Over the past several months, the W/A Notes team has published exclusive, in-depth interviews with state superintendents making some of the most interesting moves in education, including Alabama’s Eric Mackey, Virginia’s Jenna Conway, and Maryland’s Carey Wright. We open this week’s edition with the next installment of this series.

Louisiana just topped the Education Recovery Scorecard: first in the nation for reading growth, second in math, and the only state to return to pre-pandemic achievement levels in both. The state's academic rebound is part of a broader "Southern Surge" in educational outcomes—and the nation is paying attention.

In an exclusive interview for W/A Notes, Louisiana Superintendent Cade Brumley shared how the state's "back to basics" approach is supporting learning gains, how to retain a sense of urgency while celebrating progress, and what it means for every Louisiana student to grow, achieve, and thrive.

This section was authored by W/A’s Head of K-12 Communications, Thomas Rodgers.

The biggest week on the K-12 edtech calendar just wrapped in Orlando, and a large contingent of the W/A team was on the ground for it—moderating panels; running a media room that hosted dozens of reporters, bloggers, and creators from around the world; and co-hosting the Solutions Summit with ISTE for the third straight year.

The headline came off the mainstage: ISTE+ASCD is changing its name. The ISTE acronym survives, but it now stands for the International Society for Transforming Education. CEO Richard Culatta framed the change as a move from what the two legacy organizations did to why they do it, reaching for the Roger Bannister four-minute-mile story to argue that the barriers around assessment, student ownership, and belonging are more perceived than real.

The product news backed up the framing. ISTE shipped Stretch, the educator chatbot it has spent three years building and rebuilding. We first saw it demoed at ISTELive23 in Philadelphia. This version runs only on vetted ISTE and ASCD materials—no stray cookie recipes—and now includes a wellness coach for teachers running on empty. "Building AI apps is not easy," ISTE's Joseph South said, and three years of re-engineering make the case for him.

The organization also expanded its Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate, now 30 skills across six roles students play when working with AI, and announced a "safe and purposeful" technology-use pledge with GreatSchools.org: five recommendations and a tiered badge schools can show parents. Culatta's advice to districts was to start by admitting where the work is, including tech policies written by lawyers in language no kid could follow.

Pull on any of those threads and you reach the same place. In 2017, my first ISTE, the talk was Chromebooks, 1:1 rollouts, and the homework gap, and the divide that mattered was who had a device. This year, the divide leaders worried about was who knows how to question what the tools produce. Teaching AI, as Culatta put it, "as a way to support us being better at being human" is a different assignment than teaching what AI is.

That shift showed up in the sessions our colleagues led. I moderated a panel on trusting AI in schools and kept landing on the same point: the technology earns its place only if it deepens the relationship between a school and the students and families it serves. Carlos Zavala got there from another direction on his panel on technology and relationships—chronic absenteeism doesn't yield to harder tracking so much as to trust. The numbers back that up. National chronic absenteeism sat at 22.6% last year, barely down, and the districts moving the figure, like Detroit with its family health hubs and home visits, are the ones treating attendance as a relationship problem rather than a compliance one. [SmartBrief; Education Week, subscription model; EdSurge; Government Technology; Chalkbeat]

This section was authored by W/A Notes Associate Editor Julia Pasette-Seamon.

Historically, lawsuits against social media companies for inappropriate or harmful content on their platforms have largely failed. Social media companies have been shielded from litigation by Section 230, enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which was designed to protect online service providers and web operators at the dawn of the internet. Section 230 holds that providers are not liable for the content their users post, a measure that was intended to promote innovation.

It goes without saying that the internet and technology have evolved dramatically since Section 230 was enacted. (In the early 2000s, I had to buy “minutes” at the gas station to make phone calls, and my family shared a “home computer.”)

Young people are now contending with the result of three decades of rapid innovation, and a concerned society is on the brink of opening up the legal and regulatory equivalent of Pandora’s Box to rein tech back in.

Content is no longer viewed as the central risk to young people online. Rather, litigators are suing over the engagement-based design of the platforms themselves—and judges have largely found that Section 230 and First Amendment protections don't bar these product liability claims.

Two major developments this week:

These suits are built upon the verdict of K.G.M. v. Meta et al., a landmark case decided by a California jury earlier this year. The jury found Meta and Google liable for the mental health challenges suffered by the plaintiff in the case, who used their platforms compulsively from childhood. The jury awarded the plaintiff $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta responsible for 70% of the total. Meta intends to appeal, and the companies were denied a new trial in June.

The case was a bellwether—the first social media addiction case to reach a jury anywhere in the country—and it has already reshaped the litigation landscape, with several platforms opting to settle rather than face juries. Meanwhile, the race to restrict or ban cellphone use and screen time in the classroom continues as part of a broader national movement to address the youth mental health crisis. [WBUR; Reuters; PBS]

For years, the literacy debate centered on how children should learn to read. Increasingly, that debate is giving way to a different question: Once students can decode text, how do schools help them become lifelong readers?

In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch argues that the U.S. isn't experiencing an illiteracy crisis so much as a "postliterate" one. Americans still know how to read, but they're reading less. Fewer than half of U.S. adults read a book of any kind in 2022, and the share of 13-year-olds who say they rarely or never read for fun has more than tripled since 1984. Her argument is that reading is a skill that requires continual use—and a culture that stops reading risks losing more than literacy itself.

At the same time, the policy landscape continues to shift. Writing in The 74, Chad Aldeman notes that Massachusetts recently enacted a sweeping literacy law and that early literacy screening results nationally are showing their strongest improvement since before the pandemic. But he argues that policy can only take schools so far. States can require phonics instruction and prohibit three-cueing, yet vocabulary, background knowledge, and students' motivation to read remain much harder to legislate.

Taken together, the stories suggest the next phase of the literacy movement may be less about settling instructional debates and more about sustaining reading beyond the early grades. W/A Head of K-12 Communications Thomas Rodgers explores that shift in more depth in an edition of What We're Reading published earlier this week.

Achieve Partners has been one of the busiest funds in the industry this year, announcing a new $450 million buyout fund, the acquisitions of Alchemy and Celito Tech, an investment in FutureFit AI, and the $465 million sale of Optimum Healthcare IT to Infosys.

Last week, W/A Vice President and Editor of The EdSheet Matt Tower sat down with Achieve’s Managing Director Ryan Craig to learn more about these deals and the firm’s mission to bring apprenticeship programs to services businesses in talent-starved sectors all over the economy.

New York City Public Schools is hitting pause on most new educational software purchases while it finalizes updated guidance on artificial intelligence, marking one of the strongest signals yet that districts are moving from AI experimentation to AI governance. Chancellor Kamar Samuels directed principals to hold off on most software purchases until revised guidance is released later this summer, following criticism that the district's initial AI policy did too little to address concerns around student privacy, safety, and age-appropriate use. Software required for mandated services and school opening will be exempt, though the pause could complicate summer planning as schools typically renew licenses for instructional and administrative platforms during this period. [Chalkbeat New York]

Check out W/A Jobs, which features 3,576 career opportunities from 320 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that caught our eye over the past week: