Some days, my kids wake up and reach for their phones before their feet hit the floor. After school (where phones are banned) it's often worse. Longtime readers may remember that The Commons' co-founder Julia Gustafson gave me the name for this: "rebound consumption," the binge that follows a day of forced abstinence. Of course, the answer isn't as simple as taking the phones away, because everything runs through them now. Practice changes get posted in an app. Homework lives on a portal.

If you're a parent, you know the frustration. So I get why it spills into schools, and why social media posts about edtech land on already anxious ears. But when nondescript (and often uninformed) parental fears manifest as state and district policy, kids can get hurt. And as the school year kicks off, we’re beginning to see that play out around the country. 

Let me start with a concession. For the last two decades, some significant portion of the technology that entered American classrooms was justified by flimsy references to modernization, access, or time-saving (claims, often obscured by vendors themselves), and accelerated (in recent years) by a flood of federal dollars. 

All too often there was precious little attention paid to the specific learning problem addressed, and whether there was evidence that the “solution” actually solved it. As a result, there is technology sitting in schools today because a sales cycle is aligned with a vision or a strategic plan, not because it’s driving learning outcomes. 

There is, therefore, something intuitively persuasive to the argument that saturating classrooms with edtech opened the door to a degree of cognitive offloading (by students and by the adults teaching them). This is the case Jared Cooney Horvath makes in The Digital Delusion, which has become the intellectual engine of the anti-screen movement. 

But when Chalkbeat's Matt Barnum examined the evidence, he found "no smoking-gun data" that edtech is at the root of — or even contributing to — recent learning declines. Peter Bergman, an economist at UT Austin who studies edtech, was even more blunt: "It's very hard to interpret correlations."  

Turns out, it's hard to make one tidy story explain a trend when a host of factors (including, until recently, the slow walk away from the science of reading) are moving at once.  

Any investor would recognize the fallacy. The market is down, so dump the stock. The market tends to move up over time, so buy stock X. The problem, as I’ve written before, is that edtech isn't just one “asset.” It's thousands of wildly different holdings (some worthless, a few extraordinary). The challenge is evaluating them individually. 

I think it's fair to say that the sector is now dealing with the implications of selling based on brand and promise. Ironically, the techlash movement is now committing the same error — only in the opposite direction.

Horvath told a Senate committee that "when tech enters education, learning goes down." That single clip of testimony has now racked up nearly three million views on C-SPAN's YouTube channel; shorter cuts ricochet across Instagram; and parents arrive at school board meetings carrying the book.

In New Mexico, Horvath’s assertion landed as a certainty: an opt-out campaign against a reading intervention that listens to a child read and, among other things, flags dyslexia risk early, recast (wrongly, of course) as teacher replacement.  

Sadly for struggling readers in the state, the technology that’s drawing the ire of a small group of parents is actually proving its worth – not just in New Mexico, but across the country, as evidenced by more than a decade of studies by university researchers, state agencies, and independent evaluators. Among the most promising findings in the state: the rate at which children are misdiagnosed for dyslexia is actually going down.

In a state that consistently ranks at the bottom of the reading charts, perhaps the question parents should be asking is not “How do we get AI out of our schools?” but “Why would we deny our teachers the most advanced diagnostics ever built?”

I'm not without bias here. But the irony is hard to miss: the abandonment of critical thinking that we claim to fear is exactly what is fueling the debate about it. 

So how do we put evidence at the heart of edtech adoption decisions? Last week WestEd released the first independent evaluation of outcomes-based contracting in which a meaningful share of a vendor's payment depends on measurable student results. Across early-adopter districts, well-implemented contracts produced real academic gains in reading and math. 

In one district, second graders using an AI reading tool (like the one at issue in New Mexico) posted proficiency gains bigger than the gap between the lowest- and highest-scoring states on NAEP, and the vendor got paid because they did. Just as important: schools and vendors actually met to review data, tracked whether kids showed up, and course-corrected midstream. 

That's what 'pricing' the individual 'position' looks like in edtech. And it has taken years to get here: people like Erin Mote quietly building the safety standards and vetting frameworks that make that underwriting possible. Of course, none of this goes viral. But it's moving us much closer to the answer.

Parents' fears about screen time are legitimate. So is the fact that two in five fourth graders can't read at a basic level. The bathwater is real. So is the baby.

From new research on the perils of moving money through school cash boxes to a new way to measure AI impact and the future of state assessment, W/A is teaming up with leaders in the field to understand, evaluate and share perspectives on the most pressing issues in the field.

