Author: studyblog

Key points: The dominant narrative around today’s students is bleak: declining test scores, post-pandemic learning loss, and widespread concerns about student behavior and mental health. But a closer look at federal education and health data suggests a more nuanced–and hopeful–story is unfolding in schools across the country.  VocoVision, a provider of online school-based therapy staffing solutions, analyzed pre-pandemic data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the National Center for Education Statistics to show that while academic recovery remains uneven, students today are making measurable progress in areas tied to well-being, social development, and school engagement.  “These shifts may seem small, but they’re meaningful,”…

Key points: Student use of AI for homework increased in 2025, even as more students are worried the technology may be harming their ability to think critically, according to a new RAND report.   Between May and December 2025, the percentage of middle school, high school, and college students using AI for homework rose from 48 percent to 62 percent, based on nationally representative survey data from RAND’s American Youth Panel. The increase was driven largely by middle and high school students, as use among college students remained relatively steady. “Students are clearly embracing AI as a learning tool, but they’re also conflicted…

Key points: When I shipped Gramms AI to the App Store, I ran straight into a question that every developer building for kids will eventually face: What does “age-appropriate” actually mean in practice? And how do you build systems that enforce it reliably? Gramms is a bedtime story app. It generates personalized tales narrated in a grandparent’s cloned voice. Sounds simple enough. But the safety architecture behind it was anything but. This is a practitioner’s account of the decisions behind Gramms, written to be useful to anyone building AI-powered products for children ages 3–10. None of this is legal advice,…

Key points: Chronic absenteeism has stabilized at historically high levels, signaling a long-term engagement challenge rather than a short-term pandemic disruption, according to a new national white paper released by Concentric Educational Solutions. Redefining the Attendance Paradigm – A Systemic Analysis of Chronic Absenteeism, Economic Impacts, and Human-Centered Interventions is authored by Ivory A. Toldson, Ph.D., Chief of Research at Concentric Educational Solutions. Leveraging over 17,000 ethnographic home visits and deep national data analysis, Redefining the Attendance Paradigm uses provocative firsthand accounts and arresting infographics inspired by today’s graphic novels to visualize the stories of the thousands of families behind the numbers.…

Key points: Every school year brings an influx of IT solutions designed to reinvent K-12 education. Schools are primed to jump on the latest technologies to address the issues most impacting our students. Yet, in districts’ rush to innovate, we often allow technology and convenience to replace the curiosity and joy in learning. What if the latest trends in edtech aren’t related to new products pitched to us, but to new ways we as educators can shape innovation? Instead of being passive customers, we can become co-designers and decision-makers in building the future of education. I recently spoke with two…

Key points: I’ve been a principal for 14 years, during which time I served as the leader of an alternative school, an early college, and a large middle school. Through it all I’ve seen firsthand just how anxious families get during school transitions at every stage of the game. The move from elementary to middle is scary enough, but the parents of rising sixth graders often imagine the worst and need a bridge to help steady the transition. This year I took over as principal of McDowell High School. With about 1,400 students, it’s much larger than the district’s middle…

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters. Schools have been struggling for nearly a decade with stagnant or declining test scores. Some have blamed external factors like the pandemic or children’s screen use outside of school. But what if, in a sort of educational horror movie, the call is coming from inside the house? Such is the provocative theory advanced by Jared Cooney Horvath, a Ph.D-holding neuroscientist who runs an education consulting company. Students’ learning and attention have been derailed by the proliferation of screens in schools. “When tech enters education, learning goes…

Key points: When Senator Bill Cassidy recently questioned whether K–12 systems are adequately preparing students for college-level math, he touched a nerve in the national conversation. We see the symptoms everywhere: rising remediation rates, struggling freshmen, and a growing “readiness gap”–the chasm between student skills and college expectations. However, if we only look at the gap through the lens of higher education, we are looking at the wrong end of the pipeline. The readiness gap isn’t a failure of student ability; it is a predictable outcome of K–12 systems that aren’t intentionally designed around how students actually learn. Solving this…

Key points: As children, we play hide-and-seek. There is a kind of logic to it: If you cannot see me, then I cannot see you. As adults, and sometimes as leaders, we can fall into a similar pattern. We act as if not seeing a problem somehow makes it less real, or as if avoiding it allows everything to remain fine. In schools, that mindset can be especially damaging. We often hear words like transparency, trust, and psychological safety used in meetings and professional conversations. They appear in strategic plans, mission statements, and vision statements. These are the right words.…

Key points: School leaders everywhere are working to implement change–new initiatives, new instructional frameworks, new technologies, new approaches to student support. Yet one of the most common frustrations educators express is not necessarily with the changes themselves, but with how those changes happen. Too often, initiatives are designed far from the classroom and introduced to teachers as something to adopt, implement, or comply with. The result is predictable: Enthusiasm fades, implementation varies widely, and the initiative quietly disappears when the next new idea arrives. But sustainable change works differently. Sustainable change happens when educators feel they have a genuine voice…