Claude do not reliably promote intrinsic motivation or deeper engagement with content, compared to learning-specific platforms such as ALEKS and Khanmigo, which are more effective at supporting persistence and self-efficacy. However, these tools often come with subscription or licensing costs. This raises questions of equity, since the students who could benefit most from motivational support may also be the least likely to afford it.

    These and other recent findings should be seen as only a starting point. Because AI is so new and is changing so quickly, what we know today may not hold true tomorrow. In a paper titled The Death and Rebirth of Research in Education in the Age of AI, the authors argue that the speed of technological change makes traditional studies outdated before they are even published. At the same time, AI opens the door to new ways of studying learning that are more participatory, flexible and imaginative. Taken together, the data and the critiques point to the same lesson: Context, quality and agency matter just as much as the technology itself.

    Why it matters for all of us

    The lessons from this growing body of research are straightforward. The presence of AI does not guarantee higher motivation, but it can make a difference if tools are designed and used with care and understanding of students’ needs. When it is used thoughtfully, in ways that strengthen students’ sense of competence, autonomy and connection to others, it can be a powerful ally in learning.

    But without those safeguards, the short-term boost in performance could come at a steep cost. Over time, there is the risk of weakening the very qualities that matter most – motivation, persistence, critical thinking and the uniquely human capacities that no machine can replace.

    For teachers, this means that while AI may prove a useful partner in learning, it should never serve as a stand-in for genuine instruction. For parents, it means paying attention to how children use AI at home, noticing whether they are exploring, practicing and building skills or simply leaning on it to finish tasks. For policymakers and technology developers, it means creating systems that support student agency, provide reliable feedback and avoid encouraging overreliance. And for students themselves, it is a reminder that AI can be a tool for growth, but only when paired with their own effort and curiosity.

    Regardless of technology, students need to feel capable, autonomous and connected. Without these basic psychological needs in place, their sense of motivation will falter – with or without AI.

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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