This week, W/A Vice President and Editor of The EdSheet Matt Tower is stepping in for Ben with a recap of the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit.

As you might expect, this year’s ASU+GSV Summit was all about AI. Discussion of AI rang through the hallways, in panel sessions, and across the investment news cycle. It permeated nearly every conversation I had—often tinged with either borderline-irrational optimism or demoralizing pessimism.

On a personal level, AI was working hard in the background—unseen by most, but steadily making the case to be a bigger part of my professional life:

Going to ASU+GSV used to feel like a tradeoff—sacrificing a week of day-to-day work for the sake of networking. It was big, stressful, and I often felt like I was on the defensive.

This year, I went on offense.

I built skills and agents to manage several of my day-to-day responsibilities. I spent more time than ever thinking about the composition of my meeting calendar, what I wanted to learn, and how to make each interaction memorable—including the use of a few well-placed props.

Most of the “AI” that enabled this shift wasn’t visible to anyone I met at the Summit. And yet, it fundamentally changed my experience—and, I hope, theirs. I was more present, more creative, and more intentional than at any conference I can remember. That translated directly into better conversations.

I can feel the edtech industry going through a similar transition. New products and ideas are emerging at a startling pace. It is, simultaneously, all anyone wants to talk about and still somewhat difficult to pin down what, exactly, has changed.

The ASU+GSV Summit sets the tone for the year in edtech. If this year is any indication, 2026 won’t be defined by whether AI shows up—it already has.

Instead, this year will be defined by the companies and organizational leaders who figure out how to use AI well enough that it fades into the background and what becomes possible once it does.

Alabama is one of the most-watched states in K-12 education, ranking first in the nation for math recovery, building a statewide science of reading infrastructure, and passing landmark school funding reform. Much of that progress traces back to stability at the top.

We sat down with Alabama State Superintendent of Education Eric Mackey—one of America's longest-serving state superintendents—to talk about the transformative impact steady leadership has had on Alabama’s public schools and the work still ahead.

This article was written by W/A Vice President and National Math Improvement Project Director Hillary Rinaldi. 

Last week, I spent the afternoon with state education leaders, researchers, legislative champions, and practitioners from across the country for a working group focused on math state policy. The energy in the room was infectious—the policy landscape in math is more active than it has been in years. 

Yet, the core question underneath every breakout discussion was the same one I've been asking since my time at the Tennessee Department of Education nearly a decade ago: What happens when we graduate more students, reduce barriers to postsecondary entry, and yet still find significant gaps in math readiness?

In 2015, Tennessee launched the Tennessee Promise program, making it the first state in the country to offer free community and technical college—a bold, bipartisan bet that removing the financial barrier would change outcomes for students. And in many ways it did. Enrollment climbed. More students showed up. 

But more than 70% of students entering Tennessee's community colleges that fall weren't ready for college-level math. The state removed many of the barriers to entry, but too many students arrived without the math competencies they needed to immediately earn credit. 

Tennessee didn’t abandon the plan. Instead, the state restructured how it handled math preparation, shifting students into co-requisite support models rather than standalone remedial courses. But a decade of follow-up research found that graduation rates didn't increase as a result of this restructuring, and the lowest-achieving students were more likely to drop out. 

The lesson: Math skill deficits are persistent and start far earlier than the first day of college. That’s why the current momentum in math policy matters—and why it must be sustained.

With virtually every state adopting science of reading policies, math has lagged behind. About 10 states had comprehensive policies in place ahead of 2026 and more are now moving in that direction. Unlike reading, as described by Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner, there is not yet a national blueprint for scaling math reform, making state professional development investment especially critical.

State education leaders and policymakers increasingly view math policy as a system design challenge. Proposed legislation aims to break math's role as a "social sorting machine" (as described by New Classrooms’ Joel Rose during last week’s working group) through skill-level diagnostics and differentiated pathways, rethinking the delivery model rather than layering new approaches onto old structures, and bringing durable skills fully into rigorous math education rather than treating them as add-ons.

Tensions remain: Standards revisions are happening across multiple states, but there is not yet the national coherence in math that would help the market respond at scale. High school pathways are being reimagined, but the risk of creating new forms of tracking—even unintentionally—requires ongoing vigilance. Educator capacity remains a binding constraint: teacher shortages, uneven coaching infrastructure, and the genuine difficulty of shifting instructional practice all slow the translation from policy to classroom.

State policy sets the conditions. But learning happens in classrooms every day, and the districts responsible for that instruction are not waiting for states to catch up.

New research from the National Math Improvement Project (NMIP) documents what pre-implementation looked like in two of the nation's largest urban districts. In both districts, the year before a new math curriculum launch—AKA “Year 0”—proved more consequential than the launch year itself. [K-12 Dive]

More states are making policy moves in math than at any point in recent memory. The conversations happening in statehouses, district offices, and working groups reflect genuine urgency and growing sophistication about what solving the math problem actually requires.

But as Student Achievement Partners’ Aly Martinez noted during the working group last week: “...this cannot just be the year of math. It needs to be the decade.”

The results of Tennessee Promise are instructive not because the program was a failure (it wasn’t), but because it illustrated how long the lag is between investment and outcome, and how far upstream the real work has to go. 

We are graduating more students than ever. We are not yet ensuring they have the math they need for the futures they deserve. Closing that gap will take the kind of sustained, coherent, cross-sector commitment that literacy reform required—and math is still early in that arc. [The 74]

Hosted by ISTE+ASCD and Whiteboard Advisors, the Solutions Summit is a one-day, exclusive event that convenes leaders from across the education ecosystem. This year’s Summit will be held on Sunday, June 28, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and will feature a mix of interactive panels and small-group activities focused on real-world decision-making, product impact, and the future of learning.

This week, the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) Committee completed its first week of negotiations on the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) draft regulatory proposals reforming the U.S. accreditation system. 

The week opened with presentations from ED on the history of accreditation and consisted of broader discussions around key issues ED intends to address with the new regulations as well as specific line-by-line discussions about the proposed language. As we covered last week, the lengthy proposal tackles a broad range of issue areas from reforming transfer credit process, to new language on accrediting agencies ensuring institutional compliance with federal and state law, to adding program-level student success evaluations to accreditation standards.

On Friday, the AIM Committee adjourned its negotiations and will not meet again until the week of May 18, when it will conclude negotiations. In the interim, committee members and ED will work to revise currently proposed language based on this week’s discussions. The goal of revising the proposal is to draft language that all Committee members feel comfortable voting in favor of (i.e., reaching “consensus” on). 

What’s next: Following the May negotiations, ED will look to publish a draft set of regulations in the Federal Register for a public comment period later this year, followed by a final draft of the regulations. If the rules are finalized before November 1, 2026, the regulations would go into effect on July 1, 2027. If the deadline is missed, the earliest they could go into effect would be July 1, 2028.

The U.S. Department of Education announced that it will officially publish new regulations on institutional accountability and eligibility for the Title IV federal aid program on Monday, April 20. The regulations, which were part of the recently concluded negotiations of the Accountability in Higher Education and Access through Demand-driven Workforce Pell (AHEAD) Committee, set forth new requirements conditioning institutional participation in the Title IV program on the earnings outcomes of the institution’s students. 

We’ll cover that more next week once the proposal is officially published in the Federal Register. In the meantime, check out our summary of the consensus the rulemaking committee reached back in January. 

On Tuesday, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun’s administration announced a new proposal to expand access to free and reduced-cost child care in the state. The administration plans to ask the State Budget Committee to reroute $200 million from the state’s General Fund towards the Child Care and Development Fund, a state-administered federal voucher program that currently serves about 43,000 children in Indiana. Should the funding transfer be approved, it would reopen admissions for Indiana’s child care program to the waitlist—now 14,000 kids deep. [Indiana Capital Chronicle]

Check out W/A Jobs, which features 3,953 career opportunities from 316 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that caught our eye over the past week: