Faculty with the University of California plan to review the system’s admissions policies.

UC Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu announced the plan in a letter Thursday.

“In recent years, it has become clear that academic preparedness for college is a growing challenge,” he wrote.

The UC’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) oversees admissions policies and makes recommendations to improve the process. It approved a plan that creates two faculty-led groups.

One will consider using SAT, ACT or 11th grade standardized test scores in admissions. Last month, faculty members signed an open letter calling for the UC system to require STEM applicants to submit SAT or ACT math scores. They cited a growing number of students taking remedial math classes.

Another group will evaluate UC course requirements, also known as A-G requirements, and whether they adequately prepare first-year applicants for college at UC campuses.

“I know we want every student admitted to UC to make the most of their college education,” Palazoglu wrote. “Our responsibility is to ensure that our policies and practices make that possible.”

Both groups will share recommendations with the BOARS chair by May 2027.

In a statement, UC President James Milliken said he and the Board of Regents look forward to considering the recommendations.

“It’s important that UC gets this right,” he wrote.

For a moment as historic as the 250th birthday of the United States, you would expect a place focused on history to do something special.

For the San Diego History Center in the heart of Balboa Park, that means a unique look at how the last 250 years have unfolded here.

“So this is quite an ambitious project for us, and actually for any museum, because the concept is San Diego history, 1776 to 2026, in 100 objects,” said Dr. Tina Zarpour, the History Center’s vice president of community engagement, collections and education.

So, how do you choose 100 objects to tell a 250-year-old story? Zarpour said that’s where community engagement and education came together — engaging with students from UC San Diego and San Diego State University to choose those 100 objects.

“We brought them in and took them through a whole training regimen, basically a course on how to understand objects, how to work with the public, how to write labels for objects, how to do object-based learning and interpretation,” Zarpour said.

The displays run the gamut; everything from the deadly serious old cannon that used to be at the Serra Museum to a colorful plastic Jack in the Box head! You might remember those from decades ago. When you used the drive through, you’d give your order by speaking to the clown head.

You may know Jack in the Box was founded in San Diego, and it’s still headquartered here.

Just steps away from Jack’s head, you'll find a voluminous book — a priceless artifact from a pivotal moment in San Diego history.

Zarpour explained, “This is the guest register from the 1915 Expo, and every single person that came signed their name in the book.”

Moments in San Diego’s architectural history are here, including an intricate models of the late San Diego stadium (also known over the years as Jack Murphy Stadium and Qualcomm Stadium). There's also a detailed model of Horton Plaza.

Zarpour then showed us a display from just a few years ago: a flag hanging on a nearby wall.

“This flag is one of our newer objects,” she said. “It dates from 2019 and this flag has the distinction of being the first flag of the Kumeyaay Nation that was flown over the Presidio in Balboa Park.”

Zarpour said it was important to the History Center to present as fulsome a picture as possible of our history. That includes dark moments. One display shows a couple of small pieces that tell of the Ku Klux Klan's presence in San Diego; an honorary ribbon and a taillight cover with those infamous three letters. It was donated by the son of a Klan member.

“He felt it was important to preserve this history in San Diego and we feel it’s important to interpret this history and, you know, show the good and the bad,” Zarpour said.

There are uniforms worn by members of the United States Navy — a nod to our military history. And there’s an unassuming little Smith Corona typewriter that was used to draft the founding documents of the Women’s Studies Department at SDSU, the first of its kind in the nation.

I asked Zarpour, “What do you hope visitors take away when it's all done? They come, they see it, they walk out those doors. What do you hope they think or talk about?”

She said, “First, that there is always a San Diego connection, right? Second, multiple narratives, multiple stories, not the single narrative ... Sometimes it's memory, sometimes it's nostalgia, sometimes it's something completely new that they've never encountered before. And that's what we wanted to embrace, is really people's relationship with the past through objects and artifacts. We're used to telling histories through timelines, through events, through people, through the written word, but this is telling history through objects.”

Objects that — with apologies to Ken Kramer — tell you a lot about San Diego.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Federal financial aid is the engine of the country’s higher education system, pouring billions in student loans and grants into California alone, and this summer, the U.S. Department of Education plans to expand aid for students enrolled in short-term job training programs.

Except the state isn’t ready.

Launching a new financial aid program means creating new systems at the state and local level, and the California Student Aid Commission, the state agency in charge, said it needs more help. Although the federal aid program is slated to begin as soon as July 1, Daisy Gonzales, the executive director of the aid commission, has said repeatedly, both in state hearings and in an interview with CalMatters, that the money won’t be available to students until weeks or even months later.

Financial aid systems are “extremely complex,” she said, and the state lacks the infrastructure to build one on the federal government’s timeline.

The new financial aid awards, known as short-term or workforce Pell grants, are an expansion of the federal Pell grant program, which has for decades offered thousands of dollars in cash to low-income students for tuition and living expenses.

Historically, students in short-term job training programs were ineligible for federal student aid. The new Pell grants will give money to students who enroll in programs such as automotive mechanics or information technology, with most lasting about 10 weeks. Both public and private institutions are eligible, and the average student is expected to receive between $1,000 and $3,000, though details haven’t been finalized.

The new grants are part of a national, bipartisan push to further align higher education with the needs of employers, but the results are sometimes lacking.

In 2024, CalMatters investigated how California’s job centers used federal money to help low-income and unemployed adults attend short-term job training programs at for-profit colleges. Thousands of dollars in public subsidies went to those schools to train truck drivers and nursing assistants — careers that have a reputation for low wages, poor working conditions or high turnover rates.

Some of these for-profit schools were under investigation for various violations when they enrolled students. CalMatters found that the majority of truck driving schools had effectively no oversight. Some nursing assistants were making less than $30,000 after graduating.

The new Pell grants for short-term job training programs come with federal regulations aimed to ensure that graduates earn wages above the poverty line in an in-demand career and that only certain kinds of verified schools will be eligible. California is considering state legislation that would further restrict the kinds of programs that could qualify.

Since neither the state nor the federal government rigorously track these short-term job training programs, it’s not clear how many exist and how many students could ultimately benefit. Experts say that California’s community college students could be among the primary recipients, since the state’s 116 community colleges already offer numerous short-term job training programs in the skilled trades, healthcare, technology and public safety. But in an email to CalMatters, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office said it is too early to provide any estimates.

For one approximation, Gonzales points to CalGrant C, which provides state funding to students in job training programs that last at least 15 weeks. This year, roughly 225,000 students were potentially eligible. But unlike the new Pell grants, which could lead to billions in federal spending, CalGrant C has a relatively small budget, serving just under 7,800 students a year.

Are workforce investments paying off? 

In southern San Diego County, many community college students are working full-time jobs but are still unable to afford their living expenses, said Mark Sanchez, the president of Southwestern College in Chula Vista. Many students — including U.S. citizens — are “transitory,” he said, meaning that they live in Tijuana, where the cost of housing is cheaper, and cross the U.S. border for school each day because they can’t afford living in California.

Sanchez has been advocating for the new Pell grants, arguing to state and local officials that they could create a pathway for his students to get higher-paying jobs. His staff estimated roughly 1,500 students could be eligible for the grants in about 50 different programs, ranging from musicianship to accounting.

For students to qualify, schools will need to work over time with the state and federal government to prove that at least 70% of graduates of these job training programs are employed and that their wages are higher than the federal poverty line. The data is scattered and hard to track, and in some cases, information isn’t collected at all, said Su Jin Jez, the chief executive of California Competes, an education nonprofit.

State data can tell you, for instance, that a college graduate is working for a school district and how much they make, but the data can’t tell you what they’re doing at the school, such as whether they’re a teacher, a secretary, a lawyer or a janitor, said Jez. “Our state puts billions into aligning higher education and workforce and we don’t have a good way to understand if these investments are paying off.”

California Competes is sponsoring two bills in the Legislature this year, including one by Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Napa Democrat, that will require state workforce agencies to collect more data. The other is by Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, a Thousand Oaks Democrat, and will regulate which programs can qualify for the new short-term Pell grants. For the latter bill, Assemblymember Juan Alanis, a Modesto Republican, is a co-author and The Institute for College Access & Success is a co-sponsor.

Separately, the governor’s office has written emergency legislation that contains proposed regulations for the new Pell grants. Though the California Student Aid Commission can’t take positions on bills, Gonzales has openly praised the bill by Irwin and criticized the governor’s proposal saying it “risks creating a fragmented system.”

Avoiding another failure

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature created a new financial aid program, known as the Learning-Aligned Employment Program, which was supposed to give out millions in financial aid to working students to help them secure jobs related to their program of study.

The program was a failure, said Gonzales, who was the deputy chancellor of the community college system at the time. It only had one-time funding and a three-year window to succeed, she said. “What was deeply missing….was the professional development and the technical assistance. You can’t just introduce a new tool, and then say, ‘Students apply.’”

By the end of the three-year window, few students had applied and state legislators decided to cut the program. In an emailed statement to CalMatters, Nicole Kangas, a spokesperson for the student aid commission, said the Learning-Aligned Employment Program is a warning for the new Pell grants.

The expanded Pell grants were approved last summer, but the U.S. Education Department only finalized its regulations last month, giving states less than two months to roll it out before the July 1 start date. Now California officials and colleges have a long list of regulatory and administrative tasks to complete, including creating special agreements between the state and each of its college districts and universities. When the California Student Aid Commission created similar agreements with universities for the Middle Class Scholarship, the contracts were between 60 and 120 pages long and took about nine months to finalize, said Gonzales.

“We really are behind,” she said, adding that multiple other states have already passed legislation. Certain new regulations, such as Irwin’s bill, could give the state “an opportunity to catch up,” she said.

For Sanchez, the challenge is not just administrative. Once the new Pell grants are available, he said Southwestern College still needs to inform current and potential students that these grants exist and convince them to apply.

Even though the majority of community college students are struggling financially — including some who are homeless — many aren’t aware of financial aid, are hesitant to apply or they submit incomplete applications. Less than half of all community college students applied for financial aid last year, and state data shows that even fewer ultimately received it.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The most powerful factors affecting a child's brain development involve socioeconomic opportunities, according to a study in the journal Science.

The analysis of more than 2,300 9- and 10-year-olds found that environmental factors ranging from household income to education to neighborhood quality are associated with brain differences that can clearly be seen in MRI scans.

The researchers also found that preteens who'd grown up in neighborhoods with lower incomes and limited social support had brain differences associated with less sleep and more stress.

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"Something is going on in these neighborhoods," says Scott Marek, the study's first author and an assistant professor of radiology at WashU School of Medicine. "We need to find out how socioeconomics is becoming biologically embedded."

The research "highlights the fact that the environment in which we grow up and live has powerful impacts on our brain," says Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford University who was not involved in the study.

It also challenges earlier research that focused on links between brain development and factors like IQ and mental health.

Those factors do appear to have a small influence on brain development, says Dr. Nico Dosenbach, an author of the new study and a professor at WashU Medicine in St. Louis.

"But socioeconomics was, by a wide margin, absolutely the dominant variable," Dosenbach says.

As a result, some earlier studies linking cognitive performance to brain differences "may require reevaluation," says Dr. Theodore D. Satterthwaite, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Those studies focused on factors like IQ or mental health without accounting for socioeconomics, says Satterthwaite, who co-authored a perspective piece that accompanied the new study. So a reevaluation including that variable could weaken or even negate the findings.

In fact, the new study adds to what Satterthwaite calls a "rising tide of research" over the past few years, suggesting that childhood environment has a powerful influence on brain development.

Lots of brains, lots of variables

The goal of the new research was to take an unbiased look at brain development and consider every factor that might have an influence.

Data came from the federally funded Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which is tracking thousands of children starting at ages 9 and 10.

The researchers used brain scans from ABCD to identify differences in the organ's structure and communication networks. Then they looked to see whether those differences were associated with factors like a child's environment, cognitive abilities and mental health.

Finally, the team ranked each factor by how strongly it was associated with brain differences.

"The pattern that emerged was, at first, very confusing to us," Marek says.

Nearly all of the top-ranked factors were in some way related to socioeconomic opportunity. And these factors were associated primarily with brain differences in areas involved in sensory processing and motor control, not higher functions like attention or memory.

So the team worked to figure out how factors like income, preschool enrollment, healthcare access and neighborhood quality might be affecting brain development.

The apparent answer involves brain circuits involved in keeping someone awake and alert. These circuits are altered when children get less sleep, experience more stress, or spend a lot of time using social media.

The team found that all of those environmental factors are more prevalent in neighborhoods where children lack economic, educational and social opportunities.

The finding doesn't prove that these factors are actually causing the brain differences, Marek says, "But the data are screaming that we should be looking at sleep, stress and screens if we want to get somewhere."

Copyright 2026 NPR

On July 1, a host of new student loan changes from last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will kick in, including the end of a short-lived Biden-era repayment plan, the start of two Republican-designed repayment plans and strict new borrowing limits for some students.

There's a lot to parse, and not every change will impact every borrower. So we've designed this story to make it easy to find the guidance that does apply to you, or to the borrower in your life.

To get started, click on the student loan status that best describes your situation below:

• You're enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan

• You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and no plans for new loans

• You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and future loan plans

• You're a new undergraduate borrower taking out loans after July 1

• You're a new grad school borrower taking out loans after July 1

• You're in graduate school right now. Do the new loan limits apply to you?

• You're enrolling in a short-term job training program and you'd like help paying for it 

• You're interested in Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)

• You're a parent interested in helping your student pay for college

You're enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan

After a few contentious years of paused payments and a legal battle that made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden-era Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan is officially ending.

If you're one of the more than 7 million borrowers still enrolled in SAVE — the most flexible and generous income-driven repayment plan — you may have already gotten a notice from the U.S. Department of Education warning you that you'll have to switch plans soon. Well, you'll likely be getting another note from your loan servicer, starting a roughly 90-day clock.

If you don't act, the department says it will enroll you in one of the least flexible repayment plans.

Financial aid experts have told NPR that this effort, beginning July 1, to push millions of borrowers into repayment and into new plans that will cost more than SAVE, could exacerbate an alarming rise in student loan defaults – especially considering that many borrowers enrolled in SAVE precisely because their low incomes qualified them for a $0 monthly payment.

What are your repayment plan options? You've got lots. Keep reading.

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You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and no plans for new loans

Whoever you are, whatever your story, whether you enrolled in the SAVE plan or not, you're in good company: About 43 million Americans hold about $1.7 trillion in federal student loan debt.

As long as your loans were issued before July 1, and you have no plans to borrow any more money, you'll have quite a few repayment options, including one brand new plan. They are:

Standard Repayment Plan

• How it works: This plan divides your loan balance into equal monthly payments (plus interest, of course) over a 10-year period. If your loans have been consolidated, they may be spread out over a longer period, up to 30 years. 
• The upside: Monthly payments are all the same, predictable as the sunrise. 
• The downside: Payments can be pretty high relative to income-based plans. 
• A note for borrowers: Republicans also created a new version of this Standard plan, called the Tiered Standard Plan, but it's not available to borrowers with only older loans. 

Graduated Repayment Plan

• How it works: Monthly payments start out low, but as the name suggests, they increase every two years and are spread out over a 10-year period. As with the Standard plan, borrowers with consolidated loans may qualify for a longer repayment term.
• The upside: It allows borrowers to start small, and, ideally, as your payments increase over time, so too does your income and your ability to keep up with them.
• The downside: Over time, your payments could grow, even double in size.

Extended Repayment Plan

• How it works: Monthly payments can be either fixed or graduated, but there's one big difference. Payments can last up to 25 years, instead of the common 10 years. 
• The upside: Twenty-five years makes for smaller monthly payments.
• The downside: You're paying a lot in interest over the long run. 

The plans above do not take a borrower's income into account when calculating a monthly payment. So-called income-driven repayment plans do — and come with a few other perks:

Income-Based Repayment (IBR)

• How it works: If your loans are older than July 1, 2014, your monthly payments are based on 15% of your discretionary income and spread over a 25-year period. Anything left after that is forgiven. For loans taken out after July 1, 2014, monthly payments will be based on 10% of discretionary income and spread over 20 years before the remainder is forgiven.
• The upside: Loan forgiveness!
• The downside: Twenty to 25 years repaying a loan is a long time.  

Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR)

• How it works: ICR bases monthly payments on a larger share of a borrower's discretionary income — 20%. Borrowers also have to make payments over a relatively long period of time — 25 years — before they can qualify for forgiveness.  
• The upside: Up to now, for Parent PLUS borrowers, this was often the only income-driven repayment plan they could qualify for.
• The downside: It will generally cost more each month than its fellow income-driven plans.

• A note for borrowers: This is arguably the least generous member of this plan family. It's also being phased out by 2028, so, if you do enroll, you'll have to change plans again in two years.

Pay As You Earn (PAYE)

• How it works: PAYE's terms are similar to what newer IBR borrowers enjoy: Payments are based on 10% of discretionary income over a 20-year period, then the remainder is forgiven.
• The upside: Switching to PAYE, for now, could mean two years of lower payments.
• The downside: Like ICR, Republicans voted to shut down PAYE by July 1, 2028; so you'll need to switch plans again within two years.   

Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP)

• How it works: RAP bases monthly payments on a borrower's adjusted-gross income (AGI). The more you make, the higher your monthly payment. For example, a borrower earning $30,001-$40,000 can expect a monthly payment around $75-$100. Earn $50,001-$60,000 and it jumps to $208.34-$250.  
• The upside: RAP waives any monthly interest that exceeds the plan's monthly payment. It also comes with a principal-matching payment that makes sure lower-income borrowers see their loan principals go down each month. And, for parents and caregivers, it allows you to slash $50 from your monthly payment for every dependent in your household.
• The downside: Unlike IBR, ICR and PAYE, RAP requires that borrowers be in repayment for 30 years before any remainder is forgiven. By then, there'll be little if any debt left. And, a nerdy but important facet: This plan isn't indexed for inflation, which means modest income gains could trigger big increases in monthly payments. 
• A note for borrowers: This is the new kid on the block for legacy borrowers. You can enroll starting July 1.

We recommend using the department's Loan Simulator — or maybe this one, developed in partnership with The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit — to see which plan makes the most sense for you.

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You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and future loan plans

So, you've already got some loans, and you're planning to take out more. The good news/bad news is you won't have a lot of repayment options to choose from.

Any borrower who takes out a loan on or after July 1 will be limited to the two new repayment plans created in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: The Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) or the…

Tiered Standard Plan

• How it works: Like the original Standard, the new Tiered plan divides a borrower's principal and interest into equal monthly payments over a set period. Again, predictable as the sunrise. What's different is that that period of time grows with the size of the debt.
  
  • Owe less than $25,000 — repay over 10 years.
  • Owe $25,000-$49,999 — repay over 15 years.
  • Owe $50,000-$99,999 — repay over 20 years.
  • Owe $100,000 or more — repay over 25 years.
• The upside: A longer repayment period for larger balances means smaller payments.
• The downside: Longer repayment periods also mean, well, a long-term relationship with debt.  

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You're a new undergraduate borrower taking out loans after July 1

Hello, fresh face! Welcome to your higher education adventure. Let's be honest, you're probably not thinking much about your repayment options yet. You're headed to school, and we wish you well.

As you get on your way, here are a few things to keep in mind: Lending limits haven't changed for undergraduate borrowers. Dependent/independent undergrads are still limited to borrowing:

• $5,500/$9,500 in their first year
• $6,500/$10,500 in their second year
• $7,500/$12,500 in the third and subsequent years

In total, dependent/independent undergrads can borrow up to $31,000/$57,500.

When it does come time for repayment, you'll likely have just two options to choose from: Either the Repayment Assistance Plan or the Tiered Standard Plan.

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You're a new grad school borrower taking out loans after July 1

Many of you probably have undergraduate loan debt, though hopefully not too much. And for the moment, you're probably not thinking about repayment since you're headed back to school. We wish you well!

Still, there are a few things to keep in mind: As of July 1, lending limits change dramatically. Until now, grad students could borrow up to the cost of their program. Your program costs $40,000 a year? You could borrow $40,000 every year. Soon, though, you'll be limited to $20,500 a year and a total of $100,000. That's a big difference.

Only a small group of so-called "professional" degrees will be exempted from these lower limits and qualify instead for $50,000 a year in loans, or $200,000 in all. These degrees fall into 11 categories: chiropractic, clinical psychology, dentistry, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, podiatry, theology and veterinary medicine.

You can learn more about these grad school loan caps at this link, including why they have many advocates worrying about an eventual shortage of nurses and other healthcare providers.

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You're in graduate school right now. Do the new loan limits apply to you?

This is complicated. The Education Department is making some exceptions for grad school borrowers who are in the middle of their higher education adventures. You may be exempted from the new loan limits if:

1. You were enrolled by June 30, 2026.
2. By then, you also have to have received a loan for your program.
3. And you have maintained enrollment in the same program, at the same school.

If you do qualify to be exempted from the new limits, the department's website says you can lean on the old loan limits — i.e., borrow up to the cost of your program — for either three academic years or the difference between how long your program is supposed to last and how long you've already been enrolled, whichever number is smaller.

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You're enrolling in a short-term job training program and you'd like help paying for it

One of the biggest changes going into effect on July 1 is an expansion of the traditional Pell Grant for low-income students to include what's known as short-term workforce training.

A Pell Grant is essentially free money from the federal government – unlike a loan, it does not need to be paid back. For 2026-27, the largest grant a student in a traditional program can qualify for is $7,395. Awards for short-term training will likely be prorated for the program's length.

This expansion of Pell is meant to help workers learn new skills to become, say, a certified nursing assistant or a welder. For the first time, students will be able to get federal help paying for these training programs, which last between eight and 15 weeks.

The first, most important step you need to take to qualify is to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). You can't get a Pell Grant without it.

One huge caveat: This expansion is so new that many current training programs may not qualify. And because it comes with some pretty strict federal guardrails, some never will.

It will take states and the federal government some time to figure it all out, so you'll need to be patient. And while you wait, fill out the FAFSA!

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You're interested in Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)

Greetings (aspiring) public servants.

The good news for you is that the program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) still exists. It's a policy quid pro quo: If you pledge to work full-time (at least 30 hours a week) in public service — as a nurse or police officer or school teacher, etc. — for 10 years while making 120 monthly payments toward your student loans through a qualifying repayment plan, then whatever debt is left will be forgiven by the U.S. government.

Which plans qualify for PSLF?

In the income-driven category, IBR, ICR, PAYE and the forthcoming RAP all qualify.

We recommend using the department's Loan Simulator to see which plan makes the most sense for you, i.e., which plan has you paying the least over the next decade.

The other question you may have is: Wait! Didn't I see stories about how the Trump administration is changing the PSLF rules, maybe making it harder to qualify?

Good memory! Yes. Here's one of those stories.

Effective July 1, the department says it can deny loan forgiveness to workers whose government or nonprofit employers engage in activities with a "substantial illegal purpose." The job of defining "substantial illegal purpose" belongs to the education secretary. Last year, the department offered this short list: "terrorism, child trafficking, and transgender procedures that are doing irreversible harm to children."

In late 2025, several large cities, including Boston and Chicago, sued over the rule change, worried that the administration might try to use a city government's politics to exclude its public workers from PSLF. The fight over this rule is very much still playing out, so stay tuned.

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You're a parent interested in helping your student pay for college

The Parent PLUS program will see a few key changes take effect July 1. Here's what to know:

• First of all, there will be new limits on how much parents can borrow. Parent PLUS loans will be capped at $20,000 per year, per dependent child, with an aggregate cap of $65,000 per dependent. That's a big change from the previous rules which allowed PLUS loans up to the cost of a program. 
• Repayment is also seeing big changes. Parent PLUS borrowers who take out a loan after July 1 will no longer qualify for any plan that bases their monthly payment on their income. They will only be able to use the new Tiered Standard Plan. This also means future Parent PLUS borrowers will no longer be able to qualify for either a plan that offers forgiveness after a set period of time or for PSLF. 
• For Parent PLUS loans that were taken out before July 1, borrowers' best bet for a long-term, income-driven plan is IBR, but only if you consolidate your loans first, make one payment on the less generous ICR plan (which, like PAYE, will be phased out in 2028) then switch to IBR. If this is news to you, it may already be too late. The Education Department's website recommends borrowers start this process at least three months early to make sure their new consolidated loans are issued before the July 1 deadline.

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Edited by: Nicole Cohen and Nirvi Shah

Copyright 2026 NPR

New federal test scores show younger students are making gains in reading and math — after years of declines.

"I think this is an optimistic release," Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told NPR.

Results from the long-term trend (LTT) report, released Wednesday, provide a national look at progress in reading and math for 9- and 13-year-old students. The tests, which students take on pencil and paper every few years, have asked many of the same questions since they were first given in the 1970s. The tests are part of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) and are nationally representative of student learning. More than 30,000 students took the exams between October 2024 and March 2025.

Here are five takeaways from the results:

1. Nine-year-olds made some solid gains. 

The younger students tested showed gains in both reading and math, "which is fantastic," said Soldner. What's notable is that students across the board improved their scores, including lower-performing kids.

"It is just so encouraging," he said. "Even though they're performing below average, [they] are trending upward."

One possible reason for the overall improvement, the report points out, is the students' age. They were 4 when the pandemic started in 2020 and didn't begin school until after most places had returned to full-time, in-person instruction. That means they didn't miss key lessons in literacy and math in the early years of elementary school.

These students gave researchers hope about the potential that the nation can build back some of the slide that began long before COVID-19.

2. But 13-year-olds are hurting.

The report paints a less optimistic picture about 13-year-olds. Compared to the last assessment, students showed no significant improvement in reading or math.

Scores in reading remain below where they were at the start of the pandemic on average, and that includes Hispanic students, white students, female students, students who are economically disadvantaged and suburban students.

Reading scores from this test, on average, are not significantly different from performance in the first-ever administered test in 1971.

"The lack of progress in 13-year-olds raises huge questions and ought to serve as a catalyst for change," Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, said during a press briefing. Her organization sets policy related to NAEP.

For these 13-year-old students, unlike their 9-year-old counterparts, the pandemic was the backdrop for much of their elementary school experience. In 2020, they were in second or third grade. Those critical years for literacy and math skills were disrupted by school closures, and this stagnant performance may be one consequence.

3. Fewer students are reading for pleasure — than ever.

At the same time, the report found that reading is a pastime for a shrinking number of kids.

In 1984, 35% of 13-year-old students reported reading for fun on a daily basis. In 2022 and 2025, only 14% said the same. A far greater share of 9-year-olds — 37% — indicated they read for fun every day, but that's sharply down from decades earlier.

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4. Math progress erased for 13-year-olds.

From 1978 to 2012, the average math scores on the LTT for 13-year-olds improved by 21 points. The climbing scores were a bright spot in more than 50 years of data. This report shows that most of those gains have been erased.

The lowest-performing students now show no gains at all compared with the 1978 math test results.

"As a nation, we have to bring more focus to the middle school years," Muldoon told reporters. "It'll take a lot of collective work, but we've seen progress before, and it's possible to see it again."

5. This is the last we'll see of the long-term trend report for a while.

This is the first NAEP long-term trend report released since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department in 2025. Those cuts included laying off more than half the workers at the Institute of Education Sciences, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.

After those cuts, the assessment's governing board also canceled about a dozen national and state assessments of student progress through 2032 — one of those being the next iteration of the long term trend report. Since then, plans have been announced to restore some of those exams and the congressionally mandated Nation's Report Card remains on schedule for early 2027.

Still, students won't put pen to paper for this exam again until 2033.

Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

MALMÖ, Sweden — Long championed as a leader in adopting digital technology, Sweden is set to ban mobile phones in schools beginning in the fall for the next academic year as part of a broad, international reversal on the use of screens in classrooms.

Since 2023, the Scandinavian country's center-right coalition government has pursued a policy prioritizing more reading time and less screen time, particularly among preschool students, by favoring books and other traditional learning tools.

Lawmaker Joar Forsell, chairperson of the Swedish parliament's education committee, said officials have seen a decline in the general ability to read and write in Sweden, especially among younger students.

"We're rolling the screens back because we believe that books and more traditional ways of learning are better for kids," Forsell said.

Sweden's plans are part of a broader shift and a digital reckoning against smartphones in schools internationally after countries outfitted their campuses with laptops, tablets and learning apps for their students. Classrooms have become saturated with screens and a growing number of parents, teachers and school districts say it is time to scale back.

In the Nordics, Denmark looks set to implement a similar ban to Sweden, and a law restricting use of mobile devices in schools in Finland came into effect last August. Other countries from Spain to South Korea have taken a variety of steps that range from a ban of mobile phones in classrooms to limits on screen-based homework.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the U.S., has said it will ban screens until second grade, require daily caps for screen time per grade, ban YouTube and require an audit of all education technology contracts.

Backing away from screens

Tech-savvy Sweden, which is home to music streamer Spotify and telecoms giant Ericsson, has one of the most digitally advanced education systems in the world. But the mobile ban aims to foster learning environments with fewer distractions by building on restrictions on phones already independently implemented by many schools in the nation of over 10 million.

Alongside the ban, the government this year set aside 555 million Swedish krona ($59 million) as part of a new grant for purchasing textbooks and teachers' guides.

The back-to-books policy was triggered by falling reading levels. In the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment, the latest study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 24.3% of Swedish ninth graders did not reach a basic level of reading comprehension. That figure is only slightly better than the European Union average of 26.2%.

Magnus Haake, an associate professor of cognitive science at Lund University in southern Sweden, said learning with physical materials engages the motor sensory part of kids' brains and "boosts the whole system."

Sweden also is taking steps outside of school: Its public health agency has provided advice to parents about being better role models on use of screens, like having the same "screen-free zones" at home as their kids do.

Removing mobile phones removes distractions

At the Malmö Borgarskola high school in southern Sweden, mobiles are already banned during classes. Students place their handsets in a box — nicknamed a "Mobile Hotel" — and pick them up at the end of class.

"When you have a phone, there's always something to look at," student Melina Sallahi, 17, said. "It's less of a distraction."

Classmate Vasilije Stjepanovic, also 17, said apps like games or social media are "more fun than learning," adding that students can learn better by taking away the phones.

At the same time, every student is given a laptop computer. But Deputy Headmaster Patrik Sander said students are now discouraged from using them in class, unless teachers say so.

"Nowadays, we see the push going in the other direction," Sander said. "We have pushed back, learning that writing with your hands and a pencil helps you remember."

Starting last summer, Swedish children under 2 years old could use only nondigital materials such as books, and preschoolers in general face no requirement to use digital learning tools. A new curriculum to prioritize book-based learning is expected in 2028.

Divisions over digital reckoning in classrooms

Not everyone in the Nordic nation supports the shift away from digital learning.

Trade association Swedish Edtech Industry said in a report that 90% of all future jobs are expected to require digital skills. A lack of this knowledge could cause a skills shortage among young Swedes, a lack of innovation in the public sector and even increased unemployment, the report warned.

Peter Carlsson, CEO of Malmö-based startup Imvi Labs, which uses virtual reality headsets to train brain-eye coordination in children and adults, said not all screens disrupt learning and some software is "critical" to help children with learning or reading difficulties.

"By having good tools, the teaching can become more efficient," he said.

But at Malmö Borgarskola, there is little concern over learning digital skills. One morning in May, students clutched textbooks and discussed Russian history as they prepared for end-of-year exams.

"Everyone uses digital devices during their free time, so I don't think that's something that should be taught in school," student Melina Sallahi said. "It's nothing I'm worried about."

Classmate Aslan Özhan Kilicasan added, "We learn much more easily when we use books."

Copyright 2026 NPR

That’s according to a San Diego County civil grand jury report published Monday.

On July 20, 2023, the board was set to vote on renewing a contract with San Diego Youth Services. The district had worked with the provider since 1998.

Anthony Carnevale, a parent in the district and a member of the Cajon Valley school board, spoke during public comment.

“I’ve spent a great deal of time looking into San Diego Youth Services,” he told the board. “They advertise talks to kids on top surgery and transitioning.”

He referred to a San Diego Youth Services program called “Our Safe Place.” It provides mental health services for LGBTQ+ youth and can provide referrals to gender-affirming care.

That led Jim Kelly to request that the board discuss the contract with San Diego Youth Services. Board member Gary Woods said Carnevale had given information to the superintendent.

“We need to look for alternatives that best reflect the East County values,” Woods said.

The board voted three to one to deny renewal of the contract. Woods, Jim Kelly and Robert Shield voted no on the renewal. Elva Salinas voted yes. Chris Fite was absent.

The grand jury said the board’s decision was based on “falsehoods and misrepresentations” about care provided to LGBTQ+ students. Our Safe Place services weren’t part of San Diego Youth Services’ contract with the district, they said.

“Our Safe Place was not a program that was actually located within the schools,” Jonathan Castillo, CEO of San Diego Youth Services, said in an interview Friday.

Its school-based services are focused on mental health, suicide prevention and bullying prevention, Castillo said, and clinicians can refer students to outside programs like Our Safe Place if they think it’s appropriate.

According to the jury report, six students were referred to Our Safe Place between 2017 and 2023.

“When the need is identified and it comes up, with the consent of parents and with the consent of, of course, the student as well, we link them to those services,” Castillo said.

The report says the district’s 2023-2024 school year started with no district-wide suicide prevention program in place and without six mental health clinicians. It took four months for a new provider to start working for the district, according to the report.

The jury found that the board’s decision did not “represent the community’s best interests” and “was potentially harmful to students.”

“As public servants, it matters whether the Board’s decisions adhered to District policies, the California Department of Education Code, and their fiduciary duties,” the report said. “Given the community’s dissent, as evidenced by public comments at subsequent Board meetings, media coverage, and a grassroots recall effort targeting Trustees, the Grand Jury considered the Grossmont Union High School District’s governance practices a matter warranting investigation.”

In an email, district spokesperson Collin McGlashen wrote that the board has the authority to make decisions about district resources.

“Reasonable people may disagree with those decisions,” he wrote. “However, disagreement with a Board decision is not, in and of itself, evidence that Board policies, bylaws, or the Education Code were violated.”

The report makes 10 recommendations for the district’s board. One is for the district to allow San Diego Youth Services to provide services to three high schools through its East County Behavioral Health Clinic. An agreement for those services expires in June 2027.

Other recommendations include following a board policy that “states that the best interests of students must not be secondary to the personal interests of Board members.”

The district has 90 days to comment on the report’s findings and recommendations.

The effects of artificial intelligence on learning are still largely unclear. But a new NPR/Ipsos poll of K-12 teachers found that nearly 3-in-4 believe AI has bigger implications for education than past innovations like the internet or computers.

The nationally representative poll surveyed 545 respondents and paints a complex picture of teachers' views on AI: Many are using it to save time and improve their teaching materials, but a majority of teachers are worried AI is making it harder for students to learn to think for themselves.

"We're in an environment where teachers feel like this is going to fundamentally reshape the future of education moving forward," says Mallory Newall, a senior vice president at Ipsos. "They have serious concerns about AI's impact on how they relate to their students and how students relate to each other."

And schools have a role to play: A resounding majority of polled teachers — nearly 8-in-10 — think schools should teach responsible use of AI.

"To me, that sends a very clear message that teachers are acknowledging that AI is having humongous implications on education as we know it," says Newall. "It's not going away. And so now is the time to act."

More of a teacher's helper than a classroom tool

The poll shows students aren't widely using AI in the classroom – at least not yet. A little more than half of teachers say the technology isn't being used in class by students at all, while about 2-in-5 teachers say students are using it in class at least once a week.

Meanwhile, a majority of teachers polled — 6-in-10 — say they've used AI themselves to help with work tasks.

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Michele Naber, a veteran biology teacher at El Toro High School in Orange County, Calif., says she allows her students to use AI during certain lessons to teach them how to properly prompt chatbots and verify their accuracy.

For example, she says she'll tell her students to ask ChatGPT to describe a particular animal's physical characteristics and habitat, then verify what the chatbot generated with reliable sources. She says the lesson shows students that AI still gets it wrong sometimes.

"That's one of the things that has to be taught: You can't take it literally," Naber says.

She says she's also had success using AI to generate multiple choice questions for assessments.

"That's something that normally, as a teacher, would have taken you probably upwards of an hour … and it minimized the entire task to five minutes. That's helpful."

A majority of surveyed teachers who report using AI on work-related tasks say it saves them time, but most — 63% — say that time savings equates to two hours or less per week.

Joann Purcell, a math teacher and instructional coach at Downers Grove North High School, in the Chicago suburbs, says she's found AI useful for coming up with professional development activities for her fellow educators.

But she doesn't use AI with her students. And Purcell says it isn't reliable enough to generate math questions.

"It's a pain in the butt to go through and see where the mistakes are, and I feel like if I have to do that, I might as well just write the question myself," Purcell says.

Are students learning to think for themselves?

More than half, 54%, of polled teachers say AI makes it harder for students to learn critical thinking skills.

Christa Corricelli, a special education teacher at Saugus Middle/High School outside Boston, says AI could be a valuable technology for learning, but too often students are using it as an answer machine — not a tool to bolster their thinking.

"I think students who aren't already intrinsically self-motivated to be critical thinkers, like that top 1% of the class … I think people who are not already that personality type, we're going to see those critical thinking skills atrophy over time," Corricelli says.

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Naber, in California, feels a deep responsibility to teach her students that humans must always interrogate and verify what AI generates.

"I care about [my students]. I want them to be able to look at the world and figure out things for themselves, not rely on a piece of software," she says. "If we stop questioning what it says, we can be led to believe anything. And that's what really scares me."

More than half of teachers polled — 55% — think AI is mostly just a shortcut for students to avoid doing more work.

However, Ellie Rodriguez, a special education teacher at Royal Palm Beach Community High School near Palm Beach, Fla., says AI can be especially helpful for students with disabilities. She explains that one of her students, who is on the autism spectrum, recently used AI to get help with an assignment.

"I praised him," Rodriguez says, because he wouldn't have been able to complete the assignment without the help AI provided.

"It got him to do the work, but hopefully, too, it helped him to apply using resources – like you would use an encyclopedia, like you would use a library book – to find your answers," she says.

But Rodriguez does worry the technology could hamper learning for students who don't have disabilities or who are capable of doing assignments without the assistance of AI.

And she says she and her colleagues, including some English teachers, are deeply concerned about the impact AI is having on students' ability to think for themselves.

AI is eroding student-teacher trust

Nearly 6-in-10 surveyed educators say AI is eroding the level of trust between students and teachers. About 4-in-10 say they've required more assignments to be done by hand, and 4-in-10 also say they've required more assignments to be done in class as a result of AI.

Newall, with Ipsos, says the erosion of trust caused by AI is "one of the biggest red flags in the data."

She says that issue is compounded by another survey finding: 70% of teachers believe the public's perception of them has gotten worse.

"What that tells me is that they are trying to navigate some very complex challenges in an environment that is already rife with mistrust," Newall says.

Naber, in California, has had to adapt to how easy it is now for students to fake assignments. She says for years she offered extra credit to students who participated in beach cleanups and habitat restorations outside of school. All they had to do was show her a picture to prove they were there, she says. But then Naber's son showed her how easy it is to use AI to create a fake image of a registration table for such an event.

"I had to stop doing that because I can't verify it. That was sad," she says.

Naber says she's also modified her curriculum so that all lab work is done in class in front of her, and homework matters far less for students' grades.

"Teachers are much more suspect of things that students do outside the classroom and I hear a lot of comments like, 'Well, we can't do it this way because they're just going to use AI,'" says Corricelli, near Boston.

Josh Kauffman teaches seventh-grade English at Alabama Destinations Career Academy, a virtual public school that serves students across the state. He says he's noticed a substantial uptick in the number of AI-generated assignments his students submit – and because it's a virtual school, he can't do things like require more in-class work. Instead, he says he tries to persuade his students that there's value in their own writing.

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"I tell them I would rather deal with all of your typos and know that they're yours than to wonder how much you're standing on other people's shoulders to do your work for you," Kauffman says.

Purcell, in Illinois, doesn't necessarily think AI has eroded trust. She says students found ways to cheat on assignments long before AI came along.

"I think teachers need to be creative in how they use it and force kids to think with it just like they would with any other tool," she says.

Schools aren't providing teachers with much guidance

Many educators are having to adapt to AI with little guidance from their school or district, according to the survey results. Among teachers whose school provides AI software, only 35% say they have a formal policy on teacher use of AI — meaning schools are more often providing the tools without a formal policy for their use.

About half of all polled teachers say their school hasn't offered any guidance on AI, or they're not sure what the guidance is.

"I think teachers are looking for additional guidance from their district and from their students, frankly, on what AI is going to mean for the future of education," Newall says.

Only about 4-in-10 teachers say their school offers professional development or training related to AI, according to the poll.

Rodriguez, in Florida, says she hasn't received any training on the technology, and she wishes she could.

"They need to teach us how to apply that information to what we do and most importantly to how we teach to be able to utilize [AI] in a positive way," Rodriguez says.

Kauffman agrees. He says there isn't enough attention being paid to "how to teach what we are teaching differently to account for the flexibility and the resources that AI can make available."

Corricelli isn't totally surprised by the lack of training. She says schools are often slow to adapt to change, and that's been a challenge for educators.

"I think we're all just kind of trying not to drown with the whole thing," she says.

This reporting was supported by the Omidyar Network's Reporters in Residence program.

Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Audio story produced by: Lauren Migaki

Copyright 2026 NPR

CONCORD, Calif. — Ninth grader Soraya Martin is a bubbly, social teenager who recently found a new passion.

"I'm a very creative writer, I love to write stories for fun," she says.

Stories come naturally to Soraya, but reading and writing don't. That's because she has dyslexia. "Academically, school has always been a really big challenge for me."

Then last school year, she started using technology that allows her to do a number of things: dictate her writing rather than type, listen to books rather than read them on a page and take photos of notes on the board.

It changed everything. Instead of getting caught up in whether a word is spelled right, Soraya finds that with speech-to-text built into her school laptop, she can simply let the words flow from her brain out of her mouth.

"I started getting really good grades," she says. "It made me feel like … I'm not stupid, I have so much to say and it just made me like 'I can do this, I can do school and I can be good at it."

This, her mom, Heather Martin, says, is the kind of promise screens hold for students like her daughter — students she worries are being forgotten in the nationwide backlash against screens in schools. Screens are increasingly being blamed for getting in the way of student learning: More than 30 states have banned cellphones in school. Some states have gone further with proposals or policies to entirely remove screens like laptops and tablets from classrooms. In late May, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a surgeon general's advisory warning of the "harms of screen use," citing its effects on children's health and educational outcomes.

Much of the pivot away from screens in schools has come from parents who are concerned screen use is getting in the way of their children's learning — an argument Heather Martin hears in her own community in Concord, 30 miles northeast of San Francisco. She shares some of those concerns, but says, "Never once in the conversation has there been a discussion, except for me bringing it up with the other parents, about kids with disabilities."

Advocates worry those students are also being left out of the national conversation.

Screen-time policy proposals are often "a blunt instrument"

Students with disabilities make up a quickly growing share of students in this country — there are more than 8 million of them. Many rely on assistive technology to get through the school day, including for note-taking, reading and writing. For example, blind and low-vision students may use screen reading or magnifying software to read. Others, like Soraya, use speech-to-text and audiobooks.

States including Alabama, Tennessee and Utah already have laws limiting screens that take effect as early as July.

"My concern is that that's a really fast period of time for this to happen," says Lindsay Jones, CEO of the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), an education research nonprofit that focuses on making learning environments accessible.

Jones points out that some of these laws do make exceptions to restrictions on screens for students with disabilities — often a line in the text mentions assistive technology. But she says that should be the bare minimum and worries many policy proposals are "a very blunt instrument."

"They've moved so fast that we've really left our educators and our communities of people with disabilities this summer to figure it out," she says. Perhaps with more time and input from disabled people, policies would better protect their rights, Jones adds.

Beyond concerns about state- and school-level bans on cellphones and screens, disability advocates point out that the shrunken U.S. Department of Education is far less equipped to enforce civil rights. Those rights include access to assistive technology for students with disabilities. The Trump administration also recently delayed a long-expected digital accessibility rule for public institutions, including schools.

"For some kids, the screen is their accessibility tool"

At Soraya's high school in northern California, this past school year was the first that students' phones were locked up in pouches for the entirety of the school day — as they are in many schools across the country. Heather Martin worries the phone ban could open the door to a broader ban on screens at her daughter's school.

"A completely screen-free environment feels like it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater," she says. "It's not looking at 'screen free' versus 'accessibility free.' And for some kids, the screen is their accessibility tool."

As she talks about the change at her school, Soraya tenses up. "I hate them," she says of the locked pouches. She says her phone isn't just a distraction, it's a safety net to call her parents if she has a panic attack, for example. And she feels singled out when she has to ask to get her phone out of its locked pouch for note-taking.

Soraya's individualized education program (IEP), a legal document that outlines the accommodations and modifications she is supposed to receive at school, says she can use her phone for note-taking, along with other assistive technology. But because the cellphone ban is new, her teachers are still adjusting. Because she has several different classes and teachers throughout the day, she says it's easy for some teachers to be unfamiliar with her accommodations.

This is the kind of "unintended consequence" Jones worries about as she considers a near future in which more schools move away from technology that she says has been game-changing for people with disabilities. When technology is used intentionally, she says, it can "actually allow us to create much more flexible environments, and those are really needed for people with disabilities."

Jones' organization, CAST, invented an educational framework called Universal Design for Learning that encourages educators to design their classrooms to account for the different ways students learn. For instance, a teacher might give a math lesson using blocks, a diagram and a video to help impress the same lesson upon diverse learners. Or perhaps class reading is provided as an e-book so students with low-vision can magnify the text, while those with dyslexia can listen.

As screen limits ripple through the nation's schools, Jones hopes people with disabilities aren't forgotten. "We need educators, we need people with disabilities, we need assistive technology providers," to weigh in on how such policies are implemented in the classroom, says Jones. "That is going to be the best way forward for everyone to achieve their goals without trampling on people's rights."

For Soraya, using these kinds of tools has led her to embrace her learning differences. In fact, she just finished researching and writing a series of essays exploring how people with dyslexia learn. She has straight As for the first time in her life, but more importantly, she says she can express herself in a deeper, more meaningful way.

"I have so much more to say … It made me feel more confident in myself."

Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

A quiet primary race for state superintendent of public instruction is winding down Tuesday, with no clear front-runner emerging from a wide field of well-qualified candidates for California’s top schools job.

Ten candidates — including several legislative veterans — are vying for the opportunity to oversee the state’s 10,000 public K-12 schools during a tumultuous time. Schools are grappling with AI in the classroom, budget uncertainty, declining enrollment, lackluster test scores and other challenges.

The job itself is also up in the air. Gov. Gavin Newsom in January proposed an overhaul of California’s school governance structure, with far fewer duties for the superintendent. Instead, the State Board of Education, an 11-member body appointed by the governor, and a newly appointed education commissioner would hold most of the decision-making power. The superintendent would act as more of a policy advocate.

The shift would streamline a cumbersome and often opaque bureaucracy, adding transparency and accountability, Newsom said. It would also align California with most other states. Candidates for the superintendent position blasted the proposal, saying it takes away power from voters and concentrates too much control with the governor’s office.

Newsom and the current superintendent, Tony Thurmond, are both termed out this year.

Charter schools are no longer a divisive issue

The race for superintendent — at times, in previous election cycles, one of the most expensive and contentious races on the ballot — has been unusually quiet this year. In the most recent poll, conducted in April, no candidate garnered more than 10% of voters’ support, and 32% of voters were undecided. As of last week, no candidate had raised more than a few hundred thousand dollars. That’s in contrast to the 2018 superintendent race between Thurmond and Marshall Tuck, a former charter school executive, which generated more than $50 million in donations.

But there have been a few surprises in the race. The California Teachers Association and its historic nemesis, the California Charter Schools Association, endorsed the same candidate: Richard Barrera, a San Diego Unified school board member who was little known outside San Diego until this year. Both groups cited his accomplishments on the school board and his commitment to public education.

The dual endorsement shows how much has changed in education debates. For the past two decades, charter schools have been the No. 1 division in the superintendent’s race, generating millions in campaign donations from both sides. This year the subject has barely been mentioned, probably because charter school enrollment appears to have plateaued and both types of schools are now dealing with the same issues.

Another surprise has been the popularity of Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified school board. Shaw made headlines in 2023 when she took on Thurmond over the privacy rights of transgender students, and has made anti-LGBTQ policies the focus of her campaign. In the April poll, she was tied with Barrera.

Other top candidates include: Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, former head of the Assembly education committee; Josh Newman, former head of the Senate education committee; Anthony Rendon, former speaker of the Assembly and a longtime early education program administrator; Nichelle Henderson, a Los Angeles Community College District board member, and Ainye Long, a teacher in San Francisco Unified.

The nonpartisan position pays $210,460 a year.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Nearly 1,000 faculty members have signed the open letter. More than 200 of them are from UC San Diego.

The UC Board of Regents voted to eliminate the requirement in 2020. In their letter, the faculty call it “a temporary measure that has now become a permanent vulnerability.”

Those who wanted to drop the requirement said students from wealthier families often have an advantage. That’s because they can afford things like test prep and tutors, said Youlanda Copeland-Morgan, who was UCLA’s vice provost for enrollment at the time.

“Students from under-resourced schools share textbooks, use broken Bunsen burners, and don't have test prep and can't afford tutoring,” she told the board in 2020.

But faculty members argue standardized tests ensure students get admitted to the right school for them within California’s public university system.

“The SAT/ACT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it,” they wrote in the letter. “Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome.”

In November, a UC San Diego Academic Senate group reported that more and more students are taking remedial math courses. They said admissions staff are relying more heavily on high school grades, and that COVID may have caused more grade inflation.

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the letter reads.

In a statement, UC Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu said faculty plan to work with state and K-12 leaders on college readiness.

“In light of concerns raised by UC faculty about student preparedness for undergraduate study, in March I called upon our systemwide faculty Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) to address timely topics tied to students’ college readiness and UC’s admissions process,” Palazoglu wrote. “BOARS is in the process of proposing a roadmap of policy work and partnership-building with other state and K-12 education leaders in the next academic year and beyond.”

UC faculty members noted other universities have reinstated an SAT/ACT requirement. They include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University.

This week, Yale University announced it would require applicants to submit test scores starting with its next admissions cycle.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Despite making up one-fifth of the state’s voting population, most Gen Z Californians won’t vote in the June 2 primary, which is stacked with several gubernatorial candidates.

The primary election tees up the ballot in November, which will also host other high-profile races and issues, such as the rest of the executive candidates, as well as propositions like the billionaire’s tax.

Generation Z, or those aged 14 to 29, makes up nearly 21% of eligible California voters, but their historical turnout is disproportionately low compared to the general voting population.

Young voters aren’t necessarily checked out. Rinu Nair, the president of the History and Civic Engagement Club at De Anza College in Cupertino, said that the student club’s meeting on the gubernatorial race drew the most participants of any meeting this year: 20. But students were often disillusioned by each candidate having a history of controversial actions.

“There’s an interest, but also that feeling of, ‘Am I doing what I want to do? Can my vote even make a change?’” Nair said. “(Young people) don’t feel represented in politics but they feel like it’s a duty they have to do.”

In a statewide survey published by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies in May, voters aged 18 to 29 polled similarly to all voters on reasons why they may not vote in the primary election. But a few reasons jumped out in particular.

Of young voters who said they were unlikely to vote, 47% said they are not well-informed enough on the issues and candidates, compared to 38% of total unlikely voters. Another difference was that 31% of young voters said they were too busy, compared to 19% of all unlikely voters.

Cost of living and inflation, healthcare and housing costs are the top three issues Gen Z voters are tracking leading up to the 2026 midterms, according to 2026 survey data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan research organization based at Tufts University in Boston. Jobs and unemployment and immigration ranked fourth and fifth among survey respondents respectively.

How candidates are – or aren't – addressing the youth vote

CalMatters reached out to gubernatorial candidate front-runners to learn more about their methods for engaging youth voters. Steve Hilton, Chad Bianco, Tony Thurmond and Matt Mahan’s teams did not respond.

Antonio Villaraigosa said in an interview that he hired a diverse staff of people primarily aged 22 to 26 to help him connect better with youth voters. Katie Porter and Tom Steyer said they have visited many college campuses across the state in an effort to connect with young voters.

Maiya De La Rosa, the president of California Young Democrats, a youth organizing group affiliated with the state Democratic Party, said that Xavier Becerra has visited and formed relationships with more Young Democrats chapters across the state than any other candidate, having visited 30 chapters since July 2025. She said that the organization endorsed him because of that strong relationship as well as his policies.

The California College Democrats, an organization of students that mobilizes around Democratic candidates and advocates progressive policies, similarly endorsed Becerra in March.

“He’s made a really big effort to put college students at the front of his campaign,” said Daniel Guerrero, the organization’s president and incoming senior at UC San Diego. “We believed in his message, and it’s been really rewarding to see everyone else see what we saw in him, especially in the young community.”

Steyer and Becerra have both been using short videos and partnerships with content creators to reach young audiences. Both are caught up in a controversy over content creators allegedly failing to disclose that campaigns had paid for their endorsements. The influencers often posted endorsements without disclaimers that they had been paid.

According to each candidate’s endorsement pages (except Hilton, who does not have one), Becerra has the most endorsements from youth groups – 15 total, mostly consisting of Young Democrats and College Democrats chapters.

Steyer has three youth group endorsements and Thurmond has one. Peter Opitz, a representative for Porter, said she is endorsed by UAW and Teamsters, which contain unions that represent workers and educators in higher education.

A strong social media presence has been integral to reaching young voters – and any voter – in a race where it’s difficult to stand out.

Even so, California Assemblymember Alex Lee, who has endorsed Steyer, said in an interview that he believes social media strategy comes second to good policy, and that Democrats often get criticized for being boring online.

“Zohran Mamdani’s popular not because he’s good at Instagram alone, but because he campaigned on free childcare, housing and a rent freeze,” Lee said, who was 25 years old when he was elected. “You can pump so much money into viral cringe, but it will not resonate with people.”

At a televised debate held at Pomona College in April, as candidates squabbled for speaking time, hundreds of students tuned in from a nearby dining hall where the debate was being livestreamed. They giggled at Steve Hilton’s British accent, hollered over the shade thrown on stage and kept a close eye on the crowded field for standouts.

Throughout the debate, as candidates like Villaraigosa directed their responses to “the young students at Pomona,” groans erupted from students watching the livestream. Rising junior at Pomona College Sarah Russo said the candidates’ comments felt overly performative.

“It belittled us and infantilized us,” Russo said in a talkback session with other students after the debate.

Incoming Pomona College junior Alex Benach said no one candidate really stood out. “The whole field of candidates trying to have that viral moment watered [the debate] down,” they said.

Despite the debate being held at a college campus, students attending said that the candidates failed to address key priorities for youth in college, including the job market, AI and federal crackdowns on campuses for alleged anti-semitism and equity issues.

Youth turnout is low, but young voters are hardly apathetic

No matter the kind of election – gubernatorial or general – youth turnout is historically lower than other age groups, said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California, a hub for civic and electoral engagement research. In the 2024 general election, 42.5% of eligible voters aged 18 to 24 cast a ballot, compared to 62% of all eligible voters in California, according to a July 2025 report from the center.

While young people do not show up to vote as much as older voters, it's "not because they're apathetic,” emphasized Romero. Rather, it is because youth feel disconnected from the political process.

From the 2010 to 2018 primary elections in California, eligible youth voter turnout ranged from as low as 3.6% in 2014 to 17.1% in 2016, according to California Civic Engagement Project data. In comparison, total eligible voter turnout ranged from 18.4% in 2014 and 33.5% in 2016.

Likely voter modeling often shows campaigns that youth voters aren’t worth investing in due to historically low turnout. However, that same lack of investment is what can lead to low youth turnout itself – and create what Romero calls a “vicious cycle” of campaigns failing to engage youth voters because they believe it’s not worth it.

When they do focus on young voters, candidates primarily target college campuses, usually skewing towards four-year university students, which means non-college goers, low-income voters and people of color are less likely to receive their outreach, according to Romero.

“The political and social context in which young people have come of age has made them not see government as a helpful thing that they have a say in, but rather a government that is not as responsive, gridlocked, and about spewing hate and not serving,” Romero said. “Generally speaking, young people don’t have a lot of positive to look to. They’ve seen only negative.”

Young people also may be more skeptical after seeing such negativity, whereas older generations have memories of a more civil past, giving them the perspective of a government that could function in a non-partisan way.

“Young people are tapped in politically, that’s undeniable,” said Christopher Smith, a student at Evergreen Valley College who attended a Steyer event. “Anybody who claims that is not true is not listening to young people enough.”

Romero suggested that the competitiveness of the race could push more young people to vote, but the turnout would still be unrepresentative of the actual youth population. In the UC Berkeley IGS Poll, 56% of respondents across all age, race and party demographics said that a low youth turnout was a “major concern” for a representative democracy in California.

The UC Berkeley IGS poll also showed that 48% of young voters who said they were unlikely to vote said access to an “unbiased and trusted source of election news” would increase their chances of voting. A quarter of them said more convenient voting would also increase that likelihood.

Andrew Luong, a De Anza College student at the Steyer rally, said he feels that it’s partially on young people to educate themselves and vote. “In the governor’s race, I know young people care about it, but don’t care to learn more about it,” he said.

Among young Democrats, De La Rosa said she has seen youth voter engagement increase “significantly.” She recalled how when she was president of California College Democrats in 2020, phone banking events would turn out about 20 people. Now, in a phone banking event for Becerra, 60 people came.

Young progressive leaders say some youth are looking for a candidate to stand up to Trump.

“In a time where young people have been at the forefront of the attacks from the Trump administration, having someone who's been there and has already gone up to bat to fight the Trump administration is really, really important,” Guerrero said.

Where candidates stand on Gaza, affordability

In April, Steyer made his first stop of “A California You Can Afford” bus tour a few blocks away from San Jose State University, where he made his progressive bid to a majority middle-aged crowd.

A handful of people who appeared below 30 years old were present. That’s not to say young people don’t support him – a Democratic Party poll conducted May 14 through 16 shows he and Becerra both garnered the support of 23% of respondents aged 18 to 34. Meanwhile, 17% of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they still were undecided.

CalMatters spoke to college students at the bus tour, many of whom said that the genocide in Gaza was a moral touchpoint for them.

Nair attended the event to learn more about Steyer. She said that she's still unsure of who to vote for.

“The fact that he wasn't willing to take a solid stance on the Gaza question, that was more than enough for me,” Nair said. “I do hold my politicians to a higher standard than some do, and that was enough for me to not feel convinced.”

Smith said that young voters especially care whether a candidate believes Israel has committed genocide.

In exclusive video interviews with CalMatters, eight candidates currently in the race were asked whether they considered Israel’s actions in the war in Gaza a genocide. None of the candidates went that far. Porter and Becerra criticized Netanyahu’s actions, while Hilton simply responded “no.”

In these interviews, CalMatters also asked candidates what is the single biggest thing they would do to make life more affordable in California. Five of the eight candidates said they would focus on combatting high housing costs, primarily with plans to make it easier to build. Hilton and Villaraigosa said they would first bring down the price of gas, while Bianco said overregulation was California’s primary affordability issue.

When asked about their greatest hope for youth in particular, the most common answer among candidates was making sure California remains a state where people want to settle permanently.

Kahani Malhotra and Chrissa Olson are contributors with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

If you're a student in Jen Roberts' 12th-grade English class at Point Loma High School, you know what to do when class starts. You pull out a book and start reading.

“I believe very strongly in the power of reading,” Roberts said. “So my class period always starts with ten minutes of silent reading.”

In this unit, students are learning about food politics. They’re reading books like “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.

After they close their books, they open up their laptops and do more reading — this time with a tool called Brisk Boost.

Students scroll through the text on the left side of the screen. On the right, a chatbot asks questions based on the learning objectives Roberts has set.

It keeps students engaged, said Taylor Ashton, one of Roberts’ students.

“I could go through the text multiple times and just, like, read it and be done with it,” Ashton said. “This forces me to process it by keeping me interacting with it.”

But not everyone is on board with this approach.

A group of parents is asking the San Diego Unified School District to limit screen time in its classrooms. Nearly 1,200 people have signed the group’s petition. Their proposed board resolution would, in part, prohibit students from using generative AI.

Roberts said tools like Brisk Boost aren’t doing the work for students. Instead, they provide feedback more quickly and more frequently than she could on her own.

“I could come around and have an individual conversation with every one of my 36 kids to see if they all understand the article. I could give them a quiz that would be, like, five static questions and give them the results two days later,” she said. “But it's so much better when they can, in real time, find out what they do and don't understand.”

Another AI program she touts is MagicSchool. Its idea-generator tool can give students prompts for narrative writing assignments, Roberts said.

“Rather than letting a student sit there staring at a blank screen or a blank piece of paper for 45 minutes, I'll give them a tool in a MagicSchool student room,” she said.

Alfonso Jacinto, another senior in Roberts’ class, said he's used AI tools to create study guides for classes like economics and statistics. It can be tempting to use it for more than that, like answering homework questions, he said.

“It's very easy to fall into temptation,” he said. “It’s very hard to get out of it.”

The temptation to cheat is just one concern about AI in schools. Another is privacy.

Last year, researchers at Stanford University found that leading AI companies use conversations people have with their chatbots to train their large language models. Some of them collect data from teens.

Roberts said student safety and privacy are at the top of mind when she’s picking digital tools to use in class. MagicSchool, for example, says it doesn’t sell data to third parties or use it for targeted advertising.

MagicSchool founder and CEO Adeel Khan is a former teacher and principal. He shares a lot of the concerns that parents have about AI, such as kids forming an emotional attachment to a chatbot.

"Consumer AI tools are not safe for kids. Point blank,” he said. “If your kid's using an un-guardrailed version of ChatGPT or Gemini at home, without supervision, and not under the guidance of you as an adult, that is a scary premise.”

Roberts also understands concern about screen use. But she thinks phones and social media are bigger problems than school laptops.

“With screen time, it's more about how you're using the screen, not just the fact that the screen is on,” she said.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After three days of competition, 18 total rounds and one nail-biting, rapid-fire "spell-off," the Scripps National Spelling Bee has crowned its champion: 14-year-old Shrey Parikh from Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

Over the course of two hours on Thursday night, the pool of nine finalists dropped to two: Parikh and 12-year-old Ishaan Gupta from Jersey City, N.J. After each had nailed their eighth respective word, officials carried a sleek silver podium — with a buzzer on top — onto the stage, prompting huge gasps from the crowd. It was time for a spell-off.

"I was not excited at all, because to be honest, regular spelling I feel like is a much better show of what spelling is meant to be," Parikh told reporters immediately after his win. "But I accepted the fact that there was going to be a spell-off, I calmed my mind, I got some water … and I just tried to take it all in stride and do the best I could."

Parikh and Gupta each had 90 seconds at the buzzer, alone on the stage, to spell as many words correctly as possible. Then, after a few minutes of careful counting, judges made it official: Parikh had crushed 32 words to Gupta's 25, ending in "cashaw" (a type of plant) and setting a new spell-off record.

"Once I get the word, I'm not really nervous anymore, because then it's all in my control," Parikh reflected from center stage at DAR Constitutional Hall, a grand concert hall a stone's throw from the White House.

Parikh will leave D.C. with $52,500 in cash and a slew of other perks, including hundreds of dollars' worth of reference works, flight credits and an astronaut meet-and-greet at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.

He's also coming into some considerable free time: The 8th grader estimates he's spent about five hours a day working on spelling in the past year alone. He's excited to dive deeper into his other hobbies, especially tennis and math competitions. And, even before his win set in, he knew what message he wanted it to send.

"I would say, definitely, just keep trying," he said. "Trying is the best thing you can do, and it's the most important thing you can do."

This is Parikh's third bee: He placed 89th in 2022 and third in 2024.

The bee returns to its D.C. roots

This is the first time in 15 years that the competition has been held in D.C., after a long stretch in Maryland and a year in Florida during COVID. Organizers decided to return the competition to its roots in its 101st year, citing the "prestige and honor that D.C. brings to this experience for spellers," plus access to the city's free museums and monuments.

"We think it's a fitting national-level prize to be able to go and see the nation's capital, especially now as the country celebrates 250 years," said Executive Director Corrie Loeffler.

A total of 247 competitors arrived in D.C. for "Bee Week" on Sunday, hailing from all 50 states and as far away as Guam. The competitors ranged from 9 to 15, though most were middle-school age.

Several contestants and family members told NPR they appreciated the chance to explore D.C., with many planning to tour historical sites over the weekend. Though not everyone welcomed the change: 13-year-old Harini Jayakumar of Charlotte, N.C. — who made it to the semifinals of her third and final bee — said she enjoyed the hotel and overall experience more when it was in Maryland.

Spellers who didn't make it to the final still packed into the 3,700-seat venue on Thursday, along with families, journalists and curious locals. Outside the auditorium, they wandered through a timeline of the bee's history, admired a display-case trophy and posed for photos with two human-size, costume-clad bees.

Maryland resident Christy Kim, 35, got hooked after attending a county-level spelling bee last month for fun, as she looked for free activities in the area. She even convinced her friend Maia Owens to travel two hours from Baltimore for the final, promising a wholesome evening. Owens was sold too.

"We honestly might be bee people now," Kim said with a laugh.

Erika Minor, who helped sell t-shirts at the merchandise table, said the most popular item — stuffed bee plushies — sold out on the very first day of competition. Minor, a D.C. local who works for the venue, hadn't paid much attention to the bee in the past, quickly saw what all the buzz was about.

"It is so cool and exciting to see, and also just to talk to, the participants and hear where they came from, and then also to peek my head [in] … and just see how, like, the kids go through the process of remembering how to spell certain words," Minor said, adding that she will follow the contest in the future.

From nine finalists to one champion

All told, there were seven spelling rounds and one multiple-choice vocabulary round, which was added to the onstage competition in 2021 to put less emphasis on rote memorization.

The elimination-style spelling rounds are the bee's bread and butter. Dr. Jaques Bailly, who won in 1980 with the word "elucubrate," has been the head pronouncer for over two decades. He reads each speller one word per round.

Spellers have 90 seconds and the chance to ask for basic information, like origin and definition. If they get it wrong, there is a heavy pause before the head judge, Mary Brooks, rings a bell, an antique family heirloom, and delivers some praise on their way out.

"You are pure joy," she told 12-year-old Logan Bailey, who had gotten the crowd on his side with his shocked, cheerful scamper back to his seat after each successful turn. "As a speller, you absolutely brought happiness to everyone in this room. You come back."

Attendees' stress and suspense were palpable with every letter — as were their relieved sighs and sympathetic gasps as each speller took the mic.

"And you also don't know how to spell these words, so you don't know if they got it right or wrong," said Kim. "So when you hear that bell, it's very discouraging because you know how hard they worked for it. But it's still great because the spellers are really encouraging to one another and the audience is really supportive of the spellers."

All of the competition words come from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary. Some of Thursday's sounded too whimsical to be real — Kadohadacho, quillai, hwyl, Quincke tube — while others sounded too straightforward to be true, like potto, Kolami and cere.

The dreaded bell didn't ring until the third round, which saw four contestants eliminated in a matter of minutes. By the end of the seventh round, only Parikh and Gupta were left — and their success in the subsequent round brought them to the dreaded spell-off.

It's the third time one has decided the spelling bee since it was introduced in 2021.

Harini Logan won the first spell-off, in 2022, by spelling 22 words in 90 seconds. In 2024, Bruhat Soma won with 29.

After his win, Parikh said the word that stumped him the most the entire night was "Bhubaneswar," a city in India.

"I was 99% sure it had a 'B,' but always doubt creeps into your head, especially in the moment," he said. "I knew I just had to stick with my gut and stick with my instincts on that word."

Just as winning spellers get their names in the history books, so too do the winning words.

Some of them may surprise modern-day listeners — like "croissant" in 1970, "luge" in 1980 and "Purim" in 1983. More recent words have been less of the household variety. In the last five years, we've seen: éclaircissement (an explanation), abseil (basically rappelling), psammophile (an organism that thrives in sand), moorhen (a type of water bird) and Murraya (a genus of plants).

Copyright 2026 NPR

For a decade, UC San Diego students have been running Triton Gaming Expo, serving up a multiverse of fun that includes an artist alley, cosplay, industry and voice-actor panels, and a promise of insane tech.

"Triton Gaming Expo is our annual gaming convention," said Jewelle Tatad, the external vice president for Triton Gaming. "We're basically taking over all the open space in the Price Center. We're going to be having fundraisers downstairs as well as some partnerships with the bookstore. We're going to be having the majority of our programming on the second floor, with the East Ballroom housing our different gaming clubs as well as some of our partner organizations and programs such as esports. The West Ballroom will be having some of our artists, and up on the fourth floor we will be having our cosplay café."

Magnolia Hyon is the executive officer for ArtSpark Pre-Professional Art Club.

"ArtSpark is a pre-professional art club, the very first at UCSD, and we're focused on helping students break into the art industry," Hyson said. "So becoming professional artists, whether that be in animation or video games, we're just trying to help them get art education, kind of more structured education than you get here in the art program, and build their portfolio through many of our portfolio projects, and build community. So as a pre-professional art club, being around art in the industry is really important. So we're going to be tabling with some of our members' work. We can share what we've done as a club and what our individual members have done in the company of these really huge game industry giants like Riot, Supergiant, Behemoth. It's really valuable for our members to get networking with people like that."

And gaming company professionals welcome the chance to be on campus.

"Some of them are also UCSD alum — and some of them are even Triton Gaming alum— a lot of them are really excited to see what kind of art talent, as well as marketing talent, as well as all this other stuff that is applicable to this industry, is on display," Tatad said. "A lot of people in Triton Gaming do want to go into the games industry, whether that's on the esports side or in the video game side, where they are creating games. So I think that the talent is all super duper excited to be there just to talk to these people and kind of see like where students are at."

Hyon points to the work of yet another student organization, the Video Game Development Club.

"The whole club's base comes together to work on one game," Hyon said. "I was a huge part of that this quarter. It was an incredible experience, really helped me build my portfolio and make connections with the members. The Video Game Development Club is just constantly running projects and game jams to really be that video game presence on campus where curriculum kind of falls short."

UC San Diego students are quick to organize and take action when they see a need. Since the university is best known as a STEM school, Tatad wants to highlight its more artistic side.

"As someone who runs a student organization that is so focused around gaming, which I think is in and of itself an art form, I think it's really important to kind of uplift these student artists, especially in a school where I feel like we kind of get sidelined," she said.

But artists won’t be sidelined this weekend. In fact, attendees will be rewarded for visiting artist booths.

"A lot of artists organized this thing called Stamp Rally," Tatad said. "This one is specifically transportation theme centered. We were making a Riso-printed map specifically for it. So that'll be organized by some of our artists. If you make a purchase from each of these artists, you get that stamp as a special prize."

Tatad also wants to make attending a convention affordable for students.

"I feel especially in an era where like con culture and fandom culture is becoming more and more gatekept and more and more inaccessible, I think providing these spaces for people to be able to engage in gaming, engage in anime, engage in art is super duper important, especially for university students, which many of us are low-income," she said. "Many of us don't have this access to fandom without having to shell out a lot for it."

Hyon agreed: "I think it's really helping or supporting con culture here. People love art and media, and it helps bring people closer together through their interests and even through their specialty careers like voice acting and video game development, art, of course, and just being able to put it all towards this big event and then having so many people involved with it. Then getting the engagement, and engagement supports the community. I think it's a message to students — not necessarily from the university, but from students — you're not alone and we're all here together and we all love this stuff and we can bond over that."

Triton Gaming Expo takes place Saturday and Sunday at UC San Diego's Price Center. The event is free for UCSD students and $12 for the public for a two-day pass.

An eighth-grader from Maranatha Christian School in 4S Ranch was eliminated in the seventh round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee today in Washington.

Benjamin Reinhard incorrectly spelled lochage, using a K instead of an H. The word is a noun meaning the commander of a lochus, a small division of an ancient Greek army comprising about 100 to 200 men, according to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary

The 14-year-old was among 24 spellers eliminated in the round, as the field was reduced from 54 to 30. He and the other spellers eliminated in the round are considered to have tied for 31st.

Because Maranatha Christian School is conducting its eighth-grade promotion ceremony Thursday, this was the only time Benjamin competed in the national bee, which is limited to students in eighth grade and below.

Benjamin began Wednesday's quarterfinals at Constitution Hall by correctly spelling vamplate, a round plate of iron mounted on the shaft of a lance or tilting spear to protect the hand.

Benjamin then correctly answered the multiple-choice vocabulary question, "Someone who is fastidious" is, selecting "has a meticulous, demanding attitude." A vocabulary question is asked in the second round in each of the bee's four segments.

Benjamin was among 54 spellers advancing to the semifinals with a correct spelling in the sixth round. His word was Wesleyanism, the system of Arminian Methodism taught by John Wesley. The round began with 66 spellers.

Benjamin began the bee Tuesday by correctly spelling micellar, an adjective that describes anything relating to or composed of micelles, which are tiny, self-assembling, spherical clusters of molecules. The word is most commonly used in chemistry and skincare.

In the second round he was asked a vocabulary question, "Something described as serrated is?" and correctly chose "notched or toothed on the edge."

Benjamin then joined the other spellers who advanced to the third round in taking a 30-question spelling and vocabulary test, with each correct answer worth one point.

Under bee rules, spellers are grouped by their number of correct answers. The number of spellers to advance are determined by identifying the group whose minimum score results in as close to 100 quarterfinalists as possible.

Spellers with a least 13 points were assured of advancing to the quarterfinals, officials announced. The test reduced the field from 167 to 95. Individual scores were not disclosed.

Benjamin qualified for the national bee by winning the San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee in March, correctly spelling kenosis, the relinquishment of divine attributes by Jesus Christ in becoming human, in the 23rd round.

Johnson stuck letters onto a piece of cardstock to spell “teachers over tech.” Other signs read “less screens, more humans” and “ed tech is the biggest grift in education.”

The group is part of the local chapter of Schools Beyond Screens.

They stood in front of the Manchester Grand Hyatt outside of a sold-out conference, where school district leaders, college presidents, tech executives and startup founders were speaking about the latest in artificial intelligence and educational technology.

Johnson and a growing number of other parents are asking the district to reevaluate the role technology plays in its classrooms. They’re concerned about kids’ learning, attention spans, eyesight, privacy and social skills.

A resolution on the issue could go before the school board as soon as next month.

Parents push back

Johnson started worrying about screens even before she became a parent. In 2010, she was studying to become a psychologist and learned about the drawbacks. There were already studies linking high mobile phone use to depression, stress and sleep deprivation.

“I thought that if I ever had kids of my own, I would do everything I could to give them a screen-free childhood,” she said.

When her daughter started kindergarten at Ocean Beach Elementary, she began using a Chromebook at school.

“It was ubiquitous,” Johnson said. “It kind of made me sit up in a different way. I didn't realize just how much they were going to be on it.”

She remembers the first time she heard her daughter say “smash to subscribe,” something YouTube vloggers tell viewers to do to the subscription button on their profile.

“It really gave me pause, because we are so intentional about the things our kids consume, from the food they eat to the books they read,” she said. “If we watch a documentary or something, we’re pretty particular. The kids are five years old once. I don’t want them to see things they can’t unsee.”

In the four years since her daughter started kindergarten, Johnson said Chromebook use has varied depending on the teacher.

“I think there are some teachers that really believe in the efficacy of digital learning platforms. They believe that this is the gold standard, and they feel grateful to have access to these programs,” she said.

One of her daughter’s teachers didn't use Chromebooks in class or send them home, she said. They stayed in a bin in the classroom.

During a May 21 school board meeting, a parent told the board that his kids and their classmates have accessed adult content on their Chromebooks while at school, first in fourth grade and now in sixth grade.

“Blocksi is not cutting it,” he told the board, referring to the program that allows teachers to monitor students’ screen use and parents to block certain websites.

In San Diego Unified, kindergarteners and first graders have Chromebooks in their classrooms. In second grade, the district gives students Chromebooks to use at home and at school. They’re replaced when students reach sixth grade and ninth grade.

This made sense in years past, Johnson said. But not anymore.

“There was a point where giving everyone a laptop was the great equalizer. ‘Hey, not just the rich kids have tech at home. Now, this is for people who have been systematically disenfranchised or people who don't have as much access and as many resources,’” she said.

Now, she said, she’s privileged to know about the drawbacks of screen-based learning and the research that backs it up.

A nationwide discussion

Lawmakers across the country are drafting legislation to try to curb screen use in schools. New laws in Tennessee and Alabama limit device use among young students.

In January, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee heard testimony on kids’ screen time.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) chairs the committee. The rise of social media and smartphone use has hurt kids’ mental health, confidence and attention spans, he said during his opening remarks.

“There aren't many parents who think it has become easier to help with schoolwork or to cut down on screen time when schools send their kids home with a personal tablet,” he said.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, told the committee that standardized test scores started declining around 2012, when smartphones and social media became popular.

“One reason for that? The use of phones and tablets and laptops for leisure purposes during the school day,” she said.

In a study, Twenge found that declines in academic performance were larger in countries where students spent more time using devices for leisure purposes during school hours.

She said one thing districts can do is prevent that from happening. Her recommendations include blocking social media, streaming services like Netflix and pornography sites on school-issued devices.

Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath also spoke to the committee. He pointed to research that shows reading comprehension and retention are stronger on paper than on screens. And he said handwritten note-taking helps students process and remember information better than they would on a laptop.

“We now have the clear understanding of why tech does not work for learning,” he told the committee. “It is all biological. It's not that the tech isn't being used well enough, we haven't been trained enough, we need better programs. It's, we have evolved biologically to learn from other human beings, not from screens, and screens circumvent that process.”

Some studies back up Horvath’s message. Others don’t.

A 2019 analysis of a range of studies – including those of elementary, high school and college students — found stronger reading skills and comprehension on paper than on screens. Another study found that screens didn’t hurt first graders’ reading comprehension if they were accustomed to using computers at school.

A 2020 meta-analysis found that college students who handwrote notes scored better than those who took notes on a laptop. A 2022 meta-analysis found little difference in test performance between the two.

Renne Catalano-Gussman also has young kids at Ocean Beach Elementary. For her, Horvath’s testimony made something clear.

“Learning works best when students are in practices that are teacher-led, pencil and paper, and specifically not on screens,” she said. “What's awesome about having that data now is that it's validating people's intuitions.”

District-level change

In April, the Los Angeles Unified School District voted to limit its students’ screen time, especially in younger grades. The push was led by a Los Angeles chapter of Schools Beyond Screens.

During the April 21 meeting, board member Taylor Ortiz Franklin said it was necessary to give devices to students during the pandemic. At the time, she said, she didn’t have kids of her own.

“I have seen personally how distracting screens can be in our homes, our communities, and of course, our schools,” she said. “We want to be places of learning, not places of distraction. And so I appreciate the advocates who've been coming to us. You've really been speaking to our hearts.”

On May 19, the LAUSD board discussed a preliminary plan. It would eliminate screen time before second grade. It would also require parents to opt in to take-home devices starting next school year.

Johnson and Catalano-Gussman lead San Diego’s chapter of Schools Beyond Screens.

The group has proposed a resolution for San Diego Unified that would direct the district to set daily and weekly screen time limits, block YouTube on school-issued devices and require instructional apps to be ad-free.

It would also allow parents to opt their students out of using devices during the school day.

“What we'd like to see for next year is a path for opting out that has reasonable accommodations and supports teachers in making those accommodations,” Catalano-Gussman said. “When families ask for something different, that burden falls on the teachers, and that’s unfair. So how can we create a path for parents to opt out of Chromebook use or specific digital application use, and then how can we support our teachers in making that path simple?”

San Diego Unified declined requests to interview Superintendent Fabiola Bagula and other administrators about the use of screens in classrooms. Spokesperson James Canning said Bagula has been talking with various groups about screen use.

“Before the national discussion on screen use grabbed folks’ attention, our instructional technology team along with IT were already working on it as part of their ongoing efforts around promoting good digital citizenship,” he wrote in an email. “That work is underway and continuing.”

Richard Barrera, president of the district’s school board, said he's been working with Schools Beyond Screens to draft a resolution.

“We're going to be asking the superintendent to develop a comprehensive plan that weighs the benefits of multiple technologies against the risks to young people,” he said in an interview.

San Diego Unified started buying laptops and tablets for students in 2009.

The district distributed more than 47,000 Chromebooks to students in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic moved school online. Chromebooks cost the district about $450 each to replace, the district said last year. Barrera said the district has mostly paid for Chromebooks with facilities bond money.

The expenses go beyond the computers. The district also pays for online programs – some for the whole district, and some for specific grade levels. They’re paid for with general funds, Barrera said.

A list of district-funded programs is available on the Instructional Technology Department’s website. The district pays for a program called Mystery Science for kindergarten through fifth grade. The middle school curriculum includes Amplify’s math, English and science programs.

Barrera said districts have been buying educational technology “with a lot of assumptions built in.”

“Frankly, we've spent a lot of time over many years listening to technology companies, contractors, consultants, selling us on what they think are panaceas,” he said.

Barrera said he wants teachers to be involved in shaping any new district policies. Right now, he said, many decisions about technology use in classrooms are left up to teachers. But Barrera said the recent push for tighter cell phone restrictions reflects broad concerns about distraction in class.

“I think parents and teachers know a lot,” he said. “And I think it's time for us as a school system to listen to them.”

The Tijuana River sewage crisis is a multi-faceted problem, with environmental, public health and political challenges to overcome.

It can all feel overwhelming, not only for the people experiencing the crisis, but also for those wanting to help.

Enter Sarah Federman’s Peace Studies students. She teaches conflict resolution at the University of San Diego’s Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, and this spring semester, she taught her class on the ongoing cross-border sewage crisis.

“We're a school of peace studies, so you might think, well, it's not a war, right?" she said. "But we study conflict resolution and how to get different groups to work together across differences to solve a problem.”

Before they could get people working together, the students had to identify a need. They started with a visit to the Tijuana River Valley, where they saw firsthand how the seasonal river, located near homes, schools and recreational areas, flows year-round with a mix of untreated wastewater, trash and toxic chemicals.

They also spoke with scientists tracking those chemical contaminants.

They reviewed studies and data identifying chemical compounds found in the river, including methamphetamine, octinoxate, a UV filter used in sunscreen, and Dibenzylamine, a compound used in tire manufacturing.

That’s when the students said they identified a need.

“We found a lot of fragmented data,” said Elise Free, a USD student who supported Federman’s class. “We found a lot of very dense scientific reports. And so, our next goal was to create a document that made all of that legible.”

They wanted to create a chemical index that the public could use to better understand where the chemicals were coming from and what dangers they pose to their health. Such a resource could also help lawmakers and the businesses releasing the pollutants, they thought.

“Understanding what's in the water and what's in the sediment is one of the first steps we can take to figuring out what actually needs to be done to treat the water and to prevent it from getting worse,” Free said.

Meanwhile, Maria Ortiz, who took Federman’s course, began reaching out to elected officials, government agencies and nonprofit organizations, informing them about the index they were developing and offering it as a resource for their efforts to address the cross-border problem.

For Ortiz, grabbing decision makers’ attention was important. The sewage crisis has impacted her family for years. As South County residents, Imperial Beach is the family’s closest shoreline.

“Learning about the actual chemicals and where they’re coming from, it makes me sad because I have an elderly mother,” Ortiz said. “She enjoyed walking on the beach and we can’t do that with her anymore.”

The students said they plan to collaborate with business students at USD and share their index with businesses releasing chemicals into the Tijuana River to help prevent further pollution.

“We found that actually, Peace and Justice students are like an amazing bridge between the data and the legislators, the data and the public, the data and the businesses,” Federman said.

An eighth-grader from Maranatha Christian School in 4S Ranch advanced to the third round of Scripps National Spelling Bee on Tuesday at Constitution Hall in Washington.

Benjamin Reinhard correctly spelled micellar, an adjective that describes anything relating to or composed of micelles, which are tiny, self-assembling, spherical clusters of molecules, according to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. The word is most commonly used in chemistry and skincare.

In the second round, he was asked a vocabulary question, "Something described as serrated is?" and correctly chose "notched or toothed on the edge."

Reinhard will join the other spellers who advanced to the third round in taking a written test at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. The scores from the written test will determine who will advance to Wednesday's quarterfinals.

Under bee rules, spellers will be grouped by their number of correct answers. The number of spellers to advance will be determined by identifying the group whose minimum score results in as close to 100 quarterfinalists as possible.

Reinhard qualified for the national bee by winning the San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee in March, correctly spelling kenosis, the relinquishment of divine attributes by Jesus Christ in becoming human, in the 23rd round.

The 14-year-old's interests include reading, running track and cross-country, tinkering with computer-aided design, biking, theater and sketching, according to biographical information supplied by bee organizers. He is an automotive aficionado and aspires to design a car.

Reinhard has acted in multiple shows for his school theater program, including "The Wizard of Oz," "The Matchmaker" and "The Little Mermaid."' His favorite author is young adult novelist Alan Gratz, his favorite food is beef stroganoff and his favorite school subject is math.

The bee began with a field of 247 spellers from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, The Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates and a Department of Defense School in Germany.

The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below and who were born on Sept. 1, 2011 or later.

The bee will conclude Thursday. The winner will receive $50,000 from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, $2,500 and a reference library from Encyclopaedia Britannica, $400 in reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica, including a 1768 Encyclopedia Britannica replica set and a three- year membership to Britannica Online Premium, two-day admission for up to four people, a two-night hotel stay, astronaut meet & greet, and $350 in merchandise from the from Kennedy Space Center & Visitors Complex and $1,000 in flight credits from Delta Air Lines.

This is the first time the bee has been held in Washington since 2010. It was held there from its inception in 1925 through 2010. It was held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, in National Harbor, Maryland from 2011 through 2025, except for 2020 when it was not held because of the coronavirus pandemic and 2021 when it was held at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World Resort, near Orlando, Florida.

Tuesday's preliminaries will be streamed on Scripps Sports Network through noon Pacific Daylight Time. Wednesday's quarterfinals will be streamed on Scripps Sports Network from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. and the semifinals from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The semifinals will be replayed on ION from 5 to 7 p.m.

Thursday's finals will air live on ION from 5 to 7 p.m.

San Diego County has produced two national spelling bee champions — Anurag Kashyap in 2005 and Snigdha Nandipati in 2012.

Leaders of the California State University system, the CSU, want it to become the nation's first artificial intelligence-powered institution of its kind.

It entered into a $17 million no-bid contract with OpenAI last year to provide students, faculty and staff with a new resource: ChatGPT Edu — a version of the popular generative AI chatbot intended for use by educational institutions. The system recently renewed that contract for another $13 million a year for the next three years.

"No other university system in the U.S. or internationally is doing anything like this, not at this scale," said Mildred García, the CSU's chancellor, during a February 2025 press conference announcing the partnership.

But in a recent survey, majorities of its students and faculty said they were skeptical of the benefits of AI for education, and they worry about AI's impacts on job security, creativity and the environment.

Colleges across the country – from Syracuse University to Dartmouth College to the University of Minnesota – have inked similar deals with AI companies, but as the largest public four-year system in the U.S., the CSU's partnership stands out.

As higher ed scrambles to figure out the benefits and harms of AI, the CSU offers an early look at what happens when an administration commits to a technology that its own community isn't convinced will improve education.

What the university has to gain

In December 2024, university leaders flagged a potential partnership with OpenAI as "a huge branding opp[ortunity]," according to an internal CSU planning document obtained by NPR.

Ed Clark, chief information officer for the CSU's office of the chancellor, told NPR in an email that "the planning document demonstrates the extent to which the CSU thoughtfully approached selecting a vendor that could support our commitment to innovation, accessibility and academic excellence."

Clark said the system chose to partner with OpenAI because they offered "the most cost-effective option that could make it even possible to bring AI tools to more than a half a million students, faculty and staff."

A separate document obtained by NPR, dated 2025, shows that the CSU expected questions around its partnership with OpenAI. The document, titled "Potential follow-up questions on ChatGPT Initiative," advises officials to explain the no-bid contract by saying the deal is "essential for the success of the CSU's AI strategy."

The document goes on to say, "After conducting extensive research and evaluating various AI tools and vendors, it was determined that OpenAI is uniquely positioned to meet our needs."

AI won't be used to teach classes, and Clark, the CSU spokesperson, told NPR in an email that the technology should supplement learning, not replace it. Both the CSU and OpenAI frame AI adoption as a necessity to prepare students for careers steeped in this technology.

"As they prepare for the workforce, AI literacy is becoming part of career readiness… so the CSU's role is to help students understand how AI is changing their disciplines and how to use it ethically and responsibly," Clark said.

Leah Belsky, vice president of education at OpenAI, told NPR they share a responsibility to "help students use these tools well… to harness their full potential and succeed in the AI-driven future of work."

But Martha Kenney, a professor and science and technology scholar at San Francisco State University, part of the CSU, says some faculty and students reject the idea that AI in higher ed is an inevitability, and that their perspective deserves consideration.

"I think refusing this technology needs to be a position that's on the table," Kenney says. She says rejecting this technology on campuses is justified, given generative AI's environmental impact and the use of copyrighted work to train models. She also questions the educational value of technology like ChatGPT Edu: She says offering a chatbot that allows students to take shortcuts on assignments is "cheating our students out of an education."

Kenney co-authored a petition that called on the CSU not to renew its contract for ChatGPT Edu.

But Clark says the "online petition does not reflect overall sentiment from within our community." He says the CSU's survey shows strong support for AI given that majorities of students and faculty say it has had a positive impact on their learning and work.

Clark also says the CSU chose to renew its agreement with OpenAI after its generative AI advisory committee, which is composed of students, faculty and staff, "unanimously recommended renewing the contract."

How students, staff and faculty feel about AI

The CSU serves about 470,000 students and, according to the system, it awards nearly half of all bachelor's degrees in California. Its student body is diverse: Roughly half are Hispanic, more than a quarter of undergraduates are the first in their family to attend college and many students work while they attend school.

Last fall, the system invited students, staff and faculty across all 22 campuses to take a survey on their views around AI. More than 94,000 people responded, and the results show widespread use of generative AI tools, but also significant ambivalence about the technology.

The survey did not ask whether students, faculty and staff agreed with the system's decision to spend millions on a contract with OpenAI.

Among the survey's topline findings:

• More than half of students and around 6-in-10 faculty and staff report using AI regularly for coursework and tasks related to their jobs.
• Roughly 65% of students and 59% of faculty said they were skeptical AI was benefitting education overall.
• 80% of students said they wouldn't be comfortable turning in AI-generated work as their own. 
• About 64% of students said AI has "positively affected" their learning, while about 35% said AI "negatively affected" their learning. 
• About 56% of faculty reported AI had positively affected their teaching, research and administrative experience. But in a separate survey question, 52% reported a negative effect.

Roughly 84% of students said they used ChatGPT. About a quarter of them said they used the version provided by CSU and the vast majority said they used the free version.

Large majorities of students and faculty also worry about AI's impact on creativity (83% of students, 82% of faculty), job security (82% of students, 78% of faculty) and the environment (80% of students, 84% of faculty).

The survey had some limitations, says David Goldberg, an associate professor at San Diego State University, part of the CSU, and one of the survey authors.

"The findings are based on the people who did respond. We don't know the opinions of the people who didn't," Goldberg explains. Still, he says the responses are a "pretty good representation across different fields of study and across different demographics."

Goldberg says the survey illustrates a tremendous amount of nuance in opinion across all groups.

"Even within one student, you can be using the tool a lot, see real advantages, and at the same time see these negatives," he says.

What students stand to gain – and lose – from AI on campus

Sejal Daterao is one of those students with complicated feelings.

Daterao, 30, says she enrolled in the information systems master's program at California State University, Long Beach, to learn how to use AI more efficiently.

As a student, she says she uses ChatGPT Edu and other AI tools to conduct research, summarize text and video lectures, and create quizzes targeted to the subjects she's studying.

And she says she's grateful the CSU provides access to ChatGPT Edu — which includes features not available on the free version of ChatGPT. As a grad student, she says it would be hard for her to foot the bill for a premium subscription.

"Helping students use such technologies firsthand is really a good thing, honestly," Daterao says.

But she doesn't describe herself as pro-AI.

She's frustrated by the occasional false information AI chatbots generate and by tech companies' use of creative work to train AI models without providing credit and compensation to artists.

"It has a lot of bad sides, and a lot of good sides," Daterao says. "If you are smart, if you are being ethical, you can use the good sides in a really amazing way."

But another student, H, doesn't see many redeeming qualities to AI. She's in her fourth-year studying computer science at San José State University, also part of the CSU, and she asked that NPR refer to her by only her first initial because she's actively applying to tech jobs and doesn't want her opinions on AI to impact her employment prospects.

H says she was annoyed when she noticed that her classmates were using AI to write assignments for them.

"It was pissing me off, which is why I completely avoided using it at first," she says.

Eventually, H says she began using AI chatbots for "menial tasks" like writing emails, and then to help her on coding assignments.

But she noticed that when she used AI to code, "I found that I was using it more as a crutch instead of actually helping. So that was one of the telltale signs that I should stop using it.'

She says her resistance to AI has only deepened as she's learned about the environmental impacts of data centers.

H understands that the CSU is under pressure to adapt to an emerging technology. But she says she's "a little disappointed that they accepted it with open arms immediately."

And H worries that pushing AI use in coursework will prevent students from learning the foundational skills they need to be successful.

"It's something I've struggled with," she says. "Trying to use it to learn basics kind of led to just not learning basics, but using it to avoid putting in effort."

Educators "can't ignore the technology"

Zach Justus, a communications professor and director of faculty development at California State University, Chico, part of the CSU, has spent the last few years encouraging faculty to adapt their teaching to the AI age — which means experimenting with the technology to figure out what it can and can't do.

He says he's excited about the innovative ways some faculty members are leveraging and allowing students to use AI. But he says adaptation, in certain circumstances, also includes redesigning coursework to prevent AI-use.

"The most important thing that we tell faculty is that they cannot ignore the technology," Justus says. "If we ignore it, we are not doing our jobs."

He says he understands the critiques of the university system's contract with OpenAI – including the argument that the system shouldn't spend millions on an AI chatbot when it's facing budget cuts. But he says it's also a problem if only some students can afford the premium versions of this software.

Without the system providing these tools to students, Justus says, "You're just systematically advantaging students with more financial resources, and that's crappy."

English professor Jennifer Trainor isn't ignoring AI, but she's not a fan of it either.

Trainor, who teaches at San Francisco State University, says her approach is to teach students about AI and the ethical questions it raises. She says she safeguards the learning process from AI by requiring students to brainstorm and draft by hand during class time. And she allows students to use AI to edit their writing, but she requires them to reflect critically on the changes it made.

"I am really trying to get them to do their own writing and thinking," Trainor says. "And I'm also giving them chances to see what happens when they use tools to improve their writing and thinking."

Some students refuse to engage with AI altogether, Trainor says. She describes it as a "groundswelling of resistance" on the campus.

"They're ethically opposed to the environmental impacts and the bias and the erasure of their jobs and voices and creativity. [They] don't like it," Trainor says.

But it's clear that, for now, it's not going anywhere.

This reporting was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism and the Omidyar Network's Reporters in Residence program.

Edited by: Nicole Cohen

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 6, 2026 at 3:53 PM PDT

BOSTON - Salah Hussein was 11 years old when he was woken up in the middle of the night by Israeli soldiers in his family home in Nablus in the West Bank. It left him traumatized and terrified for years.

It was "triggering" to see any Israeli in uniform, he says. "For me, all of them were a threat."

But decades later, Hussein, now a 33-year-old entrepreneur, has willingly and purposefully tied his fortune to his co-founder, who is an Israeli Jew.

Hussein is one of about 35 entrepreneurs taking part in a start-up accelerator program called 50:50 Startups, where mixed teams of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews spend six months in a kind of business bootcamp, going to workshops, lectures and connecting with mentors. The program culminates with a session in Boston, where the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to potential investors.

The cross-the-divide collaboration brings an extra layer of challenge to what is already a heavy lift. By most estimates, about 90% of startups fail. But Hussein is fiercely determined, not only because of pragmatic considerations, like the need for resources and access to capital for his business, but also the more lofty ideals.

"If we are not the ones looking for change, who will be? We are the right people at the right place, at the right time. We have to move on," he says. "I don't want my kids to be living in a world full of hatred."

Yana Shaulov is the Jewish Israeli on Hussein's team. A 37-year-old molecular biologist, she joined 50:50 hoping to launch an idea of her own, but ended up joining Hussain's team instead. Having grown up in a mixed neighborhood of Haifa, she says, she's used to coexistence. 

"It's not always easy, you can feel the tension sometimes, but [Israelis and Palestinians] are both here to stay, and we have to live together at the end of the day," Shaulov says. She concedes that the small collaborations at 50:50 are just "a small start," but believes what they're doing will be "contagious." 

"It's already worth it just to show other people that it's possible," she says.

The team also includes two others: a Palestinian from the West Bank and a Christian woman who is an Israeli citizen. Their company, Qanara Tech, is developing AI cameras to detect and prevent insects in greenhouses growing food. Other teams include one with a patent pending to build a better heart monitor, and another that uses egg shells and plant seeds as the filter in a water purification system.

Sometimes, even when the ideas are viable, the partnership is not. Hussein says he had a previous venture that fell apart shortly after Hamas's deadly attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the war that ensued. The tension was just too much, both within the team and especially from hardliners back home. The scorn and backlash can be so intense, Hussain says, it's hard to keep it from getting in your own head.

"Sometimes even thinking about what I'm doing right now fills me with some negative [voices], like, 'Salah, you're a normalizer. Be careful!', he says. But then the "other voice" in his head chimes in, "Keep going, Keep moving! All these tiny effects can lead to change."

Israelis participating in the program, like 27-year old Aviv Meir, say they feel it, too.

"It's hard to put yourself in the enemy's shoes," she says with a sigh. "You need to have so much strength to feel safe, and to understand that understanding their side will not demolish your side. It's sometimes making you crazy."

Meir has been involved in bridge-building initiatives since she was a teenager. She's the type you'd expect to sign up for a program like this. But 50:50 is also drawing in participants not already inclined toward dialogue.

The hard conversations

Salah Elsadi, a Palestinian who lived in Gaza for 15 years, says he wasn't even aware of the peace-building aspect of 50:50 when he applied to the program. He was interested in building his business, not bridges. But he has learned to lean in when he has to. For example, at a recent 50:50 event in Boston that was open to the public, a French Israeli woman, Sarah Blum, drew Elsadi into conversation. A short while in, she told him that about 10 years ago, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem attacked her with a knife.

"He wanted to kill me," she said.

Elsadi was visibly taken aback, but continued listening as Blum shared that some of the first people who called to check in on her were close friends who were Palestinian, and how important it is to continue dialogue even in the most difficult moments.

Then, in what seemed to be a bid to ease the moment, she asked Elsadi how his family in Gaza was doing. But it did little to diffuse the tension.

"Not good," he answered. "They're struggling to find water or food. My youngest brother has chronic disease and can't get medicine."

Blum said she could understand.

"I have close family friends who were in Kfar Aza on October 7th who are traumatized from the massacre, and some who lost loved ones [who were] taken hostage and killed in Gaza, and [did not have] access to medicine when they were in captivity," she said.

It's the kind of conversation that could have easily spiraled out, but Blum and Elsadi managed to take in each other's pain. The encounter ended with a hug, and both said afterward that it just reinforced their conviction that focus must shift from past grievances to future possibilities.

"We need to start a new thing, not just to remember the last things which remind us that 'Oh, I need to take revenge," Elsadi says. "We cannot continue war, war, war, war. How long do we want it to continue?"

Program leaders take pains to say that 50:50 is not a political organization. That's what allows it to create an environment where each side can see the other as people, not enemies.

In one stark example, a Palestinian man who grew up in a refugee camp near Hebron was sharing how he felt humiliated and harangued by IDF soldiers at checkpoints. Then he found out one of the Israelis he had come to know in the program was actually one of the soldiers stationed near his home. It was striking, he says, to hear that former Israeli soldier share how terrified he and others were of Palestinians.

"They feel [the Palestinians] will attack them, or maybe shoot them, so they always stand by, [with] nerves tense," the Palestinian man said. "At the end of the day [the soldier is] a human being. He's someone like me who just wants to get back home safe and have dinner with [his] family."

But that kind of talk doesn't go over well back home, this Palestinian man says, which is why he asked that his name not be used in this report.

"People say it's like betraying, especially in this situation, [where] everything is on fire," he said. "I don't want to be a target to [be] hurt or something."

Building trust organically

The 50:50 Startups program was co-founded by Israeli-American Amir Grinstein in 2019, and the program later partnered with Tel Aviv University and Northeastern University in Boston, where he's a marketing professor. The idea is that short of marriage, creating a business together may be the most profound way to bond two people together; it's a partnership based on equality, a shared goal and a mutual trust and reliance on each other's support.

"Its very intimate, it's very intense, it's up and down like a roller coaster, and it's long term," Grinstein says. "They have to try hard to work together. They'll fail together or they'll succeed together."

As a start-up itself, 50:50 has had to pivot and iterate through challenges Grinstein could never have imagined: COVID, October 7th, and several wars. Each has made it difficult or impossible for the entrepreneurs to travel to Boston for the capstone session at Northeastern. This year, because of the ongoing war in the region, more than half the entrepreneurs could only attend by Zoom.

"You are still under missiles with this war raging outside, and we hope it will be over soon," Grinstein says at the start of a recent class. He then pivots to the day's lesson, which happens to be about negotiation and rebuilding trust when things become tense or adversarial, an especially apt lesson for these entrepreneurs.

But that's as close as 50:50 gets to any specific instruction on cross-the-divide collaboration. Unlike other coexistence programs, there are no dialog workshops or trust-building exercises. Grinstein says that just happens organically.

"The elephant is obviously in the room, so we're not ignoring it," Grinstein says. "But what I want is to see the Israelis and Palestinians develop friendships that transcend the business, and then naturally you will have coffee with your partners and you might be in a better position – after you build trust, after you work together — to have conversations that are tough and challenging."

Still a relatively small program, 50:50 has taken on some 320 participants since it began. But Grinstein says the relationships they forge have significant ripple effects on friends, and family, as well as on the Northeastern undergraduates who are part of his class, and work as interns for the start-ups.

Senior Alexa Garcia, says just watching the entrepreneurs working together, laughing and teasing each other, was a lightbulb moment for her.

"Sometimes it's so easy to forget that they're on such different sides of a conflict because they seem like such good friends, like the banter is crazy," she says. "A lot of times it's just completely out of my mind that they are on two different sides of conflict."

Garcia and two other students who stopped to talk after class say they each started the semester with a clear leaning toward either the Israelis or Palestinians. But that changed, they say, as they got to know the entrepreneurs personally and came to understand the hardships suffered by both sides, like when team meetings were delayed because a Palestinian was stuck at a checkpoint, or an Israeli had to run to a bomb shelter.

All three say their views have now shifted toward the middle.

"Both sides have been through so much, both have done right, both have done wrong," says Garcia. "The more I learn, there's no side for me."

A 'hippie heart' and a 'capitalist brain'

The 50:50 session in Boston ends with a Shark Tank-style chance for the teams to pitch their ventures to potential investors and hope an investor will bite, or at least offer some useful feedback.

For their part, investors grill the entrepreneurs about not only their ideas, but also their partnerships; they're investing in a team as much as a product. And while some see the collaborations as inherently risky, others see them as an asset – at least potentially.

"I always say I have a hippie heart and a capitalist brain," says Brian Abrams, founder of B Ventures, one of the investors who listened to the pitches. "My hippie heart loves this kind of collaboration. My capitalist brain insists it makes business sense."

In a best-case scenario, Abrams says, the Israeli-Palestinian partnerships could create a "halo-effect" around a brand, helping a start-up to build momentum.

"The collaboration builds the brand, attracts other people, helps them get bigger, and at best that becomes a virtuous cycle," Abrams says.

Ultimately, the case could be made that startups run by these unlikely co-founders could actually be safer investments, says Tomer Cohen, Co-Founder and Director of Tech2Peace, a bridge-building program similar to 50:50 for younger participants. 

"If the entrepreneurs have managed to come together in spite of the political reality, it actually says a lot about them as individuals, that they will be more resilient and can overcome most of the challenges that [entrepreneurs] face in early-stage ventures," he says.  

So far, Grinsteen says, 50:50 ventures are beating the odds. It's still early for many, but of the roughly 55 start-ups, about a half are still in the game.

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

When Celestina Castillo filled out the ethnicity forms at her children’s school, she’d always check Latino and Native American. After all, the family is proud of both its heritages.

But because of a loophole in the state’s data collection system, checking Latino or Hispanic meant that her children’s Native American identity was not counted at all, and they would not receive the extra services they’re entitled to. When Castillo learned of this, she stopped checking the Latino box altogether

According to the arcane way California counts its 5.8 million students, students who say they are Hispanic and Native American get counted as solely Hispanic. Native American students who also identify as another race, such as Black, white or Asian, are counted as “two or more races,” not Native American.

The problem affects all multiracial students, but it’s especially pronounced among Native Americans because the majority are multiracial. It’s resulted in an undercount of Native American students by as much as 90%, advocates said.

“If someone is Black, or Asian, or white, they’re counted that way,” said Castillo, a director of a college learning center who lives in Los Angeles. “Why does it not count if someone is Native American? That’s not OK. It feels like erasure.”

More services, fewer stereotypes

Last year California schools said they had 24,822 Native American students, but the actual number may be as high as 156,000, according to an Assembly report on a new measure, Assembly Bill 1581, that seeks to fix the problem. If those students were identified, they’d be entitled to cultural services and other programs that could help them succeed in school.

A more accurate count could also change the public perception of Native Americans generally, according to Assemblymember James Ramos, the San Bernardino Democrat who authored the bill. Instead of being thought of as rare or even extinct, the public could see that Native Americans are everywhere, Ramos said.

“We’ll start to see the true picture of Native Americans in California,” said Ramos, a member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe. “Native American students should be able to stand up in the classroom and say who they are and be proud of it.”

Changes in the U.S. Census

There’s a long history of the government marginalizing Native Americans in California, particularly in schools. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, not long after 90% of California’s Native American population was murdered or killed by disease, the federal government forced thousands of Native American children in California into boarding schools, where they were forced to speak English and abandon their cultures.

Things started to change in 1970 when the U.S. Census Bureau started improving the way it counted Native Americans. Now, Native Americans can write in their tribal affiliation or list themselves as multiracial, and still be counted as Native American. Although Native Americans are still undercounted more than any other ethnic group, the census changes resulted in a tenfold increase in the official number of Native Americans in the U.S. In 1960, Native Americans only made up .3% of the population. In 2020 they were almost 3%.

The improved census data also revealed that California has more Native Americans than any other state. More than 760,000 people in California identify as Native American, with most living in urban areas like Los Angeles.

Ramos’ bill would allow Native American students to write in the name of their tribe on school forms and identify as Native American plus another race, if applicable. The hope is to give a more comprehensive, more nuanced view of California’s Native American student population, allowing them to get extra services regardless of their biracial identity. So far, the bill has no opposition.

‘We’re in the modern world, too’

Shannon Rivers, who works on education issues for the Los Angeles-based California Native Vote Project, said an accurate count of Native Americans is essential to dispel stereotypes and bring public awareness to issues affecting Native American communities.

“In the eyes of many Americans, there’s still this image of Native American people from the past, from the 1800s,” said Rivers, who is a member of the Akimel Oʼodham tribe in Arizona. “That history is important, but we’re in the modern world, too. We’re doctors, lawyers, scientists, artists, educators.”

He’s hopeful that Ramos’ bill will improve conditions generally for Native American students in California schools. With more accurate student counts, schools could get more federal and state funding to provide extra services, such as tutoring, to Native American children. More schools could host events and curriculum centered on Native American history and culture.

When Ramos was growing up in San Bernardino, he remembers staring at the ethnicity form at school and not knowing what bubble to fill. His mother was Native American but she was labeled “white” on her birth certificate. His father, also Native American, was labeled “Hispanic.”

“Were we white or Latino? I didn’t know. We had to accept whatever the school told us we were,” Ramos said. “I’d go home and ask, ‘Are we Caucasian?’ That started a whole other conversation. It was confusing.”

Castillo, a descendent of the Tohono O'odham tribe in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, said that as a child, she thought everyone was Native American. But when she started school she realized that very few people identified as she did, and worse, it was stigmatized.

Years later, she saw her own children singled out as oddities. One day her son, who had long hair, was dressed for a Native American dance and another child pointed and said, “Look, mom, it’s an Indian!”

“My son felt like a dinosaur or a unicorn, like we didn’t exist,” Castillo said.

By leaving the ethnicity question blank on school forms, Castillo knew it meant her children would not receive extra services they’re entitled to, either at the charter school they attend or through Los Angeles Unified.

“That angered me,” Castillo said. “I’m hoping that this bill will help make Native students visible to local and state education policy makers.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

President Donald Trump's plans to close the U.S. Department of Education have run headlong into an awkward reality: The agency does important work that still needs doing.

After losing roughly half its staff in last year's big reduction-in-force, the department's student loan office is in a hiring boom. The Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) is adding around 380 new workers, according to internal documents obtained by NPR.

FSA is the central nervous system of the nation's $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio. It manages everything from communications with the nation's 43 million borrowers to repayment plans to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

In April, FSA held an internal all-staff meeting in which employees were told that FSA has 731 full-time equivalent staff (FTEs) — roughly half the staff it had prior to the current Trump administration (1,440) — and that it "needs to hire an additional 334 FTEs to meet our target." That's according to the documents NPR obtained, which were prepared for this meeting.

The documents also show FSA has already hired 52 new workers since September.

"What these job postings confirm is what we've known all along: Our jobs matter," says Rachel Gittleman, a former FSA staffer who is now president of AFGE Local 252, which represents department employees. "And [our jobs] are needed in order for our federal student loan system to function adequately for borrowers."

When asked to explain the hiring in light of last year's mass firings, Ellen Keast, the department's press secretary for higher education, responded: "Returning education to the states and breaking up the federal education bureaucracy does not mean that critical programs won't continue."

News of the hiring at FSA was first reported by Politico.

Keast says none of these new FSA hires are former employees returning to their old jobs.

Still, Gittleman says, the jobs themselves haven't changed much.

"All of the jobs that we have seen postings for since September of last year can be traced to a job that was terminated or, in a certain few scenarios, a job that was subject to a deferred resignation or retirement program," Gittleman says.

It's unclear what the cost will be to recruit, hire and train these new employees.

FSA certainly has a lot to juggle: rolling out new limits on student loans plus two new repayment plans. That's on top of important work that's fallen by the wayside. An investigation from the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that, right before last year's cuts, FSA stopped reviewing the accuracy of loan servicers' records and recordings of borrower calls.

In a public appearance last year, Education Secretary Linda McMahon acknowledged that, in some areas, the overall reduction-in-force at her agency had gone too far: "You always just want to cut fat. … Sometimes you cut into the muscle and you cut a little too deep. And we've brought some people back. Not a lot, but we did find that we cut a little bit deep."

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is another example. There, deep cuts were made, stalled by the courts and eventually reversed as OCR struggled to process civil rights complaints.

That unnecessary back-and-forth at OCR, according to a separate GAO investigation, ended up costing taxpayers between $28.5 million and $38 million.

Aren't student loans moving to the Treasury Department?

This hiring spree at the Education Department comes as McMahon has trumpeted 10 new interagency agreements intended to offload the department's work to other federal agencies, including moving FSA responsibilities to the Treasury Department.

In a March letter explaining the need for the Education Department to partner with Treasury, McMahon wrote, "For too long, Americans have shouldered the consequences of poor leadership and persistent mismanagement of our federal student aid portfolio. Today's actions reclaim integrity and accountability for you, the American people."

But this hiring suggests it will still be Education Department employees doing the work of the Education Department. In her statement to NPR, Keast said as much — that the agreement with Treasury is for "FSA to continue managing and improving delivery of these programs."

This confusion over who's doing what came up in a recent Senate hearing, when McMahon told lawmakers that, in the case of an agreement with the Labor Department, "it is the same people from the Department of Education that are at the Department of Labor. … It's dealing with the same people that you've known at the Department of Education that are located somewhere else."

McMahon's comments befuddled Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat.

"You are sending Department of Education employees to work at other agencies to administer the same programs from different buildings," Baldwin said, incredulous.

NPR spoke with another former FSA staffer who was laid-off last year. They did not want to be identified because they are in the process of applying for one of these new jobs that, they say, closely resembles the job they were doing until last year's broad reduction-in-force.

"We just want our jobs. We took an oath to serve the public, and that's what we want to do."

The former FSA staffer noted one difference with the application process this time:

There is a new series of questions about an applicant's commitment to the Constitution, improving government efficiency and one question that has already triggered a lawsuit: "How would you help advance the President's Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?"

"I feel as though they want you to show loyalty to this administration," the former staffer says.

Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

County staff published the proposal in a board agenda last week.

The academy has offered a high school, therapeutic services and life skills training since 2001. Changes in foster care have led to fewer students and less state and federal funding. There are about 40 students there now, and its $18 million annual budget is mostly paid for with local funds.

County staff spent three months gathering public input on the future of the campus. Most participants agreed that the residential program should end if they can’t increase enrollment, said Alfredo Guardado, director of the County’s Office of Child and Family Well-Being.

“Discussions highlighted declining youth numbers, limited regional partnerships and funding as major barriers to expansion,” he told the board on Wednesday. “This led to a consensus that without a larger youth population, the academy cannot remain sustainable as a residential campus in its current form.”

On Monday, advocates for the school said they wanted a chance to respond to the proposed closure.

“This is about whether decisions impacting vulnerable young people are made with them, or simply made for them,” said Shane Harris, a civil rights activist who graduated from San Pasqual Academy.

Harris asked that the board continue its public engagement process for another 90 days.

“Slow this process down,” Harris said. “Come back with recommended actions in 90 days. Expand the public outreach sessions. Listen to the foster youth, the alumni.”

On Wednesday, Supervisor Jim Desmond said he wants to discuss the long-term plan for the campus before deciding what to do with the residential program.

“I agree that there should be some sort of a pause before starting the unwinding,” he said. “What I would like to see from staff is, what’s the plan? What's the big, overall plan before we start winding anything down?”

The Board of Supervisors directed staff to continue the public engagement process and report back within 90 days. They said it should include input from current students.

“The potential for closure of the academy must be included in these discussions,” the amended agenda item read.

The board directed staff to update them on other potential uses for the campus within a year.

Glendale Community College's commencement ceremonies hit a snag just as students were walking across the stage to get their diplomas last week. The wrong names were being read aloud at the ceremony, just outside Phoenix. Some of the graduates' names didn't even get read.

The college's president, Tiffany Hernandez, tried to explain the problem. "We're using a new AI system as our reader," she said, leading to loud boos from the audience. (In a statement, the college blamed technical issues and said it had apologized to students for the experience.)

Other commencement speakers who have brought up the sweeping changes that artificial intelligence is driving are also facing boos from the Class of 2026.

Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield described AI to the graduating class of the University of Central Florida on May 8 as "the next industrial revolution."

The boos started almost immediately.

"OK, I struck a chord," said Caulfield.

Graduating students at Middle Tennessee State University booed when record executive Scott Borchetta told them at their May 9 commencement ceremony, "AI is rewriting production as we sit here." Borschetta responded to the boos with: "Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool." As the booing continued, he added, "Then do something about it. It's a tool. Make it work for you."

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was repeatedly booed by University of Arizona graduates at their commencement on May 15, including when he said, "The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence."

ChatGPT was released in 2022, when many of this year's undergraduates were just starting college. Many have embraced AI for good and for ill, whether to build businesses or use it to cheat.

But despite – or perhaps because of - those experiences, many graduates feel those boos are justified.

"I think my gut reaction was I would be one of those people in the crowd booing," said Maggie Simmons, who will attend her own graduation ceremony at the University of Denver next month.

She told NPR she is concerned AI is hurting the planet and harming Black and minority communities. AI language models have been found to reinforce systemic racism and data centers needed to power AI systems have had a disproportionate impact on minority neighborhoods.

"The future should be these people in this room that are earning their degree and now going out into the workforce," said Simmons, who studied molecular biology and Spanish to prepare to become a pediatrician one day. "We should be celebrating them and their brains, not some artificial intelligence that in the future is going to take their jobs and especially without regulation."

Kareen Gill, a recent graduate of American University with a political science degree thinks a lot of her generation is feeling pessimistic about AI.

"I think at the beginning we were excited about it and it was this cool thing, 'Oh, I can write an essay for you,' but now like, we don't want that anymore and we don't want it messing with our job prospects and messing with the jobs that we've worked for years — so hard for four years — to kind of be eligible for," Gill said.

One immediate impact Gill said she has noticed is fewer internships and entry level positions doing things like answering phones because AI is replacing some of those jobs.

"So we're seeing that firsthand and we're seeing how much it's disadvantaging us," said Gill. "But I don't think that older generations are necessarily in our shoes in that way. It's not really going to impact their future on the rest of their adulthood in the same way."

Indeed, a March poll from Quinnipiac University showed that there are generational differences in how concerned Americans are about AI taking jobs

"Gen Z, despite being more familiar with AI, is the most pessimistic about jobs, with 81% saying that AI will decrease job opportunities," said Chetan Jaiswal, an associate professor of computer science and associate chair of the Department of Computing at Quinnipiac who also worked on the poll.

Jaiswal said that the poll showed that Americans overall are more concerned and less excited about AI as the technology's impacts are becoming more evident.

"People are not rejecting AI, but people are asking questions now since the initial AI fever is gone," Jaiswal said.

That point was echoed by Gill, the recent AU graduate, who said her generation's concerns about AI go far beyond getting their first jobs.

"How they're making billionaires richer and depleting our environment has really opened our eyes to the ripple effects of AI," she said.

Indeed, Quinnipiac's poll found only 5% of Americans feel AI development is being led by people or organizations that represent their interests.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Editor's note: NPR uses only the first names of minors in this story because it discusses their learning disabilities and placement in special education.

BAY POINT, Calif. — The sun would just be rising when teacher Mary Acebu began her days. She'd blast music on the way to work to get energized and get to her classroom by 6:30 to prepare for her students' arrival at 8. Often, it'd be dark by the time she headed home, sometimes with paperwork in tow.

Like so many special education teachers around the country, this was Acebu's life for much of the 10 years she's been teaching at Riverview Middle School, in this small, unincorporated northern California town.

"I don't do that anymore," she says with a laugh.

That's because Acebu has been experimenting with artificial intelligence for the last two years to get through paperwork more quickly and says it's helped her instead use precious time for student interaction. "I have time to talk to the kiddos and really build those relationships," she says, "instead of sitting here in front of my computer."

For years, schools nationwide have struggled with hiring and retaining special educators. In the 2024-25 school year, 45 states reported special education teacher shortages, and staff turnover is worse in schools that largely serve low-income students, like Riverview.

Some special educators say part of what makes them feel overworked is legally required paperwork layered on top of regular teaching duties. Acebu is one of a growing number of those teachers around the nation using AI to help speed up that paperwork — including for writing individualized education programs (IEPs). Educators and families maintain these detailed documents that outline goals and services students need to meet those goals at school.

According to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), 57% of special education teachers polled nationwide said they used AI to help develop individualized plans for their students in the 2024-25 school year. That's up from 39% the previous school year.

Along with the survey results, the CDT warned of privacy, legal and ethical risks around using AI. Other research, however, including from the University of Virginia (UVA) and the University of Central Florida (UCF), has shown that when used appropriately, AI can help special education teachers craft IEPs of equal or higher quality than when teachers produce them alone.

And the time saved can benefit students, too. "The more face time a student with a disability has with a teacher, that often yields better outcomes for them, both educationally, functionally — just across the board," says Olivia Coleman, a researcher and professor at UCF who has been studying the role of AI in special education.

Acebu says that rings true in her classroom. She points out King, one of her eighth graders, as an example. "He was a non-reader, beginning of seventh grade. He's reading now." That, for Acebu, is the point of IEPs — to put what's on paper into practice for her students. She says that is only possible with intentional, hands-on work in the classroom.

What IEPs are and why they matter

Every seventh and eighth grader in Mary Acebu's class learns differently — some work independently, some in pairs, others with headphones on and yet others with speech-to-text technology. Those differences are captured in each child's IEP, a document required by federal law for each of the over 8 million students with disabilities in this country.

Every IEP includes annual goals tailored to each student's present needs, but importantly, "also where you want them to go within the next year," says Danielle Waterfield, Coleman's research partner at UVA.

Both Coleman and Waterfield say while many teachers report feeling bogged down by the work that goes into developing IEPs, teachers also recognize they are a necessary tool for students with disabilities to get a quality education.

Acebu says that to develop those goals, teachers must know each student's learning style intimately. "The key term is 'individualized.' No two kids are the same," she says. For special educators, the process involves hours of meetings and a deep knowledge of complex education law and policy.

It used to take Acebu around 45 minutes to develop three or four IEP goals per student. She points to a big, blue binder at least 5 inches thick on her bookshelf that contains California's education standards. "It used to be flipping through all those pages," to find the right standard to match unique student goals, she says.

Then came AI.

Using AI — with a 'human touch' 

A couple of years ago, Acebu began taking courses on how to safely and effectively use AI. Around the same time, her district, Mt. Diablo Unified, entered agreements with companies that offer education-focused AI tools including MagicSchool AI and Google. They promise to protect sensitive student data, a primary concern for those who warn against the risks of using AI in schools. A growing number of districts are adopting such products, though only a few states have official AI education policies.

Recently, using a district-vetted tool, Acebu customized chatbots for her school and trained them on state standards, assessments and other special education data. She now uses her "little assistants" for a wide range of tasks, from creating personalized worksheets to developing IEP goals.

And then, she says, "you're double-checking everything. Like you have to put that human touch, that's the final step."

In their research, Coleman and Waterfield found special education teachers nationwide are using AI to help write IEP goals, track student progress, synthesize data and create differentiated learning materials, among other things.

Acebu is uniquely equipped to use tech-tools: She just earned her doctorate in instructional technology and is on her district's AI task force, which is developing an official AI policy.

Some of Acebu's less tech-savvy colleagues, however, were skeptical, including Paul Stone, who has been a special educator at Riverview for 22 years.

Then the number of students he serves shot up.

"I don't want to say it's killing me, but it has put a huge stressor on my mental health and my life," Stone says of his work this year. "It would be kind of nice if there were two jobs, like one paperwork job and one working with the kids."

So, a few weeks ago, after a tutorial from Acebu, he gave her chatbot a shot. He was surprised by the results.

"It's an amazing time-saver so far," he says. Stone has used AI for a number of things including producing simple summaries of complicated data to present to parents at IEP meetings. "I mean, it's not like 'that's it, I'm done.' I still have to go through and check it all."

He and Acebu both say it could help them, and other educators, avoid burnout. Yet, Ariana Aboulafia, who was the lead author of CDT's report, calls AI tools "a Band-Aid" for special education teachers who feel overworked.

Using AI in special education — with guardrails

Band-Aid or not, more teachers are using AI around the country. There are a litany of concerns about its use, especially in special education, which is highly regulated. "Student privacy is number one," says Acebu. "Don't put information there that's gonna identify your students." CDT's Aboulafia adds that while the risks around privacy may be reduced if a school is using a vetted vendor, data breaches could still make that information vulnerable.

But not all teachers are using district-approved tools. Coleman, Waterfield and CDT's research all found that educators around the country are using AI both formally and informally — from free consumer platforms like ChatGPT and Claude to district-approved tools like MagicSchool AI, Google Gemini and Playground IEP, among others. To help teachers navigate this complicated landscape, Waterfield and Coleman developed a "decision tree" for ethical AI use.

Another consideration is the fact that AI models can be biased, including against people with disabilities, says Aboulafia, who leads the Disability Rights in Technology Policy Project at CDT. In addition, she worries AI models built on pattern recognition are, "to a certain extent, inherently incompatible with a process that legally requires individualization."

Aboulafia is most concerned about the 15% of teachers CDT's survey found have been relying entirely on AI to develop IEPs. There must always be a "human in the loop," she says.

Acebu, who happens to be her district's teacher of the year, says these days, she comes to class just 30 minutes before her students, and leaves just after the last bell. This has improved her work-life balance and the quality of her teaching.

King, the eighth grader in her class who has evolved into a confident reader, also goes to math class now without any additional support.

"That's the dream of every special educator," she says, beaming. "But guess what? That takes a lot of hard work."

AI tools, Acebu says, have given her more time for that kind of hard work.

Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

A coalition of 24 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday challenging a Trump administration rule that limits access to federal student loans for borrowers earning a graduate degree in several popular, healthcare-related fields.

"Higher education is expensive, and our health care system is already under immense strain," New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. "This rule will shut talented people out of critical professions and leave communities with fewer health care providers they desperately need."

At issue is a pair of complex changes that, taken together, drew the ire of the American Nurses Association and triggered Tuesday's lawsuit.

First, Republicans passed new limits on graduate student loans as part of last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The law does not change limits for undergraduate borrowers, including those attending undergraduate nursing programs, but it dramatically scales back how much graduate students can borrow. Previously, grad students could borrow up to the cost of their program, but the new limits cap annual borrowing for most at $20,500 with a total limit of $100,000.

These limits are legal, if controversial.

Arizona, California, North Carolina, Kentucky and Nevada are among the states that joined the lawsuit, which focuses on a rule that essentially outlines an exemption to the limits.

In implementing the changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Trump administration has scaled back the types of graduate degrees that qualify as "professional" and for which students can borrow up to $50,000 a year and $200,000 overall. It is limiting those exempted programs to 11 categories: chiropractic, clinical psychology, dentistry, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, podiatry, theology and veterinary medicine. Nursing, physical therapy and nurse anesthesia are some of the many healthcare-related programs excluded from that short list of professional degrees.

A press release announcing the lawsuit argues that the Trump administration "issued a final rule unlawfully narrowing" the pre-existing federal definition of a professional degree. It says, "The rule imposes new restrictions not enacted by Congress, leaving many health care and other professional degree programs unable to qualify for the higher loan limits."

What's more, in the lawsuit itself, the plaintiffs point out that the department's list of professional degree examples "was taken from a regulation that had not been changed since the 1950s, a time when graduate programs in nursing and other healthcare professions barely existed."

Late last year, in a fact-sheet titled "Myth vs. Fact," the Education Department noted that these new loan caps "are limited to graduate programs and have no impact on undergraduate nursing programs, including four-year bachelor's of science in nursing degrees and two-year associate's degrees in nursing. 80% of the nursing workforce does not have a graduate degree."

Still, last month, when the Trump administration finalized its rule, the American Nurses Association said it was "profoundly dismayed."

"This Department of Education has chosen to make it harder for nurses to advance their education and their careers," Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association, said in a statement.

She continued: "Make no mistake, this is not a technicality or a footnote. This rule will be felt in real communities, for example, in rural areas where nurse practitioners, midwives, and nurse anesthesiologists are often the only providers of core care services."

In a February fact sheet about the new limits, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing warned, under the rule, nursing students "could be forced to seek high-interest private loans or abandon advanced practice education."

In a study of the new limits, Preston Cooper of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute downplayed the impact: "The rhetoric around new loan limits for nursing programs does not match the reality. The new caps will affect only a small number of programs charging exorbitant prices."

Nevertheless, the bipartisan blowback to the department's rule has put Education Secretary Linda McMahon on the defensive.

Last week, appearing before the House education committee, McMahon was asked by Republican Rep. Randy Fine of Florida: "Does it make sense for us to take a field where we have real shortages and create a situation where we may not be able to create the [healthcare workers] we need, where we already don't have enough?"

McMahon offered two arguments in defense of these new loan limits and the department's controversial rule. First, that the cost of most advanced nursing degrees, for example, would still fall within or near the new caps and that undergraduate nursing programs will not be affected.

Second, she argued that these caps are intended to force colleges to lower their prices.

"It is our overall goal to bring down the cost of college and education," McMahon told Fine. "And I do think that, relative to the shortages we're having, if we can bring down the cost for nurses in schools, we can get more students to apply."

The challenge for McMahon – and for borrowers – is waiting to see if schools actually do as she hopes and lower their costs. If they don't, the secretary likely has more tough questions ahead.

Copyright 2026 NPR

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Until last month, California was poised to join nearly a dozen other states that ban cell phones in K-12 schools. But under pressure from school boards and administrators, lawmakers scaled back a bill that would have required such a blanket ban.

“I was disappointed, but I take the long view on this,” said Torrance Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, an author of the bill. “There’s still a growing global concern that too much cell phone use has detrimental effects on students.”

The bill, AB 1644, builds on an existing law in California that requires schools to limit, if not outright ban, students’ cell phone use during the school day. A slew of studies have shown that cell phone use is a serious distraction for students that affects their mental health, social-emotional development and ability to concentrate in class.

Confusing and unnecessary legislation?

Muratsuchi’s bill would have required all schools to draw up policies banning students from using cell phones while they’re on campus or on a school-related trip. School board and school administrator groups opposed the bill because they said a “one-size-fits-all” policy undermines districts’ ability to enact their own rules suited to their own specific students’ needs.

They also argued that the bill conflicts with the existing law that requires schools to come up with policies limiting cell phones on campus. Those policies are supposed to go into effect in July. Having two laws on the issue would be confusing for school staff and may invalidate the policies they’d already been working on, they said.

“AB 1644 creates a ‘do-over’ just one year (after the previous law passed), creating unnecessary frustration and confusion,” the Association of California School Administrators wrote to the Assembly Education Committee.

In response to those complaints, lawmakers removed high schools from the ban.

Outcomes in Contra Costa and Los Angeles

Many school districts in California, including Los Angeles Unified, have already banned cell phones. A recent study cast doubt on whether cell phone bans have any impact on test scores, attendance or other measures of student success, but individual districts say the policies have made a difference.

Mount Diablo Unified, in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Contra Costa County, has seen improvements since banning cell phones. In a presentation to the school board, teachers said students are more focused in the classroom, have livelier discussions and conversations, fight less and don’t get “riled up” about social media posts.

At Northgate High School in Walnut Creek, reports of harassment fell 33% and bullying dropped 50% since the district banned cell phones.

The only complaints, according to the presentation, were that students didn’t have access to their phone cameras to take pictures of assignments and that locking up students’ phones cut into classroom time. The authors of the report also said some students found ways around the ban.

‘All these zombies’

Rishaan Marwaha, a high school freshman from Newport Beach, was so fed up with cell phones he testified at the Assembly Education Committee hearing last month to urge lawmakers to pass AB 1644.

“Tech companies are making all this money off students’ phone addiction,” he said. “It’s not a fair fight because students are a vulnerable population. … School should be a place for learning.”

Marwaha said he was a phone addict himself. He would spend hours scrolling through Instagram reels, “when I could have been doing things I actually like, like playing basketball or going to the gym.”

He eventually removed Instagram from his phone, but saw his classmates suffering from the same addiction.

“I’d walk through school and it felt like all these zombies,” he said. “Some people were so addicted, they’d make up excuses to go to the bathroom just so they could look at their phones.”

He was disappointed the bill got scaled back, but he’s hopeful the state will enact a high school cell phone ban at some point. After all, he said, “in the past people managed without cell phones OK. I think we’ll be fine.”

This is Muratsuchi’s third bill related to schools and cell phones, each inching closer to a total ban. The previous two cell-phone-related bills were enacted into law, and he believes this one will pass, as well, now that it’s been amended.

“I hope this is part of an ongoing movement to recognize that technology can provide benefits as well as harms,” said Muratsuchi, a candidate for California schools superintendent. “We need to have responsible regulations to make sure we’re helping students navigate technology successfully.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The superintendent of Albert Einstein Academies is “on inactive status until further notice.” That’s according to a letter board president Maria Ortega sent to families and staff on Tuesday.

The Albert Einstein Academies include an elementary school in South Park and a middle school in Grant Hill.

David Sciarretta became superintendent in 2017 after serving as Einstein’s executive director and middle school principal, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Ortega wrote that the board could not provide further detail because of its legal obligation to protect employees’ privacy.

“Nevertheless, the Board would like to assure AEA stakeholders that Board actions are guided first and foremost by what is lawful and in the best interests of the School, its students, and stakeholders,” she wrote.

In March, Voice of San Diego reported that the board was investigating Sciarretta’s school-issued credit card spending. Late last year, families and staff questioned the firing of longtime elementary school principal Greta Bouterse.

Parents have also had concerns about the charter schools’ German language program, Voice of San Diego reported. The San Diego Unified School District, which authorizes its charter, has found problems with both its English language learner instruction and English/German language immersion program.

In December, San Diego Unified approved Einstein’s request to remove its German immersion program, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Einstein’s website cites limited availability of German teachers and fewer native German-speaking students.

In a Dec. 22 message, Sciarreta wrote that the school year had “included significant change at AEA.”

“Schools, like families, grow and evolve,” he wrote. “With that growth can come transitions that feel challenging or uncertain at times. Throughout it all, our families and staff have shown patience, resilience, and a shared commitment to ensuring students remain the center of every decision we make.”

Jose Diaz, principal of AEA Charter Middle School, will be interim superintendent, Ortega said.

“Given his background, the Board is confident that Dr. Diaz will fulfill the responsibilities of the Interim Superintendent role with fidelity,” she wrote.

FORT COVINGTON, N.Y. — Rumors spread on social media over the winter: School kids with disabilities in the Salmon River Central School District, including Akwesasne Mohawk children, were being confined by special education teachers in wooden boxes. Sarah Konwahahawi Herne was devastated.

"It was so unfathomable that our children were seeing these boxes and hearing children screaming in these boxes," said Herne, a parent and a member of the tribal community. "I cried, I threw up and I immediately grabbed my laptop and said, What are we going to do?"

Local school officials later confirmed that at least two boxes had been built and used by staff in November and December of 2025. That disclosure sent more shockwaves through this region of small Upstate New York towns just south of the U.S.-Canada border, which includes the sprawling St. Regis Mohawk Reservation.

Officials with New York state's education department have now quietly issued an official order requiring sweeping reforms in the district.

According to the report obtained by NPR, the state's investigation found at least five elementary-age students with disabilities were confined in a "wooden box for a timeout."

"They were subjected to seclusion when they were placed in 'stations' with the door held shut," states the May 8 order. The report, which offers no details about the children's ages or ethnicity, found that "station" was the district's euphemism for "a wooden box." It also concludes that parents of children held in the boxes weren't notified, a violation of state regulations.

According to the education department, teachers and other school personnel should have been "prohibited from using corporal punishment, aversive interventions, and seclusion against a student."

That order, known as a compliance order plan, hasn't been released publicly and doesn't recommend dismissal of staff who created and carried out the policy.

In a statement sent to NPR, the New York education department said "by law, personnel decisions are a matter of local control."

Many parents say the controversy echoes a troubling school history

When existence of the boxes was first revealed in a social media post in December, the school district responded by placing staff members on administrative leave and removing the wooden crates, while initially describing them as "calming stations."

New York Governor Kathy Hochul called the district's behavior "highly disturbing" and ordered an investigation by the state education department. Parents and community leaders also organized protests at local board of education meetings, which have continued over the last five months.

According to local school officials, roughly two-thirds of students enrolled in the Salmon River district are Mohawk. Parents interviewed by NPR said they believe one of the boxes was installed in a classroom at the St. Regis Mohawk Elementary School, operated by the district.

The small school is located on tribal land in nearby Akwesasne, NY. Herne described the practice as an echo of past abuses in government schools that ravaged Native communities.

"For our children to be placed in boxes just as they would have been in residential schools, it was so heartbreaking and disgusting to me," she said.

Native children across the U.S. were forced into federally-funded boarding and residential schools for more than a century, practice that ended in 1969. The U.S. government has acknowledged the system was repressive and violent, leading to the deaths of at least a thousand children.

Herne provided NPR with a video recording of a Salmon River board of education meeting held December 22, 2025, where parents repeatedly referenced the history of residential schools. During the gathering, St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Chief Michael Conners described the forced restraint of children as "incomprehensible."

"None of us could believe initially that was true," Conners said. "It was verified that it was and it was defended as legal. Nobody could believe it was legal to have that in our schools, with the intent of using that box on our children."

In that same meeting, T.J. Hathaway, the parent of a child with disabilities, testified that he asked his 8-year-old son about the boxes.

"He explained to us that if you are angry or if you are sad, this is where you go," Hathaway said, noting that the child's grandmother had been sent to a residential school.

Parents say the controversy and pain caused by use of confinement boxes in the district's elementary schools has been heightened and complicated by the fact that some school employees involved in the practice are members of the Akwesasne Mohawk tribal community.

A majority of Salmon River board of education members are also members of the tribal community.

"The fact that these were our own people working in these schools, hurting our children, allowing this to happen, it was so frustrating, so angering," said Chrystalynn Jock, a parent and tribal member whose child attends the St. Regis Mohawk School.

Since use of the boxes was made public, the school district has faced months of upheaval. Two interim superintendents were hired but quickly departed. A third interim leader was appointed in March.

The local board also released findings from its own investigation, while promising changes. "This report gives us a clearer understanding of what happened and where our systems fell short," said Salmon River board of education president Jason Brockway, in a March statement.

Six days after that report was issued, one of the Salmon River special education elementary teachers who had been placed on leave by the district, was arrested by New York state police for allegedly endangering the welfare of a student in May 2025. It's unclear whether that case involves improper confinement.

New leadership and questions about healing

During a Salmon River board of education meeting on Wednesday, board members approved the permanent hiring of Rebecca Stanley as the district's new head of special education. Stanley told board members she has already begun implementing reforms, some with deadlines as early as next month, mandated for by both the local and state investigations.

"This will be quite the undertaking with the timeline that state education has given us," Stanley said.

While the state report has not yet been made public, Stanley confirmed that it includes a long list of violations that require correction, including "the use of seclusion" and "improper physical restraints."

Following Stanley's presentation, local board members asked no questions and made no statements about the report. Speaking after the session, interim superintendent Ben Barkley said the district is committed to change.

"Nothing like this will happen in Salmon River again," Barkley said. "We will be in full compliance with the state education department."

Some parents told NPR they don't believe these reforms go far enough. Herne noted the district has yet to issue a formal apology. She also said the state education department isn't requiring dismissal of "ten to twelve" staff and faculty members involved in approving, constructing and using the wooden boxes.

"I'm not trying to be on a witch hunt, I'm just trying to hold people accountable and make a safer place," Herne said. "If they have to stand up and admit they were wrong, that's what they need to do. That helps us all heal."

Copyright 2026 NPR

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon sparred with Democrats on the House education committee Thursday on a visit to Capitol Hill to defend the Trump administration's new budget proposal.

The lawmakers and education secretary tussled over several key education issues that will affect the lives of millions of Americans, including whether new Republican caps on federal student loans will lower the cost of college, what role the government should play in trying to improve abysmal literacy rates among U.S. students — and whether the U.S. Department of Education should exist at all.

Here are some of the moments that stood out from the hearing.

The end of the Education Department?

Starting with their opening statements, McMahon and the committee's top Democrat, Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, made clear the hearing wasn't just about the U.S. Department of Education's budget for the next fiscal year; it was an existential fight over the department itself.

McMahon's first words to the committee, after the usual thank-you's, were a flag-planting for the department's forceful dissolution.

"The American people elected President Trump with a clear mandate: to sunset a 46-year-old, $3 trillion failed federal education bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., and return authority to where it belongs, to parents, teachers and local leaders," McMahon told lawmakers.

This after Scott, in his opening remarks, told McMahon, "The Trump administration has not returned education to the states, rather it has empowered you to effectively dismantle one of the country's strongest civil rights institutions."

According to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Department of Education has gone from roughly 4,200 employees in 2024 to 2,300 in 2026.

In addition to cutting staff by roughly 45%, the administration has offloaded more than 100 programs and department obligations onto other federal agencies, including many elementary and secondary education programs to the Department of Labor (DOL) and efforts at improving family engagement to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In one of the latest big shifts, in March, the department announced a transition of the nation's massive federal student loan portfolio to the U.S. Treasury Department. By August, remaining department employees will be physically moved from the department's longtime, Washington, D.C., headquarters to a smaller office roughly a block away.

While the dismantling was roundly condemned by the committee's Democrats, Republicans cheered McMahon's efforts during the hearing. "I hope you're the last secretary of education," Republican Rep. Randy Fine of Florida told her, intending it as a compliment, not a critique.

But the dismantling has also gotten… weird. According to internal Education Department documents obtained by NPR, the department's student loan office, which was cut in half by last year's reduction-in-force, is now in the middle of a hiring spree.

The Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) is trying to bring in 334 new staff – a tacit acknowledgement that the previous cuts did serious harm to the office's ability to do its work.

The future of special education oversight

One of the department's most significant responsibilities — overseeing programs and funding for students with disabilities — has not yet been offloaded to another federal agency, in part because of fierce pushback from disability-rights advocates. At one point in the hearing, McMahon said she had met with "twenty-something" disability groups to hear their concerns.

McMahon has explored moving the management of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the country's landmark special education law, to either DOL or HHS, and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, used Thursday's hearing to push for clarity on any potential move.

McMahon said, "We have not yet made a determination of where IDEA services would go."

"Do you plan to transfer the services to another agency? Yes or no," Bonamici shot back.

"Well, eventually, congresswoman, you do know that —"

"Just a yes or no," Bonamici interjected.

But McMahon held firm: "It's not a yes or no answer. I'm sorry. We will be looking to transfer and, first, co-administering these programs with other agencies."

Of all the decisions McMahon has made thus far, moving special education oversight will be one of the most consequential — and controversial — which explains why it hasn't happened yet.

Cutting, rehiring and possibly more cutting at the Office for Civil Rights

McMahon fielded tough questions from Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, about cuts to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which investigates complaints of discrimination in schools based on students' sex, race, national origin, disability and more.

OCR was hit hard in last year's layoffs and firings, with roughly half of the office's staff, including civil rights lawyers, being removed. After the courts intervened, the department under McMahon chose to keep 247 OCR staff on paid administrative leave, rather than allow them to work — a decision a government watchdog says cost taxpayers between $28.5 million and $38 million.

Previous NPR reporting, using public data, captures the effect of the cuts:

• After Trump's 2025 inauguration, OCR reached a resolution agreement in just two racial harassment cases the rest of the year. In 2017, the first year of the first Trump administration, it resolved more than 30.  
• In 2017, the Trump-led OCR reached agreements in roughly 10 times as many disability discrimination cases as it did in 2025.
• And finally, OCR resolved nearly 60 sexual harassment cases and 15 sexual assault cases in 2017. After Trump's second inauguration, the office did not reach a resolution agreement in a single case of school-based sexual harassment or sexual assault for the rest of the year. 
  

In her House testimony, McMahon insisted that "OCR is important" and said she is actively "rehiring attorneys." She has even intimated that she disagreed with the original staffing cuts, telling Takano that the administration "had started that process before I came onboard."

Here Takano pushed back: "They were firing half the staff that you need at OCR, and it took you 10 months to figure out that was a mistake."

Then Takano asked McMahon, if she is rehiring lawyers and fully supports the mission of OCR, why does the department's own budget propose a new 35% cut in funding to the office?

McMahon answered that the budget document "is a floor for hiring. We want to increase those numbers."

A moment later, in the hearing, McMahon said the funding proposal is "not where we want to be."

It's not clear why the administration's budget request to Congress recommends a cut in OCR funding that McMahon does not appear to support. In response to a request for clarification, the Education Department reiterated McMahon's contention that the funding level is a floor, a minimum.

Student loan changes

One subject brought up by Democrats and Republicans was the new limit on federal student loan borrowing that was passed as part of Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The law does not change limits for undergraduate borrowers but dramatically scales back how much graduate students can borrow. They could previously borrow up to the cost of their program, but new limits cap annual borrowing for most grad students at $20,500 with a total limit of $100,000. Only a shortlist of what are labeled professional programs — including medicine, law and dentistry — will be allowed loans up to $50,000 a year and $200,000 overall.

Early in her testimony, McMahon complained that "college costs are just exorbitant. Students are burdened with debt. … We really have to do something to bring down the cost of college."

Specifically, the cost of colleges' graduate programs. Graduate loans make up nearly half of all new loans, even though graduate school students are a much smaller fraction of overall borrowers.

Later in the hearing, Democrats argued these new graduate loan limits would lead to shortages in teaching, social work and nursing.

Fine, the Florida Republican, echoed the concern over a potential shortage of skilled healthcare workers and asked McMahon, "Does it make sense for us to take a field where we have real shortages and create a situation where we may not be able to create the [healthcare workers] we need, where we already don't have enough?"

McMahon offered two arguments in defense of these new loan limits. First, that the cost of most advanced nursing degrees, for example, would still fall within or near the new loan caps and that undergraduate nursing programs will not be affected. Second, she argued that these caps are intended to force colleges to lower their prices.

"It is our overall goal to bring down the cost of college and education," McMahon told Fine. "And I do think that, relative to the shortages we're having, if we can bring down the cost for nurses in schools, we can get more students to apply."

McMahon mentioned that a few colleges have already lowered their prices in response to the caps. Among them is the University of California at Irvine's Flex MBA program.

But the connection between accessibility of federal student loans and school price tags is incredibly complicated, and several economists have told NPR that capping graduate loans, while it may prevent some borrowers from taking on debts they cannot repay, isn't likely to lead to widespread price cuts.

Student achievement

Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York invoked a "literacy and reading crisis in the country" and asked McMahon what she's doing to combat this crisis.

Crisis indeed. A new report out Wednesday, called the Education Scorecard, says U.S. schools have been in a "learning recession" for more than a decade, tracing drops in reading and math scores not to the pandemic but years earlier, to around 2013.

"We have clearly failed our students," McMahon said, noting that "the greatest improvement we have seen in literacy scores… were in those states like Mississippi and Louisiana and Florida who have adopted the science of reading. These are state initiatives, and they originated at the state level."

McMahon was spot-on in celebrating Louisiana especially. According to that new review of student performance, Louisiana is the only state to return to 2019 student performance levels in reading and math both. Alabama also deserves credit for a remarkable turnaround in math.

The Scorecard does, however, suggest that, while Florida has embraced reforms around the science of reading, it is no success story. From 2022 to 2025, Florida ranked 35th out of 35 states in reading growth.

McMahon and several committee Republicans touted the administration's proposed MEGA (Make Education Great Again) grants as a powerful new tool to help states improve literacy.

However, these proposed grants would actually be a funding cut to schools, by consolidating 17 current programs (including for English learners and rural schools) funded at roughly $6.5 billion into a block grant worth less than a third of that: $2 billion.

Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

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MALVERN, Pa. — In a social media era rife with mouthwatering food content, kids will no longer settle for a drab school meal.

"I don't have a TikTok account, but they're telling me, 'Hey, I saw this on TikTok. Can you make this? Can we do this?'" said Nichole Taylor, supervisor of food and nutrition services at the Great Valley School District in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

"I would have never asked my lunch lady to make something special for me. I would've just ate what they told me," she said, adding that the students are "very engaged."

Taylor has been working to refresh the suburban Philadelphia district's meal program since she took over a year and a half ago, trying to balance a desire to cook more fresh food from scratch with budget constraints and a lack of skilled labor.

But now, districts like Taylor's and others across the U.S. are waiting to see whether it will become even more expensive to prepare a meal.

That's because in January, the Trump administration overhauled the national dietary guidelines. Announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., they follow the Make America Healthy Again blueprint, urging Americans to avoid highly processed foods and prioritize "high-quality, nutrient-dense" protein at every meal. Those guidelines form the basis of federal nutrition standards that schools participating in federal meal programs must follow.

Yet many districts rely on processed, premade foods to feed their students, and protein is already the most expensive ingredient on the cafeteria plate, school nutrition experts say.

This year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's reimbursement rate for schools in the contiguous 48 states is about $4.60 per meal for a student who is eligible for a free lunch, according to the School Nutrition Association (SNA). The rate is $4.20 for students eligible for a reduced-price lunch and $0.44 for students who pay full price, SNA said.

Federal and state funding are the largest revenue streams in Taylor's district, and they help pay for everything from staff wages and kitchen equipment to food and utility costs. She said she supports the nutritional goals of the new federal standards but wonders how they'll affect schools already struggling to operate.

"We want to follow the guidelines, because we are that voice that says, 'No, you can eat healthy and still eat really well,'" Taylor said. "But we also have to be realistic and say we need the funding for it."

At the same time, the Trump administration has cut funding programs that allowed schools to buy local food from farmers.

How dietary guidelines can affect schools

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said at a press conference for the updated guidelines in January that she was particularly interested in how they could improve child nutrition.

"Right now, that is going to be the single most important, from my perspective, move forward — is the school lunches and making sure that we're getting the right amount, the best amount and the most nutrient-dense foods into the schools," Rollins said.

Yet some in the medical community have objected to the new food pyramid, specifically the placement of saturated fat sources such as red meat and full-fat dairy at the top. "It does go against decades and decades of evidence and research," Stanford University nutrition expert Christopher Gardner told NPR this year. Gardner was a member of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

Exactly how the government's new dietary guidelines will impact schools is unclear. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) said it is still working to update the nutrition standards it requires of institutions taking part in the National School Lunch Program, which fed 30 million children last year, and the School Breakfast Program. The department said in an email that the new guidelines are a "pivotal step to Make America Healthy Again through real, nutrient-dense foods" and that the guidelines' release "kicks off a multi-year effort" to update the rules of the department's nutrition programs through a formal rule-making process, which will include public comment.

Mara Fleishman, CEO of the Chef Ann Foundation, which works to help schools cook more meals from scratch, applauded the move away from highly processed foods but said the shift wouldn't be easy.

"The conundrum is that often animal protein in school food is one of the most highly processed components," she said. Fleishman used chicken nuggets as an example, which she said appear in some form in just about every school district in the United States.

"The primary chicken nuggets that are served come cooked frozen. So you get it cooked, you put it in your freezer, take it out, put it in the retherm [ovens], put it on the line. And it's got about 35 ingredients in it," she said.

Fleishman said districts that want to cook chicken strips from scratch could make them fresh using six or seven ingredients. "But it's hard, because you go from buying a chicken nugget, which is totally contained," to having to consider the financial, labor and waste implications of cooking it from scratch, she said.

USDA cut funding that helped schools buy local food

At the same time as the Trump administration is urging Americans to eat more "real" food, it has cut funding that enabled schools to buy from local farmers.

In March of last year, the School Nutrition Association reported that the USDA ended the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program (LFS), erasing an estimated $660 million in funding. LFS provided money that schools could use to buy "unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as meat, poultry, fruit, vegetables, seafood, and dairy" from local or regional producers, according to the program's website.

"That was a big loss," said Stephanie Dillard, SNA president and the nutrition director of an Alabama school district, "because we lost the money we could spend on local farmers."

The USDA said in an emailed statement that the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program — as well as the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), which supports feeding programs such as food banks — are being "sunsetted at the end of their performance periods."

The department said that it released more than half a billion dollars in funding through the two programs last year and that, as of March, $100 million remained in LFPA funding and more than $17 million remained in LFS funding for states to use.

The USDA also paused funding from the Patrick Leahy Farm to School grant program for the 2025 fiscal year, which a spokesperson said was in response to Trump's executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in January 2025.

However, the program reopened for the 2026 fiscal year and offered up to $18 million in awards. The department said it "streamlined the Farm to School Grant application process and removed Biden-era DEI components to ensure equal treatment, not preferential treatment, of applicants." Rollins said in a statement that the grants are "one of the best ways we can deliver nutritious, high-quality meals to children, while also strengthening local agriculture."

Schools have long called for more money for meals

For years, education administrators and child nutrition advocates have been saying that school cafeterias — often called the biggest restaurants in town — operate on tight budgets due in part to inadequate reimbursements from the federal government. Federal initiatives such as the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program provide billions of dollars in funding each year to schools across the U.S. to keep their meal programs afloat.

Reimbursement rates are adjusted annually based on the consumer price index, but school nutrition directors say that the increases are not enough and that Congress needs to revisit the reimbursement formula altogether, as meal programs become more expensive to operate.

"It all comes down to funding," said Dillard, of the SNA. "The sky would be the limit if we had the funding. We could cook all day long."

In an SNA survey released in January, nearly 95% of school nutrition directors said they were concerned about the financial sustainability of their programs three years from now.

"The current reimbursement rate isn't even quite enough for the current status quo," said Jennifer Gaddis, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of civil society and community studies who studies school food systems, "let alone to do the holistic transformation that we need in order to make school meals really important engines of public health and economic vitality in our communities."

Additionally, Gaddis said, the heat-and-serve model of the past allowed schools to spend less money by hiring fewer workers for shorter shifts. Preparing meals from scratch would require workers to be present longer and kitchens to be equipped for cooking.

Many school meal programs receive state funding in addition to federal dollars, but the amounts vary. According to SNA, nine states have dedicated state funds to provide universal free school meals.

"If a kid is hungry, they're not studying"

Despite the budget and logistical constraints, more schools are finding ways to expand their efforts to cook meals from scratch.

The Chef Ann Foundation, for example, offers an online database of recipes and guides for districts that want to prepare fresher meals, as well as apprenticeships, fellowships and other programs for nutritional staff.

The Great Valley School District hired a chef in December to help source more local ingredients, expand the district's freshly prepared offerings and train staff members on new kitchen skills. Jenifer Halin, the district's new culinary coordinator, said she found frozen, precut vegetables in the cafeteria kitchen when she arrived. "And I have already transitioned everybody over to cutting fresh vegetables. It's been simple."

Taylor, the district's supervisor of food and nutrition services, has even tried to reformulate some of those meals suggested by students to meet federal nutrition standards, and she said she still hopes to cook more meals from scratch, which would mean giving more staff members full-time status and culinary training. (The cost of cheaper raw ingredients might make the overall financial math even out, she said.)

"I want to be able to offer our students our own muffins, our own French toast sticks," Taylor said, standing in Great Valley High School's walk-in freezer next to boxes of frozen chicken breasts and banana chocolate chip breakfast bars. "I want to be able to produce our own pizza, so that we're not having to buy out from other vendors."

Her efforts have not gone unnoticed by the students.

"It started with like one day randomly they had this grilled cheese and tomato bisque, and it was like ancient-grain bread, and everyone was like, 'It tasted like Panera,'" said Varun Kartick, a Great Valley High School senior.

More new dishes followed. Kartick, who doesn't eat pork or beef, said the vegetables have been fresher and the cafeteria staff often makes entrees vegetarian upon request. On a given day, he may opt for a seasonal chicken wrap or fill up a plate with pasta and vegetables.

"It's been very convenient and very nice to see that change, that we're not disgusted [by the food] or having to pack a lunch," he said. "There's an option that we can have at school."

Among the items on offer in the cafeteria that day were pizza and chicken fingers, as well as avocado toast and a salad made with Pennsylvania sweet potatoes.

Taylor said getting more students to eat breakfast and lunch at school would mean more federal reimbursements that could help her expand the district's nutrition program. But it would also ensure that — most importantly to her — more students are fed.

"If a kid is hungry, they're not studying. They can't learn. They're acting out," Taylor said. "But if you build this into part of their school day to where they feel like this is the norm for them, then you've knocked down that hurdle."

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A UC San Diego program to recruit early-career researchers in the biomedical field has been awarded $5 million from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund, officials announced Tuesday.

The Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program began in 2022 and has allowed UCSD to hire 12 faculty in life sciences disciplines across campus, who collectively have brought in $16 million in new research grants since their arrival, according to a statement from the university.

"Despite the challenges we've faced in the last year related to federal funding, the FIRST program has been a great success," said FIRST principal investigator JoAnn Trejo, professor of pharmacology at UCSD School of Medicine and assistant vice chancellor of health sciences faculty affairs. "This cohort model of faculty recruitment provides a strong foundation of mentorship and early career development for faculty, and we look forward to continuing this important work."

The FIRST program was canceled by the NIH in early 2025 as part of larger federal spending cuts, but reinstated following a multi-state lawsuit.

According to UCSD, one of the key features of the program is its centralized search process for the new faculty hires, which allowed for a "more streamlined and inclusive approach" to faculty recruitment.

"This was a truly cross-campus search," Trejo said. "We involved faculty from across the university, including medicine, pharmacy, engineering, biology, physical and social sciences, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This kind of interdisciplinary collaboration is a hallmark of UC San Diego, and it allowed us to identify and recruit talented faculty who can tackle complex biomedical challenges from multiple angles."

The FIRST program has several initiatives under its umbrella beyond recruitment, including a grant writing course, mentorship training, and a program to "build a more respectful scientific culture."

"Addressing the world's most complex health problems requires a wide range of experience, perspective and creative solutions, and we strive to follow this principle in our faculty recruitment," said John Carethers, vice chancellor for health sciences. "Through the collective impact of the FIRST program, we are strengthening our research community with incredible faculty who are driven to push the boundaries of biomedical science and improve health for all."

Once the initial NIH grant is completed in 2027, Trejo said her goal is to institutionalize the programs developed through FIRST so they can become permanent parts of UCSD.

"Our vision is to make these programs part of UC San Diego's long- term identity," Trejo said. "FIRST has given us the foundation. Now we're working to embed these practices into the fabric of UC San Diego so that every new faculty member has the support they need to thrive from day one until retirement."

Several faculty members hired through FIRST said the experience has been "transformative."

"As a new faculty member, you're often the most junior person in a department, and it's easy to feel isolated," said Melissa Campbell, assistant professor of neurosciences at UCSD School of Medicine. "Because we're all in the same phase of our careers, it's very different from being the lone junior hire. Here, we can talk openly about what we're dealing with and help each other through challenges that are unique to this moment in science."

Adrian Jinich, an assistant professor with a joint appointment in UCSD's Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said the program has shaped his research group.

"I was the first person recruited through FIRST, and thanks to the support network and startup resources, I was able to hire my ideal senior research associate right away," he said. "We were also able to collaborate with campus researchers to build a GPU computing cluster that's now central to our AI-driven infectious disease research. That infrastructure exists because of FIRST."

A report out today shows that big losses in reading and math scores did not begin with the pandemic. Researchers found that they started more than a decade ago. NPR's Cory Turner has more on what they call a learning recession and what some states are doing about it.

CORY TURNER, BYLINE: The report, called the Education Scorecard, comes from researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth. Let's start with that headline about the nation being stuck in a learning recession.

SEAN REARDON: Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic.

TURNER: Stanford researcher Sean Reardon.

REARDON: In fact, you wouldn't really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There's been just a steady kind of decline.

TURNER: Reardon argues this learning recession began around 2013 after a quarter-century of learning gains he calls astonishing.

REARDON: The average fourth-grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth-grader could in 1990.

TURNER: And that matters, Reardon says, because as bad as things are now, it means America's schools have done incredible things before and can do them again. To stop this learning recession, though, we need to know not just when it started but why. Tom Kane at Harvard says there are at least two possible explanations. One, schools stopped worrying about a tough federal law that punished them for low test scores.

TOM KANE: Under No Child Left Behind, school leaders every year had to be nervous the day that their test results were being announced.

TURNER: But Kane says around 2013, that law was essentially abandoned. So that's one theory.

KANE: The other one is the rise in social media, which happened about the same time.

TURNER: Turns out, reading and math scores also started falling as teens' social media use skyrocketed. What really caused the declines, though, it's too early to know. Now, let's jump to the present and some good news. Last year, students in most states showed improvement in math, offering fresh hope for an end to this learning recession. Reading has been a tougher slog, but there's hope there too. The few states that have improved all have something in common.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: C. Cat.

TURNER: They've doubled down on phonics and the science of reading, including Maryland.

KIMBERLY LOWERY: C-L-oud.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS AND KIMBERLY LOWERY: C-L...

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: ...Oud. Cloud.

LOWERY: You guys are super-duper what?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.

LOWERY: Kiss your brain.

TURNER: Baltimore City's schools have made big gains in reading. Last year, teacher Kimberly Lowery helped three-quarters of her kindergarteners become grade-level readers or better. Her top boss, Sonja Brookins Santelises, has been Baltimore City schools CEO for the past decade and says she came in determined to improve the district's approach to literacy.

SONJA BROOKINS SANTELISES: The first thing that it did mean was that we all learn together how young people learn to read.

TURNER: Brookins Santelises decided to move away from an approach known as whole language and toward the science of reading. So she told her literacy staff...

BROOKINS SANTELISES: There are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City.

TURNER: Then during the pandemic, Baltimore students lost far less ground than kids in schools with similar levels of poverty. And by 2022...

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Laughter).

TURNER: The city's reading scores were shooting up.

LOWERY: All righty.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: (Inaudible).

LOWERY: Raymond.

TURNER: Back in Mrs. Lowery's kindergarten class, the kids have the giggles after a fun game of breaking down word sounds. Mrs. Lowery asks them one more time - you guys are super-duper what?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.

TURNER: Smart. Cory Turner, NPR News, Baltimore, Maryland.

(SOUNDBITE OF NAS SONG, "I CAN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

The pandemic-era backslide in math and reading scores for students across the U.S. was not a sudden catastrophe but the continuation of a brutal, decade-long "learning recession" that began years before COVID-19's arrival. That's according to the latest Education Scorecard, an annual deep-dive into student data from The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and Harvard University's Center for Education Policy Research.

The new Scorecard, released Wednesday and in its fourth year, offers several revelations for families, educators and policymakers looking for clarity — and hope — at a time when public education has been blamed and battered for those persistent declines in student performance.

Among the report's takeaways: Most states are finally making gains in math; federal relief dollars likely helped the lowest-income districts mount a hearty comeback; and, while most states have yet to make gains in reading, those that have all made legislative changes to how it's taught in their schools.

Before we dive in, one caveat: The annual Education Scorecard includes data from the vast majority of states and Washington D.C. drawn from their own state tests — as opposed to the Nation's Report Card. But some states were excluded for various reasons, including if their state assessments had changed recently (Illinois, Kansas), if test opt-out rates were too high (New York, Colorado) or if a state didn't publish district-level data with enough detail.

'The learning recession'

For nearly a quarter-century, from 1990 to 2013, math achievement among fourth- and eighth-graders "rose steadily," according to the Scorecard's analysis. So steadily that "the average fourth grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth grader could in 1990. That's enormous progress," says Stanford University's Sean Reardon, one of the Scorecard's authors.

Reading gains weren't quite as eye-popping, but they were gains nonetheless.

These sustained gains "may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about," says Harvard's Thomas Kane, one of the Scorecard's authors. "Racial gaps were narrowing too. We just need to get back on that track."

In short, much was right with America's schools, which makes the decline that began around 2013 "appear more striking and anomalous," the report says.

"Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic," says Reardon. "In fact, you wouldn't really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There's been just a steady kind of decline regardless of the pandemic."

What might have triggered that decline?

The Scorecard's trigger theories

Scorecard researchers offer two possible explanations for the beginning of schools' learning recession:

1. The fade-out of test-based accountability: Remember the much-maligned federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), that took a tough-love approach with schools to improve student performance? The law, implemented in 2003, threatened a host of sanctions, including school closure, if student test scores didn't rise, but its standards were seen by many to be not just unrealistic but unattainable. By 2013, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to free states from the law's consequences. According to the Scorecard, 38 states were granted relief in the 2012-13 school year. Eventually, Congress replaced NCLB with a new federal law that de-emphasized test-based accountability. 

Around 2013, Kane says, "school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement."

While the Scorecard researchers don't draw a direct, causal connection between the declines of test-based accountability and student scores, it's clear that the nation's learning recession began at roughly the same time states and schools stepped back from the punishing consequences of NCLB.

2. Students' social media use: It turns out, 2013 also marks a period of explosive growth in teenagers use of social media. A Pew Research study found that in 2014-15, roughly 1 in 4 teens said they used the internet "almost constantly." By 2022, it was nearly half of teens.

The researchers also point to international testing data that shows that lower-achieving students are the heaviest users of social media. Students who spend more time (7+ hours per day) on social media score below students who spend less (1-3 hours). And this gap, between the highest and lowest performers, began growing before the pandemic, not just in the U.S. but in many other countries too.

The end of the learning recession?

The Scorecard devotes considerable analysis to what's been happening in schools since the end of the pandemic, from 2022 through the spring of 2025. There are signs that the nation's learning recession may be turning around, albeit slowly.

In that span of time, most of the states covered by this year's Scorecard showed students making meaningful improvement in math, with Washington D.C. coming in as the clear winner there. Only five states failed to make gains in math: Georgia, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa.

Reading, though, remains a cause for concern. While D.C., Louisiana, Maryland and five other states did experience meaningful improvement between 2022 and 2025, most states continued to stagnate or, as in Florida, Arizona and Nebraska, further declined.

It's also worth noting, while schools are once again, on average, regaining ground in math and slowly turning the corner in reading, the declines that began around 2013 have been so steep and lasting that only one state, Louisiana, has returned to 2019 performance levels in both subjects.

No state has returned to 2013 levels, according to Reardon.

"It's easy to be sort of doom and gloom," he adds, "but when you look at the period from the '90s through 2013, we made enormous gains. And we actually narrowed achievement gaps between racial groups. That says we can actually improve our schools in ways that also improve equality of opportunity. We just haven't been doing it for the last decade. But we could do it again."

The U-shaped recovery

The Scorecard reveals a fascinating phenomenon in schools from 2022 to 2025: a U-shaped recovery. Meaning, schools with the least amount of poverty, alongside schools with the most poverty, saw similar gains in math and similarly small losses in reading achievement. That's while the schools in the middle of the income spectrum, at the bottom of this U, improved the least in both subjects.

Why? One theory is that the highest-poverty districts got the most help from Congress in the form of federal COVID relief dollars — money they could spend on interventions such as tutoring and summer school. Districts with the lowest poverty rates got little help from the federal government but were already well-positioned financially. It was the middle-income districts that needed more help but didn't qualify for full federal support.

"If it hadn't been for the federal pandemic relief," says Kane, "we estimate there would have been no recovery on average for the highest-poverty districts."

The science of reading effect

There's been an important wild card in the effort to improve students' reading skills: A movement among states to change their approach to teaching reading to young children by embracing the "science of reading." As of March, the Scorecard says, most states had passed new literacy laws, including doubling down on the importance of teaching phonics.

The Scorecard authors note that all seven of the states (plus D.C.) that saw reading gains between 2022 and 2025 had put comprehensive science of reading reforms into place. Of the states that had not by January 2024, none saw improvement. The connection between these reforms and improved results isn't necessarily causal, they warn, but there's clearly a link.

With most states struggling to make reading gains, one district-level success story highlighted by the Scorecard stands out: Baltimore City Public Schools. In spite of the challenges posed by poverty — most students there qualify for free or reduced-price meals — Baltimore students have been making striking reading gains.

Under CEO Sonja Brookins Santelises, the district reformed its approach to literacy. It embraced the science of reading even before the pandemic and years ahead of the national wave of state-based literacy legislation.

When Brookins Santelises took the lead in Baltimore in 2016, she says she quickly embraced the science of reading districtwide and its emphasis on phonics, as opposed to the whole language approach, which teaches children to guess at words using cues from a text's pictures.

"I remember gathering the [district's] literacy department. And I said, 'If you want to do whole language, there are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City. I respect you, but you cannot stay here. I've been ferocious about it ever since."

'Kiss your brains!'

The benefits of these changes appear to have been twofold. During the pandemic, the Scorecard shows Baltimore schools lost far less ground in reading than schools with similar levels of poverty. Then, in 2022, with those practices firmly in place, the city's reading scores began to skyrocket, erasing pandemic-era losses and rising back around 2017 levels.

Baltimore's successful approach to teaching literacy was on full display on a recent May morning, in veteran teacher Kimberly Lowery's kindergarten class at Johnston Square Elementary. Lowery sat at the front of a rainbow-colored reading rug, running through a series of phonics-based games that her kindergarteners seemed to genuinely enjoy.

There was letter-sound bingo, guess-the-sound flashcards and even a visit from a special spelling helper — a toy owl, named Echo, who lives at the end of a yardstick. If the kids' laughter and cheering isn't sign enough that they're learning, district data shows that, by the end of last year, three-quarters of Lowery's students were reading at or above grade level.

Lowery told the children to kiss their brains and asked, "You guys are super-duper what?"

In unison, the children hollered, "Smart!"

"Yes you are," Lowery answered.

Edited by: Nirvi Shah and Steve Drummond
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

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The primary for the state’s top K-12 schools job is in less than a month, but judging from the polls, it’s debatable whether anyone is paying attention.

A whopping 32% of voters are undecided with just a few weeks until the June 2 primary for state superintendent of public instruction, according to a recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California. In the past, it’s been one of the state’s hottest races, with millions of dollars in spending.

Among the dozen or so candidates, none had more than 10% of voters’ support, meaning that the race is essentially a 10-way tie.

“There’s no lack of qualified candidates, but previous elections had an urgency and a sense that who won really mattered,” said Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at USC. “We don’t have that this time.”

A job with few duties?

One reason for the malaise, observers said, may be that voters are more focused on education policy unfolding in Washington, D.C. The Trump administration is in the process of dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, which could potentially upend funding and student rights. Another reason might be that most of the candidates agree on the major issues, so there’s not much to distinguish them.

Regardless, the position might be nearly irrelevant by the time the new superintendent takes office. The state is poised to strip the superintendent of most duties. Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed in January that the superintendent no longer run the California Department of Education. Instead, it would fall under the control of the State Board of Education, which is appointed by the governor. The idea was introduced in his January budget proposal and is expected to pass the Legislature.

That would shift power over the state’s 10,000 public schools to the governor’s office. The superintendent would have few responsibilities except championing various education-related causes. The governor’s race would carry more relevance to school funding, policies and other issues than the superintendent’s race.

Teachers union weighs in

The California Teachers Association, one of the biggest players in education politics, has been far more involved in the governor’s race than the superintendent race. After Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out of the governor’s race, the union endorsed billionaire Tom Steyer for governor, citing his alignment with the union’s priorities.

For superintendent, the union endorsed Richard Barrera, a San Diego Unified school board member who was little known outside San Diego before winning the union’s backing.

“The superintendent race is off the radar because the governor’s race has taken up so much bandwidth,” said David Goldberg, president of the union. “Although the superintendent’s impact is deeply felt by those who work in public education, it’s not widely known outside public education.”

The next superintendent will replace Tony Thurmond, who is termed out and is running for governor. The superintendent position is nonpartisan and pays $210,460. The top two candidates in June’s primary will advance to the November general election.

So far, the leading candidates in the superintendent’s race include a host of education policy veterans. Among them: Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, former head of the Assembly education committee; Josh Newman, former head of the Senate education committee; Anthony Rendon, former speaker of the Assembly and a longtime early education program administrator; and Nichelle Henderson, a Los Angeles Community College District board member.

‘A lightning rod’

Sonja Shaw, a school board member in Chino Valley, is also running and has gained traction on the right. In the most recent poll, she had support from 7% of voters, the same as Barrera. Lance Christensen, who ran against Thurmond in 2022, predicted that Shaw will advance to the November election because Democrats’ votes will split among the other candidates.

Shaw is best known for her fiery positions on transgender student rights. She was propelled to the limelight in 2023 when she presided over a Chino Valley school board meeting where security guards escorted Thurmond out when he spoke over his time limit defending transgender students’ right to privacy. She’s been an outspoken advocate for schools to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender, and for students to participate on teams that align with their gender at birth.

“They can say anything they want about her, but she’s such a lightning rod that now everyone knows who she is,” said Christensen, who’s now a vice president at the anti-union California Policy Center. “I think this issue will take her all the way to Sacramento.”

Why no one’s talking about charter schools

One issue that’s been glaringly absent in the superintendent race is charter schools. In years past, charter schools were the No. 1 topic in the race. Candidates were deemed to be either “pro-charter” or “anti-charter,” with donations and rhetoric following suit. “Pro-charter” was often interpreted to mean anti-union, leading to an avalanche of rancor from both sides.

But the public, and even the unions, seem to have grown tired of arguing about the independent public schools. One reason is that many charter schools now have unions. Another reason is that because of declining enrollment, charter schools are no longer expanding; they appear to have plateaued at about 10% of overall enrollment.

A more likely reason is that voters see that charter schools and traditional public schools grapple with the same issues, said Marshall Tuck, a former chief executive of the Green Dot charter school network who ran for superintendent in 2018 and 2014. The 2018 election in which he lost to Thurmond was one of the most costly superintendent races ever, with contributions topping $50 million. By comparison, no candidate in the current election has raised more than $1 million so far.

Most schools – regardless of their governance structure – are facing teacher shortages, floundering reading and math scores and lackluster student engagement since the pandemic ended.

“Now that we’ve removed the charter vitriol, we can focus on bigger issues,” said Tuck, who is now chief executive at EdVoice, a policy advocacy organization. “The core issues are the same everywhere.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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Esther Mejia and Kelly Merchant had a question Friday afternoon for their professors: Where were you?

The UC Riverside public policy students were among the likely hundreds of thousands in California who lost access to the all-important academic software Canvas when it was brought down by a hacker group Thursday afternoon. Losing Canvas meant losing assignments, tests, and required reading material along with a way to communicate with instructors. The timing was especially bad for UC students, who were hunkering down for midterms or finals.

“This is a very crucial time for students to be able to access their coursework. So I definitely do think that professors should reach out,” Mejia said in an interview. “And they did not.”

Merchant heard from only one professor by Friday who addressed the downed website. She learned about the hack attack on the social media site Reddit after she was logged out of her account while finishing an assignment.

“Professors should reach out. They did not."Esther Mejia, student, UC RiversideThe Riverside students’ experience underscores just how central Canvas has become to higher education in California — the outage likely affected more than 1 million of the state’s university students. The hack has raised serious questions about how schools should be vetting and balancing their use of online platforms, to what extent they may be held liable for breaches, and what role policymakers should play in protecting student data and regulating edtech.

By Monday evening, the company behind Canvas had told customers, including the University of California, that it had struck an agreement with the hacking group. In an email shared with CalMatters by UC's systemwide Office of the President, the company's CEO stated that “we reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident” that returns data and assures it is no longer held by the attacker nor any other outside parties. Further, “we have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted.”

CalMatters asked the company, Instructure, if it paid a ransom, but did not immediately hear back.

The attack seems to have begun on or around April 29, when Instructure “detected unusual activity,” according to a class-action suit filed in a Texas federal court. The attack exploited a vulnerability in Canvas’s free tool for teachers.

On May 4, some Cal State campuses experienced a brief shutdown but were operational within 20 to 30 minutes, the university system said.

By May 7, Thursday, the platform was offline. The University of California system blocked access to Canvas the same day, and wrote on its website that it won’t “be restored until we are confident the system is secure. We understand this disruption is concerning.”

The hackers, a group calling itself ShinyHunters, claimed to have obtained sensitive data, including billions of messages, and threatened to release the data if they weren’t paid a ransom. The CEO of Instructure has said that core “learning data (course content, submissions, credentials) was not compromised” and Cal State has said that Canvas does not store social security numbers.

On the evening of May 7, one of Merchant’s professors, she said, shared the material students needed to complete an assignment due Friday. The professor did so using a Discord group they created for the class at the beginning of the term. Merchant appreciated the initiative, but observed that not every student checks Discord as regularly as they would their email account.

By May 9, Saturday, UC Riverside mostly restored access to the platform, with other universities coming online in the following days. Mejia had a quiz and assignment due Monday at 2 p.m. She received a note from the professor of that class only at 9 a.m. that day through Canvas, she said. The professor granted a two-day extension.

Merchant wants more professors with a communication back-up plan, especially since Canvas has been down before. “Whether it’s a cybersecurity thing or routine Canvas maintenance, it’s going to continue to be a risk. And we have to prepare for it.”

“These situations are fluid and campuses and UCOP communicated as quickly and completely as feasible,” said UC Office of the President spokesperson Stett Holbrook.

For many colleges and high schools, Canvas has become indispensable, with teachers using it to give quizzes, message students, post grades, and more.

Almost 9,000 colleges, K-12 schools and school districts, and offices of education around the world were reportedly affected by the Canvas outage, according to the hacker group and other media, along with likely millions of students and teachers. California seemed to be hit especially hard. The institutions relying on the system and affected by the cyberattack included Stanford, at least some campuses at the University of California, USC, all 22 California State University campuses and all 116 of the state’s community colleges.

The number of students ultimately affected by the breach could be staggering. The Cal State system alone enrolls more than 400,000 students. The UC system, where hackers claimed to hit six of 10 campuses, enrolls about 300,000. The hacker group listed the Los Angeles Unified and Fresno Unified school districts as among their targets — they too enroll more than 400,000 students combined.

Deputy chancellor of the LA Community College District, Nicole Albo-Lopez, told CalMatters that Canvas was being used by students in thousands of courses, including as a “repository for gradebooks, sharing of course materials, and messaging.” The district is among the largest community college districts in the country, with nearly 200,000 students annually.

Canvas, she said Friday, still hadn’t informed them of what’s been exposed in the hack. “We’re supposed to receive specific information about what was accessed in our specific system, but we have not received that yet,” she said.

‘Eggs in one basket’

One expert said the incident highlights the problem of relying on “all-in” solutions for online education tools.

The attraction of software like Canvas is that it allows institutions without technical expertise to easily manage everything on a single platform. But the hack shows the danger of relying on such centralized systems, where a breach of one company exposes the data of the countless institutions that rely on it.

“The beauty of these software as a service systems and what they sell is, ‘Hey, your staff members don't need to run this, we'll just handle it,’” said Jake Chanenson, an education technology researcher and PhD student at the University of Chicago.

In the best case, those companies have diligent cybersecurity teams protecting student data.

Many schools without tech departments, by contrast, may only be equipped to give any new tools “a cursory, at best, privacy and security assessment,” Chanenson said. Small schools, especially, may then struggle to recover from a breach or outage.

But a centralized system also means that only a single point needs to be hacked for every school that uses the software to be affected.

Chanenson, who is currently researching “critical infrastructure" in schools, said that “when you put all your eggs in one basket across schools, it makes these targets very attractive.”

One state lawmaker wants a legislative audit into California's heavy reliance on Canvas. “The Canvas breach exposes the growing risks of concentrating massive amounts of student records, academic systems and institutional operations into a single platform," said Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat from Bakersfield, in a written statement.

What now?

It may be too early to identify the consequences of the hack for schools and for Canvas. It’s still not clear, for example, how the breach happened, or the full extent of data that was compromised.

At minimum, schools will want to reassess how much information they’re willing to give over to third-party software companies in the name of efficiency. Those companies, Chanenson said, should also take a look at their policies around data collection and retention to minimize how much sensitive information they store.

“You think in your head that any data set that you have has a non-zero probability of being leaked or breached or some sort of privacy loss, then you want to start thinking about things like data minimization,” he said.

Past data breaches have led to legal consequences for the companies and institutions involved, including action by state attorneys general. There are federal legal protections for data belonging to children under 13, through the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, as well to students, under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In California, the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act protects data for K–12 students. Lawmakers in the state are also actively considering additional data protections.

The state has grappled with previous compromises of school data. Los Angeles Unified School District has faced a series of class-action lawsuits related to data privacy breaches. Most recently, the district disclosed last year that a telehealth vendor it worked with experienced a breach.

Chanenson points out that schools are prime targets for hackers since they hold immensely sensitive data but often lack the technical prowess of other large institutions, like banks.

“They’re happening with enough of a frequency that it’s more of a when, not an if,” he said.

CalMatters reporter Adam Echelman contributed to this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

That's according to an item on the County Board of Supervisors meeting agenda scheduled for May 19. It would start “a planned, phased wind-down of the Academy.”

“Under this proposed approach, current seniors will be supported to complete the school year and graduate, and current juniors will be supported to graduate at the conclusion of the 2026-2027 school year,” Chief Administrative Officer Ebony Shelton wrote to the board.

The campus opened in 2001 and provides housing, a high school, mental health services and more.

Enrollment peaked at 195 students in 2009, county staff told the board in November. As of March 30, there were 42 students living at the academy, Shelton wrote. Most are in high school, with 31 attending high school on site and three attending other high schools.

Enrollment has dropped as state and federal policies have changed. Legislation has shifted foster care away from group settings. That means less state and federal funding for San Pasqual Academy.

The campus nearly closed in 2021 after the state said it would no longer direct federal funding to San Pasqual. The Board of Supervisors voted to keep it open.

It has an annual budget of more than $18 million, according to the County, mostly made up of local funding.

In November, the County Board of Supervisors approved a plan to gather community input on the future of the campus. More than 270 people attended engagement sessions and 184 filled out a survey, Shelton wrote.

Two main themes emerged, she wrote: boosting enrollment and broadening the community use of the campus.

“Notably, participants in the engagement process indicated that without increases in both Academy placements and youth attending on-campus school, the Academy should close, alongside efforts to maximize the campus for expanded community benefit,” Shelton wrote.

Shelton’s letter describes a phased approach that would allow current juniors to graduate at the end of next school year. Younger students would gradually transition to other schools and homes.

“Many youth currently at the Academy are on a path towards reunification with their family,” Shelton wrote. “Consistent with the kin-first approach, placement decisions will prioritize keeping youth with family members, relatives, or trusted adults whenever possible.”

Community members also suggested broader uses for the campus, including health services, housing and workforce development. The May 19 agenda item recommends continuing that engagement process for 18 more months.

The board would get a status update on the academy’s transition within the year.

The May 19 agenda also includes a vote on providing $1.8 million for a housing project in Vista. It would create 35 units of permanent supporting housing for young adults exiting the foster care system.

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria joined SDCCD Chancellor Gregory Smith on Monday to sign a Memorandum of Understanding to begin evaluating a possible redevelopment of the site. They were joined by Prebys Foundation CEO Grant Oliphant and Downtown San Diego Partnership President/CEO Betsy Brennan who have been leading efforts to "revitalize San Diego's downtown center."

Monday's agreement will allow the district to look into converting the 3,200-person capacity building — long used as an Election Night headquarters for parties across the spectrum and from 2019-2024 as a temporary homeless shelter — into an educational and cultural campus.

"This is about putting a major civic site to better use for San Diegans. Golden Hall has served our city for nearly 70 years, and now we have an opportunity to transform it — making sure it delivers more value through education, arts, and community use," Gloria said. "We have to be smart about the assets we have, and this effort takes an innovative look at what's possible. It's the first step in exploring a future that reflects who we are today and where we're going."

The agreement serves multiple roles for the city, which has designs on redeveloping the entire civic core but lacks the funding to do so on its own. SDCCD could alleviate some of the financial burden.

"We appreciate and celebrate the visionary leadership of Mayor Gloria and our City Council in reimagining civic center as a cultural hub for San Diego," Smith said. "Today we take a significant step forward in expanding our service to San Diego as we work to bring the Mesa College World Art Collection and educational programs downtown to be accessible for all San Diegans."

Golden Hall was built in 1962 and served as the venue for many concerts. In the 1973-74 basketball season, the short-lived San Diego Conquistadors of the American Basketball Association played in the hall, coached by Wilt Chamberlain.

The site was approved as a temporary shelter in 2019 by the San Diego City Council and took on a greater role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Golden Hall was damaged in 2024's heavy winter rains, and was shuttered as a homeless shelter. According to a report issued in 2023 by San Diego's Independent Budget Analyst, it would cost at least $9.3 million in improvements to operate Golden Hall as a permanent shelter.

"Golden Hall has long been part of San Diego's civic story, and this partnership advances the vision to revitalize that space in ways that can serve the public for generations to come," Oliphant said. "As downtown San Diego evolves, this effort brings together education, arts and culture, public space, and housing in ways that can help create a more vibrant and connected city."

The Prebys Foundation and Downtown San Diego Partnership announced their intent in supporting early planning efforts for redevelopment. Over the next six months, SDCCD will assess how feasible any such project will be.

"Today's MOU signing marks an important next step in the collaborative effort to revitalize Downtown San Diego's Civic Center and plays a key role in creating `America's Outdoor Downtown,"' Brennan said. "This work is about partnership and shared leadership, and we are encouraged to see the city of San Diego and the San Diego Community College District advancing a vision centered on education, public space, arts and culture, and long-term economic opportunity. This is the type of transformational investment that will help redefine downtown."

Any future agreement for the site would require approval by the San Diego City Council.

At Perry Elementary School in Paradise Hills, students are learning how to ride a bike in P.E. class. On a recent Tuesday morning, transitional kindergarten students sat next to small, white bikes.

“We had some people last week that were going through the stop sign,” P.E. teacher Robbie DePerro told them. “We need to make sure that we come to a complete stop. And I want you guys looking both ways, just like we practiced.”

He makes sure everyone’s helmets fit properly and their seats are at the right height. Then everyone walks their bikes out to the blacktop.

They start with a game of "red light, green light." When DePerro says “green light,” the students sit on their bikes and use their feet to push themselves forward.

Unlike other kids’ bikes, Strider bikes don’t have training wheels, just footrests. Pedals will be added later. Along with balance, the course teaches students about spatial awareness and controlling their speed.

“What I love about these Strider bikes is it really gets them coordinated and ready,” DePerro said. “They learn how to balance themselves a lot quicker, in my opinion.”

In 1972, the Federal Highway Administration reported that 42% of school-aged kids walked or biked to school. In 2017, 10% did.

There’s another, more recent change DePerro has noticed among his TK, kindergarten and first grade students.

“One alarming thing is a lot of them are riding e-bikes, which is a new thing the last couple of years,” he said.

Week one of the curriculum focuses on helmet safety. DePerro also reminds students that most e-bikes are meant for kids 12 and up. He sent a letter home to parents about e-bike safety.

DePerro also asks kids whether they have bikes at home. This year, less than 40% of them did.

Bringing bikes to schools makes them accessible to kids whose families might not be able to afford them, said Lisa Weyer, executive director of the Strider Education Foundation.

“Parents might not have the resources to teach their kids how to ride a bike at home because they're working two jobs or more,” she said. “There might not be the infrastructure. There might not be a bike path or a safe park where they can teach their kids how to ride.”

The All Kids Bike program comes with 24 Strider bikes, 24 helmets, a teacher bike and a rolling storage rack. It costs $9,000 per school and is meant to last up to 10 years.

Weyer says it’s usually paid for by a donor who wants to bring it to their local school. Parents sometimes crowdfund for the program.

In San Diego County, the program is at 12 schools across three districts. Seattle Public Schools offers the program at all of its elementary schools. North Dakota paid to bring the program to hundreds of the state’s elementary schools.

DePerro applied for a grant to pay for the program at his school. After COVID-19, he wanted to find a way to teach his students a childhood rite of passage, he said.

“I just loved riding bikes when I was a kid,” he said. “Our older classes here have the opportunity to learn how to swim. I'm a big proponent for learning how to swim and learning how to ride a bike as a kid. It's kind of one of those staple things.”

Learning how to ride a bike means learning resilience, he said.

“There is tears at times, and Band-Aids, but eventually they get it. And I really do try to create an environment where the kids feel safe and they can take risks,” he said. “I’m very proud of them.”

San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer and Scripps Health are hosting an e-bike safety webinar for parents on Tuesday. It starts at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

But what happens when you can’t access your notes and lectures to study for those finals? That’s what happened to San Diego State University senior Selina Gonzalez, when the education platform Canvas went down Thursday.

“Every single note, every single lecture video, everything we need to study for our final is on Canvas," she said. "So while it was down for (Friday) morning and (Thursday), no one was able to study for it.”

In San Diego, the outage affected students at all levels, from community colleges and UC San Diego to California State University campuses and the San Diego Unified School District, among others.

When students logged on to the Canvas platform, they saw a message from the hacker group ShinyHunters threatening to release data unless Canvas’ parent company, Instructure, paid a ransom.

"They got names, they got emails, they got student IDs, and they got communications that go through a feature called Canvas Inbox," University of San Diego cybersecurity professor Nikolas Behar said. "So that includes communications between students and their professors."

Instructure said hackers exploited a vulnerability on Canvas' Free-For-Teacher accounts.

"As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down Free-For-Teacher accounts," the company said.

But what concerns Behar is that no one knows yet how deep the breach was.

"We don't have all the information yet," he said. "So there is something going on inside their environment."

Canvas is now back up, but some schools, such as UC San Diego, are limiting access to Canvas. The university is advising students to avoid accessing Canvas until further notice.

Some students, Behar said, have received phishing emails asking for money or the hackers would release personal information.

"They're saying, 'If you don't pay us $2,000 in the next 48 hours, we're going to release data that we took from your browser, your browsing history.' Things like that," he said. "That is a scam. Ignore that any time you get an email."

During the outage, many professors weren’t able to contact students about course assignments and tests due. Some, like Jaclyn Siegel, found other ways to contact their students.

Seigel posted on the social media platform Reddit. She didn’t want her students to stress about their finals.

“But I was also sort of worried for me, who might have needed to respond to, you know, hundreds of emails," Seigel said. "And so I figured that given that the course is so large, there must be at least one person in my class who's on Reddit who can then provide the information to the other students.”

That seems to have worked for her class. At USD, freshman Jack Kelly said he found other ways to prepare for his finals, but his professors have also been accommodating.

“They were very supportive and very helpful dealing with the outage,” Kelly said.

With Canvas back up, students are breathing a sigh of relief and hoping this will be the only disruption during this stressful finals season.

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All but one Cal State campus have Native American remains and cultural items that federal and state laws require them to return to tribes. In many cases, the process has been slow.

Though the size of their collections varies, campuses like Cal Poly Humboldt and San Francisco State have made progress in returning human remains and cultural items, with Sacramento State having returned most of its Native collections. But others, like Cal Poly Pomona, have yet to see much progress and Cal State Bakersfield has not made any returns.

The Cal State system holds the remains of more than 2,000 Native Americans and more than 1.57 million artifacts, according to the most recent list of the system's collections. Another 500,000 collections of items are still in storage awaiting proper tribal review to be cataloged.

Campus officials say they are working diligently to follow legal mandates to return items to tribes, but the road can be long and arduous.

Last February, members of the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu tribe reburied three ancestors whose remains had been held at Sacramento State since 1963. The Lake Concow Campground donated 10.7 acres of land to the tribe within their traditional territory in Northern California, where they were able to perform the reburials.

“During the process it’s a very, very heavy feeling,” said Matthew Williford Sr., the tribal chairperson and cultural resource director. “But when you receive the remains back, you feel lighter. It doesn’t feel like so much weight.”

If collections stay in storage, for Williford, it's as if "nobody knows that we were ever around."

"It's important for us to get that back, because we believe that those items still have spirit," he said. "They need to come back to the people."

Federal and state Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation laws require agencies and institutions with Native American remains and cultural items, such as the ancestors’ remains from Williford’s tribe, be returned to tribes. While there was not a deadline for when collections had to be returned, federal law required campuses to complete an inventory of their collections by 1995.

As of February 2025, Sacramento State had repatriated 89% of the human remains and 68% of the cultural items on their campus. That means control of the collections has been legally transferred to a culturally affiliated tribe, but collections may remain physically held by the campus if requested by the tribe. The figure also does not include what the campus holds for other state or federal agencies.

“Some tribes want us to hold on to collections, in which case we might do a held trust agreement, where we just are saying, 'We’re holding this for you until you’re ready to take it for repatriation,'” said Sarah Eckhardt, Sacramento State’s repatriation coordinator.

Eckhardt has been the repatriation coordinator for more than six years, overseeing the university's compliance with repatriation laws and policies. Eckhardt shared that the campus has a good relationship with local tribes, to whom the majority of their collections belong, allowing them to repatriate the collections effectively.

The amount of cultural items at Sacramento State decreased significantly from about 30,000 in 2024 to about 6,000 in 2025.

Why it's hard to return Native artifacts

To move forward with repatriation, universities have to contact potential culturally affiliated tribes, based on geographic location or historical evidence, for consultation. Then, tribes can submit a request for repatriation.

While the process can be slow, multiple tribal leaders said that the campuses are supportive and are up against federal and state rules that complicate returns for non-federally recognized tribes. There are also times of confusion over who exactly has authority to make those returns.

Sacramento State reported an increase in their collection of human remains from 171 in 2024 to 223 in 2025, which Eckhardt said was due to some confusion over who manages them.

“There were several collections that we thought were the responsibility of another agency, that they denied responsibility for and so we accepted responsibility for that,” said Eckhardt.

Near the end of 2024, 32 boxes containing three human remains and cultural items previously held at Sacramento State were returned to Williford's state-recognized tribe. But since they are not federally-recognized, federal law meant they'd have to partner with a federal tribe to claim the collections on their behalf, and also have local tribes sign off on the handover, said Williford. That process took about six months after a notice was published to the federal registrar, which informs other tribes in case any want to rebut the claim. To him, that was a quick timeframe.

“At least they’re trying… I think they need to up their game on helping nonfederal tribes with federal repatriation,” said Williford.

San Jose State has run into a similar situation. The university has returned all the remains belonging to federally recognized tribes, but still possesses remains affiliated with non-federally recognized tribes, posing the biggest challenge, according to Alisha Marie Ragland, the campus’ repatriation coordinator. As of December 2025, San Jose State reported having 514 human remains and more than 5,000 collections of stored items waiting to be reviewed.

“SJSU will continue to work with tribes to find appropriate and respectful means of sending the Ancestors home,” said Ragland via email.

So, why do some campuses struggle to make returns under their care?

“Repatriation can take years. Just for what we consider one artifact potentially could take up to a couple years,” said David Silva, the repatriation coordinator at Cal State Bakersfield.

Cal State Bakersfield is still in the process of consulting with tribes to determine what the boxes under their care contain, he said.

“There’s no direct timeline for our tribal partners to have to conduct consultation,” said Silva. “The only timeline is really when we start to submit notices or when we complete that inventory verification.”

Curtis Alcantar is a member of the Tejon Indian tribe and a tribal representative for the NAGPRA committee at the Bakersfield campus, working with Silva. Alcantar said he has had a good experience working with the university and other Cal State campuses and that he believes the system is moving in a positive direction.

Before, Bakersfield housed items in five different rooms spread throughout campus, creating a hassle for tribal members. They recently moved to a new building on campus, allowing tribes easier access to review collections.

When he first started helping with tribal consultations, Alcantar was troubled by how many Native American remains and cultural items were still in possession of museums and universities. Universities acquired Native remains and items through excavations and research often from anthropology and archeology disciplines. Some collections were acquired through donations.

At the time, it was difficult for him to understand how much Native American collections museums and universities still held and were refusing to give back, said Alcantar. But now, he says that people are more open minded and willing to repatriate.

The process does take a lot of research and time, he added. For him, the most helpful tool Cal State has provided is the campus collections map, making it easier to find which campuses have collections from Kern County, his home base. According to the map, eight different Cal State campuses have collections from Kern County and Cal State Bakersfield has collections from 18 California counties.

“The fulfilling part for me is seeing the objects go back home, watching the ancestors just finally get their journey back home,” said Alcantar.

Cal Poly Humboldt has repatriated about 39% of the 23,889 cultural items initially in its possession, according to figures provided by Megan Watson, the campus' NAGPRA coordinator. San Francisco State has repatriated roughly 36% of its original 44,000 collections of stored items, according to Robert King, the campus’ director of communications. The campus has about 250 remains, a number that hasn't budged much in recent years. Since November, it has returned two remains with about 260 collections of items, the official said.

Cal State updates list of Native collections

Cal State's updated list was released in December after, for the first time, all Cal State campuses completed an inventory review.

Sonoma State has more than 1.52 million cultural items, by far the highest count in the system. Meanwhile, Cal State Fullerton holds the most remains with 534 individuals counted, and San Diego State has the highest collections of stored items awaiting tribal review, totaling more than 426,000.

One reason for Sonoma State's high count is that it has a large facility to house those collections under proper care, said Samantha Cypret, a member of the Mountain Maidu tribe and executive director of the office of tribal relations for the Cal State Chancellor’s Office, which oversees NAGPRA compliance. Campuses with large anthropology or archeology departments also tend to have larger collections, she added.

Multiple members of Sonoma State’s NAGPRA team were contacted for comment. Some declined an interview while others did not respond.

Cal State revamps how it returns remains — with some delays

In November 2025, Cal State launched a systemwide NAGPRA policy providing campuses with a consistent approach for repatriations. The move came in response to Assembly Bill 389 – a 2023 amendment to the 2001 state NAGPRA Act – and a critical Cal State audit. The assembly bill required the Chancellor's Office to adopt a systemwide policy and committee, and that committees form at each campus.

Cypret said that the policy took time to enact after the audit was issued and the Assembly Bill passed because they wanted to make sure they were letting tribal voices take the lead, learning about what tribes wanted to see included in the policy.

“We also really wanted to make sure that we were centering tribal voices in the development, in the implementation of this policy, so we held over 30 tribal outreach sessions in about the year and a half that this policy took to create,” said Cypret.

The new system policy outlines responsibilities of each campus, such as employing a full-time repatriation coordinator, conducting ongoing surveys of holdings and forbidding the use of collections for teaching and research. Cal State allocated $3.7 million for campuses with Native American collections for the fiscal year 2025-2026 to support the costs of staffing repatriation coordinators, reburial costs, reimbursing tribes for travel costs, and other expenses related to repatriation.

The University of California system and community colleges also have Native American collections on their campuses. An audit of the University of California published in April 2025 determined that the system lacked urgency and accountability.

Williford said that his tribe has made formal requests to receive two woven baskets from UC Berkeley that are part of his tribe's dogwood collection. For him, helping return collections for his tribe has helped him feel connected to his dad who passed away in 2015. He said his dad was part of a “lost generation” that knew who they were but didn’t have a lot of cultural information. But today, the tribe's elders find meaning when returns are made.

“To see an elder’s eyes light up like a child’s, it’s something special,” said Williford.

Cal State will review its systemwide policy again in November 2026 after tribal consultations.

Brittany Oceguera is a contributor with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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Becoming a new public school teacher in California means facing an impossible choice: work for a high-need school, making a full-time salary but with little support or training; or get the proper education and training but lose a year or more of wages.

For decades those were often the only options. But in recent years, California has expanded opportunities for teachers to get paid training for work at high-need schools, namely through special grants and through programs known as teacher residencies. This fall, the state will launch its first registered apprenticeship program for teachers, which means it gives students a chance to earn a wage and a teaching credential at the same time.

These programs are promising, but they’re set against a troubling backdrop, said Mary Vixie Sandy, the executive director of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, in a state hearing last month. “More teachers are entering the profession, but too many are leaving,” she said, adding that there is a “continued reliance on underprepared personnel, emergency-type permits, and substitutes to fill persistent vacancies.”

In the last academic year, almost 16,000 teachers in the state entered the classroom underprepared, about 5% of the total teacher workforce, according to the most recent report by the commission. It’s a significant increase compared to the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years. Areas in California’s Central Valley, the far north, and rural parts of the state, such as near the Sierra, have some of the highest rates of underprepared teachers.

Being a teacher is burdensome and for many, cost prohibitive, even in areas with a lower cost of living. California requires teachers to get a credential, which can cost over $30,000, in addition to a bachelor’s degree. Students also have to spend at least 600 hours in a classroom, often unpaid. As a result, many teachers carry student debt for years, according to an analysis from the Learning Policy Institute, an education research nonprofit.

While cheaper education and training programs exist, and some teachers in high-need areas are granted temporary permits to work without a full credential, it can take years to pay off the college debt. Starting salaries for teachers are low, often around $63,000 a year. Many new teachers quit, and retention rates are especially low for those who lack the proper credentials.

Nationally, both Democrats and Republicans have supported teacher apprenticeship programs. In his gubernatorial campaign in 2018, Gov. Gavin Newsom promised he’d create 500,000 apprenticeships over the next 10 years, many of them in fields where apprenticeships didn’t exist before, such as teaching. President Donald Trump said he’ll expand apprenticeships, too.

Still, to be recognized as an apprenticeship program by the state, employers and local agencies must go through complicated planning and vetting. The Tulare and Santa Clara county offices of education spent roughly two years setting up the first teacher apprenticeship programs, which will serve just eight students in the first year.

A teacher prep program with ‘divisive’ ideologies

In 2024, the Biden administration awarded the Tulare County Office of Education roughly $18 million to expand and improve teacher training, including designing future residencies and apprenticeships.

The Trump administration abruptly cut that funding last year, saying the grants promoted "divisive ideologies,” such as diversity, equity and inclusion that no longer fit the U.S. Education Department’s “priorities.”
The Hanford Joint Unified School District, about an hour south of Fresno, was one of many school systems affected by the federal cuts. Hanford has about 55,000 people, surrounded on all sides by dairy, nut and fruit farms or manufacturers who support them. Most people in Hanford have never finished college, making it particularly difficult for the district to find qualified teachers.

The district often temporarily waives the education and training requirements for new teachers, in some cases allowing them to take on a classroom alone with no prior experience. These emergency-style waivers or permits are especially common for teachers in math, science and special education.

The federal grant would have provided a pipeline for teacher residents in Hanford. Residents get full training and mentorship before they are in charge of a classroom and, as a result, have significantly higher retention rates than teachers with emergency-style permits or waivers, said Melanie Leung-Gagné, a researcher with the Learning Policy Institute.

Of the teachers who started at the Hanford school district without the proper training during the COVID-19 pandemic, about half have since left, according to local teacher data reviewed by CalMatters.

An easier hire but at what cost

Hanford West High School is a collection of long, single-story concrete buildings near the train tracks, which run north-south through the town. In Luis Garcia’s special education classroom, long chains of colored paper and posters cover his wall — his students recently decorated the classroom to celebrate his Teacher of the Year award.

But Garcia’s excellence is an exception in more ways than one. When he started teaching in 2018, he didn’t have the proper qualifications. For the first few years, such underqualified teachers are often called interns but are treated similarly to regular employees — handling an entire classroom on their own —- complete with a full-time salary. They are expected to simultaneously enroll in a program to gain their teaching license.

“In a pinch it’s much easier to hire an intern but at what cost,” said Brooke Berrios, who oversees some teacher preparation programs at the Tulare County Office of Education, including many at Hanford West High.

In retrospect, Garcia said more robust training, such as the residency or apprenticeship model, would have better prepared him for the job. “It was difficult because I was on my own,” he said while tidying the decorations before class one morning last month. He mentors both residents and interns now and said he can see clear differences in the quality of their training.

Trump cuts put a student’s future in flux

Unlike during Garcia’s internship, resident teachers aren’t responsible for a classroom their first year. Students co-teach with the help of a mentor while enrolled in a teaching preparation or graduate program. Residents receive a stipend of up to $40,000 during their first year of training. The new apprenticeship program will work similarly, at least in its first year. The main difference is that apprentices will also have jobs as substitute teachers, allowing them to earn more money on top of their stipend.

Last spring, Hayden Pulis was finishing his bachelor’s degree and helping coach football at the University of Central Oklahoma when he decided to return home to Hanford and become a teacher. “I didn’t have any teaching experience before,” he said, stepping away from his class and letting his mentor supervise the students. “Personally, I wasn’t ready to take over a classroom.” He applied to join the residency program at Hanford High School, 2 miles on the other side of the railroad tracks from Hanford West High, where Garcia teaches.

But a few weeks later, he learned in a meeting that the money was cut, putting his future in flux. In an average year, the Tulare County Office of Education supports about 20 residents, said Berrios. With the federal grant, the office was planning to serve almost 100 students, including Pulis, in collaboration with other county offices.

For weeks the district scrambled to find a solution for its incoming class. Using other state funds, Berrios said the school district was able to fulfill its commitment to Pulis, though his stipend was reduced to $35,000.

It was a “weight off my chest,” Pulis said. If the program hadn’t come through, he said he’d probably still be coaching football.

An opportunity to build wealth

All told, California has spent roughly $2.1 billion over the past decade to address teacher shortages, often through grants to make credentialing programs cheaper and make the training better. The largest pot of state funding goes toward residency programs, including the stipends.

There’s also the Golden State Teacher Grant, which gives students up to $10,000 toward the cost of their teaching credential. In return, aspiring teachers commit to working in schools, such as Hanford West High or Hanford High, where the students are majority low-income, English learners or foster youth. Pulis used the money to cover much of his tuition. The grant program is set to end this year, unless state lawmakers approve new funding in the upcoming budget.

Starting this summer, the state is launching a new grant that pays student teachers $10,000 for the hundreds of hours of classroom work during their preparation.

For Pulis, just thinking about the impact of these programs on his life makes him emotional. The grants allowed him to get a head start on building wealth, he said, speaking for himself and his wife, who is working as a waitress while in nursing school. In the past year, Pulis got married and moved to California — major expenses that would have been much harder to bear, he said, if not for the Golden State Teacher Grant and the $35,000 residency stipend.

Many of these grants and programs didn’t exist when Garcia was starting as a teacher in 2018. The internship was the only feasible route financially, he said, since other programs required him to study or work without a salary.

Internship programs, such as the one Garcia did, often pay more than more rigorous training programs, such as residencies, though Berrios said she intends to continue bringing those costs down.

Garcia still has about $30,000 in debt from the graduate-level teaching program he enrolled in as an intern. He also has another $50,000 in debt from his bachelor’s degree at Sacramento State.

Still, he said he had no regrets and was proud of his recent Teacher of the Year award. “Am I rich? No. But it’s nice that your colleagues see your hard work and your students praise you.”

When asked if the award came with a cash prize, he laughed and said no. “I’ll gladly take a donation.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The online education platform Canvas went offline after a data breach on Thursday, temporarily leaving students and faculty at thousands of U.S. colleges — and K-12 schools — without access to course materials and communications during finals period.

"I'm sure somewhere in the country when the outage happened, there probably were people actually taking final exams on the platform when it crashed," says Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Thirty million users — including at half of the higher education institutions in North America — rely on Canvas to manage courses, submit assignments, view grades and facilitate communication, according to its parent company, Instructure.

But when Linker and many other users tried to do so on Thursday afternoon, they met a black screen and a warning message.

"ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again)," it read. "Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some 'security patches.'"

ShinyHunters is the same entity that took credit for a massive Ticketmaster data breach in 2024. Like many such groups, it's a cluster of young people working remotely together, "kind of like a ransomware gang," says Rachel Tobac, the CEO of SocialProof Security, which trains people and companies to defend themselves against hackers.

ShinyHunters wrote on a threat intelligence website earlier this week that the initial breach on Saturday involved data — including private messages — from 275 million students, teachers and staff at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide. The group said Thursday that affected schools can prevent the release of their data by consulting with cyber advisory firms and negotiating settlements through the encrypted chat platform Tox.

"You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked," the hackers wrote.

Instructure has confirmed a series of cybersecurity breaches this week and provided status updates on its website. It said the breach only appeared to involve identifying information like names, email addresses, student ID numbers and user messages — no passwords, birth dates, government identifiers or financial information.

Instructure confirmed on an FAQ page that it started an investigation after it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on April 29, and took Canvas offline on Thursday after that same unauthorized actor "made changes that appeared when some students and teachers were logged in." They said the actor exploited an issue with its Free-for-Teacher accounts, which it has temporarily shut down.

"This gives us the confidence to restore access to Canvas, which is now fully back online and available for use," it said in a statement to NPR. "We regret the inconvenience and concern this may have caused."

It's not clear whether Instructure paid a ransom or what the return of Canvas access could mean for the hackers' May 12 deadline.

Tobac says Canvas could be back online because of a successful negotiation, or because the hackers "didn't get super far in their attack." Either way, she says users should stay vigilant, especially for phishing messages — whether it's someone posing as Canvas prompting a password change, or pretending to be a professor sending course materials.

"I would operate under the assumption that there's going to be some knock-on effects here," she says.

Not everyone got back online immediately 

Just before midnight on Thursday, Instructure posted online that "Canvas is now available for most users," though two separate services, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test, remained in maintenance mode.

Students and faculty at at least some schools were still unable to access Canvas on Friday — either because service had not yet been restored or because administrators warned them to stay away.

Penn State University, for example, said Friday morning that while the school's Canvas access had been partially restored, it was "not yet ready for use."

"Technical teams at Penn State are actively working to prepare the system for our community," it added. "As access is restored, Canvas integrations and related services will be brought back online in phases."

Several schools have taken similar approaches, either temporarily disabling Canvas access or outright asking users to steer clear. The University of California said across its schools, "Canvas access will not be restored until we are confident the system is secure."

And it's not just higher education: The Montgomery County Public School system in Maryland alerted families on Friday morning that even as service returned, it is "continuing to test and review systems before restoring access."

Tobac says this could mean that schools think the attackers might still be within their systems, potentially stealing information like passwords and messages.

"The attackers probably got some sensitive information and … [schools] don't want this information out online," she says.

Many schools are urging users to be on high alert for any unsolicited emails or messages that appear to come from Canvas, especially those requesting login credentials, as Georgetown University warned. The University of Amsterdam — which says it's one of 44 Dutch educational institutions affected — also recommends people change their passwords on any other sites where they use the same one.

Tobac also recommends using a password manager — to generate long, random passwords for each login — and turning on multi-factor authentication for all online accounts, not just Canvas. She says any student or professor who gets a suspicious call, text or email should "use another method of communication to verify what is authentic."

"Even if there was no breach yesterday, I would say these are the things that I recommend you do," she adds, urging people to "be politely paranoid."

The breach disrupts finals, highlights vulnerabilities

Several schools affected by the breach have already postponed or outright scrapped some final exams, with others warning students and professors that they might need to do so.

The University of Illinois is postponing all final exams and assignments scheduled through Sunday. Penn State canceled certain exams scheduled for Thursday night and Friday, saying it was working with faculty to "determine next steps for final grading" and urging students to check their emails (not Canvas) regularly in the meantime. And Baylor University delayed Friday exams and asked all faculty to send students "whatever study materials they have on their local computers to students as soon as possible."

The breach has underscored how much of academia relies on a single, centralized platform.

Linker, of UPenn, told NPR that he received an influx of panicked messages from students on Thursday afternoon when they suddenly couldn't access PowerPoints, readings and previous exams as they tried to study for Monday's final.

"The problem with using a platform like Canvas is that most [students] are not going to have the readings available printed out or on their laptops," he explains. "It all lives on the online platform, and if that platform goes down, they have no way to access them."

He told students on Thursday that he would upload the course materials to another platform (like Dropbox or Google Docs) if Canvas access wasn't restored by Friday morning. Fortunately, he says, it came back online shortly before 9 a.m. ET.

But Linker says he has concerns about relying fully on Canvas in the future.

"Given what this has exposed, the vulnerability involved and also the concern with the data breaches, I'm starting to rethink whether this is really a wise way to proceed," he says.

One example of that is grading. Linker says Canvas makes it so easy to calculate and weigh students' scores — on individual assessments and overall — that it's come to function as a digital grade book. Going forward, he says he may start keeping an analog record of students' grades just in case.

While Canvas does have competitors like Blackboard, Linker says he doesn't think any would be less vulnerable to a future breach. And Tobac agrees.

"The problem is not that this one website had this cyber event, right? Because nothing in this world is unhackable," she says. "The thing that we have to think about is disaster recovery: How do we continue doing business when there is a cyber event, and how do we do our very best to keep the bad actors out?"

Tobac says this week has shown that many institutions did not have a clear plan for how students and professors can be in touch and access course materials without Canvas. She said those plans should vary based on schools' different circumstances and schedules — which might explain why some are proceeding with finals as usual while others are scrapping exams altogether. But she'd like them to approach the immediate aftermath with one common goal.

"We have to treat people with dignity and respect," Tobac says. "And I hope that that is something that the institutions do, within their timelines and constraints."

Copyright 2026 NPR

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California K-12 schools have come a long way over the past 20 years, but according to an exhaustive overview of the state’s school system, further progress may require tinkering with a long-entrenched form of school governance: local control.

That’s among the conclusions of the much-anticipated Getting Down to Facts report released Thursday, a 1,000-page undertaking written by more than a hundred K-12 education researchers.

“We’re in a much better place than we were,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education and one of the report’s authors. “But we need a coherent governance system if we’re going to continue to progress.”

The Getting Down to Facts reports, published every 10 to 12 years, are large-scale reviews of California’s K-12 system – what’s working, what’s not, and how lawmakers should respond. For this report, researchers looked at everything from special education staffing to school closures to overhauling high schools. The report is based on extensive data analysis and interviews with hundreds of superintendents, principals, school board members and parents.

The report’s timing is important because the state’s K-12 school system is at a transition point, said Susanna Loeb, an education professor at Stanford who is among the lead authors of the report.

The political landscape is changing in California, with voters electing a new governor and state superintendent of public instruction this November. Artificial intelligence is expected to drastically change the way students learn in the coming years. And the state is finally emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, which upended learning for nearly all of California’s 5.8 million public school students.

Lack of consistency and accountability

For at least a century, California has had a convoluted system of school oversight, with the governor, Legislature, state superintendent and state school board all sharing policy-making authority. Local school districts have wide leeway to adopt those policies to suit the unique needs of their students. That system was further strengthened more than a decade ago when the state shifted the bulk of funding decisions to local districts through the Local Control Funding Formula.

But that’s left big gaps in student performance and questions over who’s accountable for what, according to the report.

“California has invested a lot in education and there are instances of real excellence,” Loeb said. “But we haven’t been very good at scaling it so there’s consistency across the state.”

Transitional kindergarten, expanded after-school programs and community schools are a few new programs that have led to big improvements, according to the report. Low-income students especially have benefited from these initiatives. For example, low-income students who attended TK scored higher in math and reading in third and fourth grade, especially if they attended well-funded elementary schools, researchers found.

Big investments, big improvements

In the mid-2000s, California schools were in a sorry state. They ranked near the bottom nationally in nearly every metric. That was the impetus for the first Getting Down to Facts report in 2007, which aimed to stop the downward slide.

The state has almost doubled per-pupil spending since then, when factoring for inflation, and now ranks well above the national average. Because of the Local Control Funding Formula, which allocates more money to districts with larger numbers of high-needs students, there’s more equitable funding than existed in the past, the report noted.

California students are scoring significantly higher in reading and math than they did two decades ago, even when accounting for pandemic setbacks and even as the percentage of English learners, low-income students and other high-needs students has grown.

“Over the past two decades, the state has adopted stronger standards and assessments, made school funding more equitable … and improved achievement scores, especially in reading,” researchers wrote. “These changes have not solved California’s educational challenges, but they have left the state better positioned than it was fifteen years ago to pursue broader and more ambitious goals for students.”

Solutions and ideas

Concentrating more power with the state could bring some accountability and transparency, help narrow the achievement gaps and ensure that all districts are adopting programs that have shown promise, researchers said. For example, the state could require districts to adopt curricula that have been successful, hire more tutors or counselors, or expand after-school programs.

Some of that power shift may happen soon. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed moving most of the state superintendent’s duties to the State Board of Education, whose members are appointed by the governor. This won’t solve the problem entirely, but it’s a good start, Darling-Hammond said.

The report also suggested improving conditions for teachers and administrators. The state needs to do a better job recruiting and training teachers and making sure they stay in the profession. It also needs to reduce paperwork for administrators, who spend far too much time filling out forms that are redundant and of little use.

“California has strong foundations, ambitious goals, and visible examples of what richer and more coherent educational experiences can look like,” researchers wrote. “The central challenge is whether state policymakers (and others) can connect policies, supports, and institutions into a system that delivers those opportunities consistently for students.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

PENSACOLA, Fla. — At the kitchen table at their rental condo in Florida, Dick and Kathy McCaskill were working on coloring in an elaborate star, one of the few unfinished designs in the adult coloring book they've been working on.

"We love to do this," said Kathy, 77, laughing as she picked up a dark blue colored pencil. "I married a blue girl," Dick, 76, said. Coloring helps Kathy with her dementia, calming her anxiety and helping stimulate cognition.

Their grandson, Colby McCaskill, was visiting from New York, where he's finishing up his senior year at Fordham University. He grabbed a gold colored pencil and joined them. "How long have you been working on this coloring book?" he asked his grandmother. "A lot of time," she said, laughing. "I love doing it."

This is not what past visits used to look like, when his grandparents would color with him. Now, his grandparents are aging and changing. Caregiving roles are shifting. When Colby was growing up, his Papa worked as a healthcare executive and his Grammy was a teacher. They were always adventuring and telling stories — about 100-mile bike rides and skiing double black diamonds. Now they live one day at a time, navigating cancer and dementia. Colby, who recently turned 21, has struggled to square this new reality.

To deal with all those feelings, Colby made what he calls an audio letter to his grandfather. Dear Papa, the epistolary begins, "It's hard to admit because it feels like there's no solution, but I really wish you and Grammy weren't growing so old."

The resulting podcast is the grand prize winner of this year's NPR College Podcast Challenge. NPR judges found the episode stood out from hundreds of other entries for its intimacy and vulnerability as it tells the story of a family learning to talk about hard things.

"Being with my grandparents is like a warm hug," Colby McCaskill said after winning. "[The podcast] was an opportunity to get my thoughts down and to make it clear: This is what I'm thinking and this is how I'm feeling and I want you to know this."

Capturing the subtle slip into dementia

In the podcast, Colby weaves scenes from a past visit with his grandparents with interviews and personal reflections. He doesn't skirt the reality of what's happening to his grandmother: that like millions of Americans with dementia, she's losing her memory. She struggles to remember names, her age and how to do basic tasks.

Here's part of the letter:

"I'm sure you know out of everyone how her dementia has been progressing. How she can't remember my name or her age," Colby says in the podcast. "I am, let's see," Kathy responds. "I think right now, I am like … I'm like … 47 years old, that's how old."

At another point, Colby asks his Grammy to describe what's happening. "Now, I started to say something, and then I can't remember," Kathy tells Colby. "But it is a little scary, honey, that when I walk in, and I'm going to do something, and then I can't remember what I was supposed to start talking about."

Dick McCaskill has lived this reality with his wife for the past several years, but seeing it through the lens of his grandson felt different. "I've listened to [the podcast] four or five times, and it brings tears every time I hear it," he said, while wiping tears from his cheeks.

He and his wife have just finished listening to it again, and they held hands while sitting with Colby on their screened-in porch overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway in the Florida Panhandle.

"As people look at themselves day to day, it's hard to see the big changes." He looked over at Colby, who was a bit apprehensive to hear what his grandparents thought of his openness. "It's more poignant that you can see things that we don't."

Things like Kathy's dementia.

Even though he and Kathy live each day with the progressing condition, like a lot of people, they weren't quite ready to admit it was happening. But in Colby's podcast, their grandson uses the word dementia clearly and often. He's unafraid to name it.

"Hearing the word," said Dick, referring to dementia, "it's sort of like a cold cup of water thrown in your face. And you realize, well, it's a fact. That's what we're dealing with."

An enduring love story of patience and faith

What they're dealing with, it's been hard. Dick described how Kathy often struggles with basic tasks, such as knowing how to turn on the electric toothbrush but not knowing how to turn it off. Or turning the water on but forgetting to turn it off.

"That used to drive me crazy," Dick said with a laugh. "I would say my daily prayer is 'Lord, give me more patience.'"

In addition to patience, the experience has taught him acceptance and contentment, and it's solidified and strengthened his faith and hers.

"The Lord knows it all," said Kathy, a phrase she repeats often, which seems to calm her. Dick responded, "Yes darling. That's right. Healthy, happy and wise."

Colby captured this enduring connection and love in his winning podcast.

"I would have thought this kind of change would emotionally isolate you from her," he says in the podcast. Dick responds to Colby, "Yeah, but truly it's getting, on many levels, better and sweeter." He turns to his grandmother, to ask her the same thing. She responds, "My precious husband, you know, he'll stop and he'll wait and he will say, well, what were you talking about a minute ago? And he helps me bring it back to me."

Their decades-long love just looks different today.

Talking about hard things 

Colby said he used the podcast as a way to start difficult conversations he was too afraid to have face-to-face. Conversations about aging, change and death. Before the recording, he'd never talked with his grandparents about dementia or his grandmother's health or their changing family dynamics.

"I was a little scared to talk about it," he said. "If there's no medical solution for it, then what would talking about it do? It would just make us all more sad." Dick conceded that there was some avoidance on his side, too. He didn't want to burden his grandson, who is nearly 50 years younger and living a very different life as he prepares to graduate from college, on the cusp of his adult life.

But the podcast cracked that open. The family has used it as a jumping off point to talk about dying and how things are changing and what they need to do as a family to stay connected. And in talking about it, it's made Colby feel less scared about the future.

"The ideal outcome was that I get to tell my grandparents how I feel," said Colby. "And they listen and they get to tell me how they feel, and I listen. And I think that happened."

Edited by: Nirvi Shah and Steve Drummond
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

Connecting with a team of San Diego State mechanical engineering seniors at the start of the fall semester changed that.

"I think it's just really cool all the way around," Doyle said. "I love that they do this for veterans. I love that I'm able to take part in it."

Doyle lives in Spokane, Washington. He said his wife told him about the nonprofit Project S.E.R.V.E., which connects veterans to engineering students around the country. Students like SDSU senior Will Brandenberger, who said at the start of the school year his team was looking for more than just a homework project.

"I'm great with numbers and we all are, but we wanted something that would feel fulfilling," Brandenberger told KPBS Wednesday at the university's Senior Design Day event.

The challenge was to help compensate for Doyle's limited range of motion. Doyle said it was the only thing keeping him out of the saddle — and from riding bikes with his two kids.

"I've had 16 surgeries trying to repair my leg," he said. "And now ... I'm kind of stuck at this 88-degree, 85-degree limited range of motion ... So when we go for bike rides, I kind of just walk behind them."

The final product is a stainless steel pedal custom-made to fit Doyle's e-bike. It allows him to evenly pedal with both legs even though one has a much shorter rotation.

"It's been actually very easy, a lot more intuitive (and) easier than I thought it was going to be with my leg," Doyle said. "So I'm very excited about that. I thought it was gonna be a lot more awkward and cause a lot more pain, but it's really, really flawless."

Engineering senior Nikhil Maharaj said that while the pedal looks simple, they went through several prototypes before dialing in the design. Being custom-made for someone out-of-state added to their challenges.

"Our project is distinctly person-facing and there's not many quantitative variables that you can receive back after testing," Maharaj said.

Brandenberger said the project was more to the team than a homework assignment.

It was just really fulfilling," he said. "It's not just a homework assignment you turn in and you get a good grade back — you turn it back and you see a smile."

Brandenberger said the team won't know whether they've earned an A on the project until next week.

San Diego County measures its homeless population with an annual Point-in-Time Count.

“But we know that the homeless population is actually very dynamic,” said project lead Ming Tsou. “They’re moving every single day.”

Tsou is program director of the Online Big Data Analytics program at San Diego State University Global Campus.

His project combines city, county and nonprofit data with a new approach — using AI to identify tents in aerial and streetview images, similar to what can be seen on Google Maps. The tool estimates how many people live inside those tents based on their size.

He said the result is a more comprehensive and real-time measure of where San Diego’s unsheltered homeless population lives and where and how they move. The information could help local governments and nonprofits decide where to place resources like shelters, handwashing stations, and street medicine teams.

Tsou’s team uses something called geomasking to protect the people they’re tracking — displaying population densities or hot spots without revealing exact locations as pinpoints.

The project relies on artificial intelligence, but it’s also very human.

His students drive around to see where AI is making errors and why.

They survey the people living in tents, asking questions like — why stay here? Where did you stay yesterday and why did you leave?

Tsou is adamant that they must lead with empathy.

“When we analyze the data it’s just a number. Digital numbers, digital maps. But every single number, behind that is a story of an unhoused individual,” he said.

He plans to one day use the model to make predictions and help communities prepare before homeless people move.

He hopes policymakers will use the information to support not just homeless people, but the neighborhoods they’re gathering in, which his team’s data show tend to be lower-income, less educated and “more vulnerable,” he said.

On Monday, outside the San Diego County Registrar of Voters, labor unions and advocacy groups unloaded a truckload of boxes containing what they said were more than 167,000 signatures in support of the Protect San Diego County’s Health and Safety Act.

“Today’s submission of over (160,000) signatures is more than a milestone,” said Waylon Matson, cofounder of the nonprofit 4 Walls International.

He has been advocating for an end to the pollution crisis for years through his nonprofit. Now, he’s pushing for solutions through the proposed measure.

“It's a signal, a signal that communities across San Diego County are no longer willing to accept chronic pollution, beach closures, and the ongoing exposure to contaminated air and water,” he said.

The Tijuana River routinely carries a mix of untreated wastewater and industrial waste year-round. Scientists have found that pollution in the river water, which eventually reaches the Pacific Ocean, affects air quality. Pollution has worsened in recent years because of heavy rainstorms, sediment and underinvestment in wastewater infrastructure on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Local elected officials from all levels of government repeatedly lobby Congress and state lawmakers to set aside funding for projects designed to stop sewage from spilling over the border. They have successfully secured $600 million in federal funding to upgrade the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment plant, which is located north of the border and serves as a backstop for Tijuana sewage, as well as additional funds for smaller cleanup projects related to the pollution.

But supporters of the Health and Safety Act said that the crisis has gone on long enough without a steady stream of funds that could bring relief to people who live and work near the polluted river.

“This would be a huge step forward in addressing the gap in an ongoing funding source,” said Sarah Davidson, who manages the Surfrider Foundation’s Clean Border Water Now program. “Every year, Surfrider and so many other advocates have to approach Congress for funding and every other possible source of funding, the state, the county, anyone who is willing to listen and prioritize this desperate issue.”

If passed, the measure is estimated to generate about $360 million annually, of which the county Board of Supervisors would ultimately vote on how, specifically, to allocate the funds.

According to the proposal, 22.5% would be set aside for the cross-border problem. Most of that total, or no less than 20%, would need to be spent on infrastructure and engineering projects “to stop sewage flows from Tijuana” and the rest could go toward “addressing the emergency health impacts caused by the sewage crisis, and protecting local beaches, bays, and coastal waters from toxic pollution.”

Funds from the measure would also go to the following:

• 60% to make healthcare and childcare more affordable and accessible, including by funding vouchers for families to choose care and to offer health coverage for uninsured or underinsured, low-income county residents; 
• 17.5% on wildfire prevention, such as upgrading firefighting equipment and investing in more brush clearing, and to bolster crisis response services, including hiring more deputy sheriffs and improving the regional emergency 911 communications system; 
• 1.5% on administrative services, such as salaries and benefits. 
  

The measure proposes creating an 11-member citizen oversight committee to ensure the tax revenue is spent accordingly.

To qualify for the ballot, the county requires petitioners to submit more than 102,900 signatures, which it would then verify.

The proposed measure is endorsed by several labor unions and advocacy groups, such as CalFire Local 2881, the county’s workers’ union, Children First Collective San Diego and First 5 San Diego.