Time saved has become the default yardstick for AI’s value in classrooms. “From Efficiency to Efficacy: Measuring AI’s Instructional Impact”, a new white paper from Brisk Teaching, argues the more consequential question is whether AI helps educators deliver better instruction — and proposes a framework that weights each AI-assisted interaction by its instructional value, focusing on moments that are observable in real time and grounded in learning science, like timely feedback, spaced practice, and differentiated content. The stakes: the decisions districts make now about which tools to adopt and what evidence to expect from vendors will shape AI’s role in classrooms for years to come.

The money that moves through schools in cash boxes and coaches’ Venmo accounts — field trip fees, gate receipts, fundraiser proceeds — carries more risk than district leaders acknowledge. In “K-12 Student Activity Funds: Fraud Risk and Perceptions”, a survey of 782 CFOs, school staff, and parents in 40 states commissioned by KEV Group, 99% of districts reported at least one funds-related incident in the past three years, including one in five that faced a legal claim or lawsuit. The central tension: 83% of CFOs say their current approach protects the money and the people handling it, yet six in ten rate their district’s financial risk as moderate or higher — and only 29% have real-time visibility into student balances. In a foreword, Georgetown’s Marguerite Roza argues the stakes rise in 2027, when the new federal tax-credit scholarship program will require districts to document which dollars covered which services for which students.

With the Education Department granting states new testing flexibility and convening state chiefs in April for a two-day summit on reimagining K-12 assessment, the W/A Content Studio’s “Modernizing Measurement: A Policy Primer for the Next Generation of Assessment” — with a foreword by former Tennessee education commissioner Penny Schwinn and ISTE CEO Richard Culatta — traces how assessment policy got here, from No Child Left Behind through the Common Core consortia, the opt-out movement, and ESSA, and what could come next: “dynamic assessments” that continuously gauge growth and achievement, amassing enough insight to satisfy federal requirements without the cost and class time of annual end-of-year tests. Former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift, writing in The 74, likens today’s state tests to car phones: “the world of education has clung to the same, outdated approach to testing.”

Fifty-five percent of workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher work in the same state where they grew up and earned their degree, and just 9% moved to another state for college and stayed, according to a new report from the Strada Education Foundation and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “Despite interest in attracting talent from other states, most states face long odds of doing so as homegrown talent is the primary source of college-educated workers in most states,” the report said, advising states to invest in public higher education instead. [Higher Ed Dive] 

Where graduates studied matters. About two-thirds of graduates who attended broad-access public institutions stayed in state for both college and work, compared with half of graduates from the most selective public colleges and two-fifths from private nonprofits. The mix also varies sharply by state: 78% of Michigan’s college-educated workforce grew up and studied there or moved to the state for college, versus 48% in Colorado. Among graduates who recently moved states, 51% cited economic opportunity as the top reason.

The Justice Department sued Connecticut, New York, and Vermont on Monday over policies that grant in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants at public colleges and universities, arguing the policies violate federal law and discriminate against U.S. citizens from other states. With the new filings, the administration has now sued 17 states over in-state tuition for undocumented residents, including California, New Jersey, and Virginia. [The New York Times, subscription model] 

The stakes are real money: in New York, undocumented students who graduated from a state high school pay $7,700 a year at SUNY campuses, while citizens from other states pay about $17,730. All three newly sued states condition the benefit on completing a local high school, which DOJ argues acts as an indirect residency requirement barred by a 1996 federal law.

The department’s record so far is mixed. Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas settled and ended their tuition policies, and a federal judge struck down Illinois’ law last month. But a Minnesota judge dismissed a similar suit in March, ruling the benefit is tied to high school attendance rather than residence; DOJ is appealing. A split among the lower courts could send the question to the Supreme Court.

A coalition including the American Federation of Teachers, AFSCME, National Nurses United, and the AFL-CIO sued the Education Department (ED) Tuesday over the definition of a “professional degree” in its Reimagining and Improving Student Education rule. The line matters because of loan limits that took effect July 1: graduate students face a $100,000 lifetime federal borrowing cap, while students in ED-designated professional programs can borrow up to $200,000. [Newsweek; K-12 Dive]

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asks the court to vacate the rule, arguing that ED unlawfully narrowed the definition in conflict with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Higher Education Act. A federal judge temporarily blocked the definition in June, prompting the department to expand its interim list of qualifying programs to include nursing, physical therapy, athletic training, and occupational therapy. Education graduate programs remained excluded as of July 10, and the unions say master’s programs in social work and public health are still left out as well. 

ED isn’t budging. “Nearly every program believes it should be entitled to the higher federal loan limits,” said Ellen Keast, the department’s press secretary for higher education, adding that the agency “is confident in its interpretation of the law.” The unions counter that the definition “will make it more difficult and less attractive for students to enter the nursing and teaching profession.”

Check out W/A Jobs, which features 3,295 career opportunities from 304 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that caught our eye over the past week: