The framed school photo on the mantlepiece is a “familiar fixture of family life”, said The Times, but the annual push to encourage your child to smile nicely for the school photographer may soon be no more.

The school photography industry is “under threat”, and the main culprits are parents using artificial intelligence tools to scrub the watermarks from photographers’ proofs or previews, and print off photographs without paying. Nearly 60% of school photographers say they have “lost commissioned work to AI”, and more than two-thirds have “experienced copyright infringement”, according to the Association of Photographers.

Prices ‘can run up’

The average spend on a single school photo is £25 but, if you want extra copies for relatives, or fall for added extras like turning the picture “into a magnet, keyring or snow globe”, prices “can run up” to £100 or more, said The Guardian.

Parents are increasingly baulking at shelling out for “mundane headshots” when it’s so easy to use AI tools to erase the photographer’s watermark and get the pictures for free, said Futurism. Some are even opting to “fast-track school picture day” altogether by taking their own photos of their children and then “tossing them into ChatGPT, with a prompt” to “make it look like a school picture”. The tool then adds that “milquetoast background” school photographers so favour, and you’re done.

Privacy concerns

The big catch with this approach is that your child’s face “may not survive the edit”, said Gadget Review. Even after “explicitly asking” the chatbot to “preserve” your child’s features, a face “can change during generation”. You may end up with slightly different “eyes, facial proportions, and hairline”.

Uploading your child’s image to an AI chatbot may also “pose a bigger concern”, said USA Today. That image won’t be discarded after you’re done, even if you delete the chat; it will be kept for potential use in training AI to “generate more refined content”. You are “basically seeding your child’s image into a large language model, and who knows how that can be manipulated” in the future, legal expert Daliah Saper told the paper.

And scrubbing watermarks could “end up being far more costly” than paying for the official photo, said US business magazine Fast Company. Doing so is copyright infringement, and photography companies could choose to pursue legal action, hitting parents with fines that could run into hundreds of pounds.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ school experiment reads like “an Aesop’s fable for progressives,” said Coleman Hughes in The Free Press. Ten years ago, the New York Times journalist wrote a viral essay explaining why she’d enrolled her 6-year-old daughter, Najya, in an underperforming, majority-Black public school. Better public schools were available near her Brooklyn home, and she and her husband could afford to go private. But Hannah-Jones—best known as creator of the Times’ “1619 Project”—felt an “obligation to be part of the struggle” against racial and class stratification, and believed that her daughter’s presence would help improve the failing school. Ten years on, Hannah-Jones has written a viral follow-up, headlined “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” Far from lifting up the school, we discover, Najya was “dragged down” by it. Hannah-Jones recounts how assignments went ungraded and disruptive students monopolized the attention of teachers—on the rare occasions those teachers weren’t absent. At Najya’s middle school, there was “no homework whatsoever.” When Najya eventually chose and tested into a majority white and Asian high school, she was woefully unprepared. Now 16, Najya feels cheated by her mother’s choices. “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids,” she told Nikole, “you would have thought about me.”

Hannah-Jones should feel no guilt, said Jenice Armstrong in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Unlike most of us, she found the courage to “practice her principles,” but faced the same “no-win choice” as many “socially conscious Black parents.” Do we send our kids to neighborhood schools, struggling after decades of “systemic” neglect? Or do we pull strings and write checks to access schools in whiter, more affluent zip codes, condemning our kids to “social isolation and subtle discrimination?” Najya is now getting A’s and B’s, Hannah-Jones writes, but in classrooms where kids toss around “racial slurs as if it were cool.”

Those trade-offs are real and agonizing, said Elizabeth Grace Matthew in USA Today. But Hannah-Jones is “evading the truth” about why her daughter’s schools were so bad. She handwaves at “racism” and “segregation” in progressive New York City, and at funding disparities between heavily white and nonwhite districts. But the worst of Najya’s schools spends $52,349 a student annually, far above the national average. Not mentioned by Hannah-Jones are the teachers’ unions that have built a system where their members can “do nothing and get paid.” Neither are the progressive “education professors” who decided tests, discipline, and academic rigor were all oppressive structures to be dismantled. Hannah-Jones helped promote this “faux-enlightened ideology,” even as her own daughter suffered its ravages.

Let’s not overdramatize, said Noah Smith in his Substack newsletter. Judging by international test results, Americans are getting “pretty good value” from the money we spend on public education. If we want better value still, we should abandon our “obsession with shrinking class sizes” through hiring more teachers, and start paying higher salaries to better teachers who can make “a big difference in disadvantaged kids’ lives.” With the right policies, all our children can receive a high-quality education in classrooms filled with kids of all backgrounds, said Jill Filipovic in Slate. But we won’t get there if progressives demand “individual parents make intolerable sacrifices that set back the people they love most,” or if they insist “the only way to even the scales is by setting both sides to zero.”

“Authorities seek to drive us out of our places of study through budget cuts, the closure of places, dilapidated buildings, selection, or repression, let’s not let them: let’s block and retake the universities and high schools!”, wrote the Student Union and the High School Trade Union in a statement last week.

What started as a “spontaneous blockade” of a high school in a Paris suburb in mid-September, has now led to the closure of up to 500 schools across the country, said Le Monde. Since protests began, more than 5,000 people have been arrested, “85% of them minors”, said the same paper, with the education minister confirming that 24 schools had either been “burned or ransacked”, and millions of euros of damage caused.

Ever since the student demonstrations of May 1968 and, more recently, the gilets jaunes protests in 2018, “every government has run scared of angry French youth”, said Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield on the BBC. With no sign of slowing down, and presidential elections coming up, the protests will “send shivers” down the French government’s spine.

Why has this happened?

A major cause of the protest has been a lack of central government funding for the education system. On Thursday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu outlined a modest 1.7% rise in education spending to €65.53 billion (£55.7 billion) in a draft of the 2027 budget, said The Telegraph. However, this is below the rate of inflation, and excludes teacher pensions. Traditionally, education has been the “largest item in the French budget”, but this year, debt-servicing costs are expected to reach €74.5 billion (£63.1 billion), according to the draft.

Another “main complaint” is a shortage of teachers and support staff in schools, said Time Magazine. In the year 2024/25, nearly 10% of teaching hours in public secondary education went untaught, according to data from the education ministry. The majority of that (7.5%) was due to a failure to find substitute teachers, and 2.3% because of complete school closures.

Students have had to navigate “overcrowded classes of up to 40 children in crumbling buildings”, said The Guardian. “Ceilings partially collapsing during class, leaks, cockroaches and buildings in disrepair” are fairly common experiences.

Many have also found the online system designed for university applications – “Parcoursup”, the equivalent of UCAS – “opaque and difficult”, and in urgent need of reform. Discontent this year has also been exacerbated by “unbearable temperatures in classrooms during heatwaves in May and June”.

How has the government responded?

The government has “strongly condemned the violence and responded forcefully”, said The New York Times. On Friday, France’s justice minister Gérald Darmanin said on X that he would pursue a “firm” criminal response, and hold parents of minors civilly liable “wherever possible”.

But the government has also tried to “placate” the rapidly spreading protests, and has “acknowledged some of the students’ grievances”, said the NYT. Education minister Édouard Geffray announced on Thursday that the government would scrap plans to increase some higher education registration fees, an idea floated just hours before in the proposed 2027 budget. Ahead of meeting unions for talks on Friday, Geffray said he would introduce a new platform, where students could voice their thoughts for education reform, which would then be included in a “national report”, said Time.

Geffray also told broadcaster France 2 on Thursday evening that the protests, which were “legitimate at the outset”, had been “taken hostage by ultra-left groups”, said Le Monde. Lecornu’s team had directly blamed La France Insoumise (France Unbowed, or LFI) and “its ultra-left proxies” for the violence. LFI, led by presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has strongly denied the claim, though supported the students’ right to protest. However, party member and mayor of Paris suburb Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, had said that “violence can sometimes be legitimate”.

What could be the effect of the protests?

Talks between student representatives and Geffray “failed to produce the concrete measures they were seeking”, said The Wall Street Journal. Student unions have called for a third day of nationwide protest on Tuesday, joined by several teachers’ unions. The General Confederation of Labour, one of France’s largest unions, also “threw its support behind the demonstrations, raising the prospect of the unrest broadening beyond schools and universities”.

We cannot forget that French presidential elections are “only months away”, said the BBC. These protests, like many youth movements, are “unpredictable and shapeless”, and have “no clear structure” that would allow for negotiation. Because of this, they will have Emmanuel Macron in “cold sweats”.

One person who stands to gain is Mélenchon, who “stands a good chance of making it to the second round of the presidential elections”. Polls show he has “massive” support – around 40% – among 18- to 24-year-olds. He still lies behind Marine Le Pen in popularity, but given the current unrest, France is in “unstable territory”, and the “young people’s protests of recent days will indeed have been a harbinger” for the election’s results.

A debate has broken out at the University of St Andrews after a former student accused the establishment of having a “culture of anti-Scottish classism”.

In a LinkedIn post three weeks ago, Sophie Rose Jenkins said that the culture she encountered at the elite university made working-class students like her “feel ashamed of their home life”.

Speaking to The National, she recalled a group chat where members exchanged recommendations for designer clothes, and tutorials in which fellow students “refused to include me in the conversation because apparently, they couldn’t understand my accent”. She claimed disparaging attitudes extended to staff: an adviser attempted to remove her from an elective course, telling her she was likely to fail, only for her to average more than 90%.

‘Anti-Scottish bias’

Jenkins' story has “resonated with hundreds” of other students and “touched on a growing tension at St Andrews”, said The Guardian. “My parents were worried about me coming here,” a Scottish fresher on a scholarship told the newspaper. “They didn’t want me to be left out.” Since arriving, “most of the people I have met are international students” who maybe “can be a bit ignorant to the cost of things”.

The “exclusivity of expensive, invite-only events rattled me,” said another former St Andrews student Carla Jenkins in The Times. “I too experienced anti-Scottish bias.” An American tutor “disagreed with everything that I ever said”, including marking me down for “using the word ‘Glaswegian’”, and in tutorials I was “asked to speak slower or change the words I used”.

The “debate around classism at Scottish universities is not new,” said The Guardian. In 2024, Edinburgh University offered guidance on how students should treat one another after rising claims of discrimination and classism. “Don’t be a snob!” it advised.

St Andrews vice-principal Niall Scott acknowledged in a statement that some students arrive with “immature, offensive, and classist views”, but claimed “they tend not to leave with them”. Universities have a “crucial role to play in challenging these attitudes by bringing together people from different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives, encouraging understanding, respect, and inclusion”.

Manhattan microcosm

The feeling that Scotland’s most famous university is not a welcoming place for ordinary Scots is rooted in its unusually high international make-up. US students, many of them escaping even higher fees back home, represent around 20% of the total undergraduate body and are a particular source of friction. An article in student newspaper The Stand last year complained that “our beloved Scottish town is day by day turning into a microcosm of Manhattan’s elite world; complete with intrigue, privilege, and secrets that spread like wildfire”.

Scottish universities have a “capped number of places” each year for Scottish students, whose fees are paid by the devolved government. The issue is not as simple as Scots being “squeezed out” in favour of rich international students, said The Herald; the Scottish government has a limit on how many subsidised places it can fund. But in practice it means institutions may “continue to accept high fee-paying international students” while turning Scottish applicants away.

The international tuition fees are “significantly higher than what the government pays for a domestic student” so they’ve become “an essential, if increasingly volatile, source of income” for universities.

The Department of Education has formally rescinded the 2024 Title IX regulations, a Biden-era policy that extended the federal ban on sex discrimination in schools to also protect LGBTQ+ people. The change prompted pushback from advocates.

What has the Trump administration done instead?

In the regulations’ place, the department reinstated 2020 regulations from President Donald Trump’s first administration, which took immediate effect “without a notice-and-comment period,” said EducationWeek. Trump’s regulations outline “how schools must handle reports of sexual misconduct,” including setting a “stricter definition for what constitutes sexual harassment and giving more due process rights to those accused,” said The Washington Post.

The change formalizes how the Trump administration enforced Title IX since January 2025 and will “faithfully reflect court orders and congressional intent” while “reducing confusion for parents, students and educational institutions,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a press release. The department will continue to “hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.”

McMahon has “led the administration’s push to restrict civil rights protections based on gender identity,” said The New York Times. The Biden-era Title IX rule was “already struck down in the court system” after challenges from Republican states, said The Hill.

Who will the change affect?

Critics of the move say it will harm transgender athletes and weaken protections for sexual assault victims. Sexual harassment and assault “continue to be pervasive in schools,” Shiwali Patel, the senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement. But McMahon and the Trump administration have “decided to ignore what survivors need,” instead “weaponizing Title IX to attack trans students.”

Title IX is supposed to be about protecting students and “ensuring that they are safe from abuse, harassment and discrimination while they pursue their education,” said Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, in a press release. But “Trump and his cronies aren’t interested in any of that.” Rather than “enforcing protections for students,” they’re “rescinding them.”

The Trump administration doesn’t care if “sexual harassment and assault go unaddressed,” Robinson said. We know who will be hurt: “women, girls and others who are vulnerable to sexual harassment, assault and abuse — including LGBTQ+ students.”

When DOGE began cutting up government entities in 2025, among the most severely affected was the Education Department’s little-known National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Now, more than a year later, experts say the gutting of this center has made it very hard to keep track of the nation’s education goals.

What does NCES do?

The NCES is the federal body “responsible for collecting, analyzing and reporting data on the condition of U.S. education — from early childhood to adult education — to help improve student outcomes,” said the agency’s website. It produces reports via “direct student assessments, longitudinal studies, international surveys, postsecondary institutions, adult surveys and synthesizing data from federal sources.”

The agency has been significantly hampered by federal cuts from the Trump administration. As part of nearly $900 million in cuts to the Department of Education last year, NCES’ work was “abruptly terminated and its headcount dropped” massively, said The Guardian. Prior to the funding slashes, NCES had about 100 staffers; it currently has just 12, according to a government directory. This has “hamstrung the historically under-resourced agency’s ability to collect and report on a range of data on K-12 and college students.”

What will NCES do now?

The American Statistical Association put together a report on how the situation at NCES could be improved. More streamlined data collection would allow NCES to “much more readily modernize how it meets its responsibility to report on the condition and progress of education,” said the report. NCES should also be “ensuring that data is handled safely and ethically and is more useful to state and local practitioners,” said Education Week.

It would be beneficial for NCES to “become a more modern, data-centric partner to states” instead of returning to the “structure it had before it was largely dismantled” and relying on the methods it used before being gutted, said StateScoop. “What is lacking is national comparability,” said Shelly Martinez, an independent statistical consultant who worked on the report, to the outlet. “I think there is an interest and an understanding that there’s federal data that could really enhance those analyses and that evidence is building.”

“Nobody goes into politics, whatever party, to close a school,” said Una O’Halloran, leader of Islington council.

“There’s a generation that are not going to be having children, or maybe just having one child, and that’s really sad. You need children in the city.”

The number of pupils in the capital is falling, as birth rates decline, and costs for housing and childcare services increase. But as London’s population continues to rise, experts fear an unbalanced and unsustainable future for the city.

How bad is it?

Due to falling numbers, more than 90 schools have either closed or merged over the past five years, said a new report by London Councils. And the problem is “intensifying”. In Hackney, primary school numbers are down 15% since the pandemic, and projected to dip another 14% between 2024-25 and 2029-30. Islington is set for the “sharpest decline in the country” at 22%.

In the past five years across the UK, nine of the 10 fastest-shrinking local authorities for primary school children were in London, according to The Education Policy Institute. Eight were in inner London.

It is not just primary schools. Secondary school numbers, which have been “rising until 2026, will start to fall next year”, said Chris Smyth in the Financial Times.

But London’s population is rising, according to London Assembly Economy, Culture and Skills Committee (LAECSC) data, quoted in Bloomberg. In the decade up to 2023, the population increased by more than 500,000, yet the number of residents under 10 fell by 99,100.

And since 2018, 100 of London’s 2,500 schools – 4% – have closed, mostly in inner London. If this trend continues, the report warned, the capital could become a “childless city”.

Why is this happening?

Many experts think unaffordable housing and childcare are the principal causes of this decline. LAECSC data showed that the typical London home costs 11.1 times the average salary, compared with 7.7 times across England. Rents are also “60% higher than for England as a whole”, and nursery costs for a child under two in inner London are “34% higher than the English average”.

The birth rate in London also “continues its steady downward march”, said The Telegraph, revealing “an ageing city at the sharp end of Britain’s baby bust”. Many fertility rates in London hovered just above 1.0 births per woman in 2024, where 2.1 is needed to maintain a population. Some experts believe that “big jumps” in the minimum wage and National Insurance have left the childcare sector “reeling”, squeezing resources for parents and prospective parents.

Is London alone?

London’s falling numbers are “mirrored across cities in Europe and the US”, said Hugo Cox in the Financial Times. Primary school enrolment in Paris has “fallen by a quarter” in the last 10 years, while the same group in New York fell almost 20% in the decade to autumn 2024. In Barcelona, preschool entry – “the main entry point into the school system” – was 16% lower in 2024 than in 2016.

As in London, much of the decline is blamed on falling birth rates and rising housing costs. Also, in these cities a “growing use of homes for short-term rentals and housebuilding strategies geared away from families are fanning the demographic imbalance”. In other words, families are being forced out for financial reasons.

But these “divergent lines are not inevitable”. In Vienna, authorities provide family-sized homes, often through “large-scale subsidised or municipal housing”. Copenhagen, aided by high immigration, also implements “strong childcare and parental leave policies”. Both cities “buck the trend of falling child numbers”.

What will the consequences be?

“Change can create uncertainty and anxiety for children, families and staff,” said the foreword of the London Councils report. “While changes to school organisation are often discussed in terms of pupil numbers and finances, their human impact is equally important.” Closures can create a “genuine sense of loss, reflecting the deep connections between schools and the communities they serve”.

Councils are still hedging their bets, said Smyth in the FT. They are holding onto empty buildings in case of a revival. Hackney “planned for a pupil boom more than a decade ago”, only to be met with a decline. “It does not want to make the opposite mistake now.”

College campuses are alarmingly under-populated, said Marina Villeneuve in The Guardian. Enrollment is down at more than 1,000 institutions this year thanks to soaring tuition, Trump administration cuts to financial aid and international student visas, and “growing public skepticism about the value of a college degree.” Colleges are being forced into austerity. At the University of New Hampshire, “officials closed the dining hall on weekends, shut campus pharmacies, raised tuition, and laid off dozens of professors and staff members.” At Rhode Island’s Johnson & Wales University, students have protested “worsening dorm conditions” and “the rising cost of laundry and meal plans.” More than a dozen colleges now cost more than $100,000 a year, said Jessica Dickler in CNBC.com. But “tuition revenue has actually fallen” 8.1% in the past five years, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, because so many students now need financial assistance “to make higher education affordable.” David Greene, president of Maine’s Colby College, says it has trapped higher education in a “death spiral.”

It’s not just small schools “beginning to flail,” said Douglas Belkin and Roshan Fernandez in The Wall Street Journal. Syracuse University fell short of enrollment targets this academic year, “sending the school into a 1.5% budget shortfall.” It added nearly half a billion in debt recently to build new dorms. And despite a $2.5 billion endowment, Syracuse recently eliminated 93 academic programs “that it said didn’t draw enough students, such as child therapy and Middle Eastern studies.” What universities should be cutting, said Barry Lam in The Boston Globe, is their outrageous administrative spending. “There are now more nonteaching administrative staff than students at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.” Technology is making it worse. Take the University of California system, where a $170 million digital infrastructure project was supposed to cut administrative bloat by $753 million. Instead, the project “ballooned to $942 million” and was so ineffective it required an “entirely new” IT unit to operate.

Some believe “higher education is a bubble that is about to pop,” said Allison Schrager in Bloomberg. “That’s unlikely,” but it is due for “repricing.” For years, almost any tuition could seem justifiable, especially “at prestigious private schools.” Students are pushing back—with some opting for cheaper state schools in the South—but ultimately, demand isn’t going anywhere. “For most areas of study, there still exists a significant college wage premium (although it has shrunk a bit recently).” And if you graduate, odds are excellent that you’ll earn almost $1 million more over your lifetime and experience steadier job status. Universities once had to broaden their appeal beyond elites. “Now they will need to demonstrate their value to price-sensitive customers.”

How are boys and men struggling? 

Young men are falling behind women in nearly every area of life. In academic performance, boys lag well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where female undergraduates now outnumber their male peers roughly 2 to 1. That ratio was about even in the early 1980s. Most men have seen their real wages fall over the past four decades, and a growing share of young men are dropping out of the workforce. They have fewer friends than women and are three times as likely to suffer “deaths of despair” from alcohol or drugs, or by suicide. In a post-#MeToo world where the word “masculinity” is frequently preceded by “toxic,” experts say young men often encounter two competing narratives: one from the Right telling them to become a hyper-macho caricature, modeled by President Trump and manosphere influencers, and another from the Left implying they should keep quiet because they’re so privileged. “This is not a zero-sum game,” said New York University business professor Scott Galloway. “Women still face huge challenges, but we can also acknowledge our young men are struggling.”

When does the trouble start? 

At a very young age. Boys enter kindergarten behind girls in terms of academic preparedness and in behavioral skills, such as the ability to socialize and regulate emotions. That gender gap continues throughout school: Girls score better on reading and writing tests— they are almost a full grade ahead of boys by ninth grade—and earn higher GPAs. Boys, meanwhile, are roughly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and twice as likely to be suspended; they also drop out at higher rates than their female classmates. Researchers believe some of this disparity could be a result of the increasing emphasis on academics and testing in the earliest years of education, which may make the learning experience harder for boys, who mature later than girls. Educators and policymakers have also spent several decades focused on correcting historical gender inequalities that held back girls. But some experts worry that educational excellence itself is now “coded” as female, discouraging boys.

What happens after school?

The decline of traditionally male-dominated industries such as manufacturing have hit men’s pay and employment potential. Inflation-adjusted wages for men dropped 3% from 1979 to 2019, while those of women—who earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by men—rose nearly 29%. And of the 1.2 million new jobs added between February 2024 and February 2026, about two-thirds went to women. That pattern is likely to be replicated in future jobs reports as sectors with large shares of women workers, such as health care and social services, continue to expand while male-heavy sectors like construction and tech either shrink or stagnate. Faced with these difficulties, a growing number of young men are simply giving up on employment. Today, nearly 1 in 9 prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work, and about 1 in 5 men ages 25 to 34 still live with their parents, compared with 1 in 10 women in that demographic.

Does this affect men’s mental health? 

It’s causing a crisis of loneliness. Men ages 18 to 30 spent 18% more time alone in 2023 than in 2019—an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours—according to time-use surveys by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s 22% more alone time than same-age women. “The more that you’re sitting on the couch,” said Gary Barker, head of progressive gender-equality group Equimundo, “your social network gets narrower and then you don’t have the social capital or the skills to step into a job.” In an Equimundo poll, almost two-thirds of men ages 18 to 30 said nobody knew them well; a quarter hadn’t seen anyone outside their home in the past week. Dan and Joana Moreno of Miami have seen this crisis play out in their family. Their daughter finished business school and got engaged in 2024; that year, their three adult sons were all single and still living at home. Middle son Daniel, 27, dropped out of college in 2019. “Nothing is really stopping me,” he said. “It’s just myself, standing in my own way.”

Where does that aimlessness lead?

Experts believe it’s to blame for a sharp increase in the suicide rate among men ages 25 to 34, which climbed 30% from 2010 to 2023. Social isolation, said psychologist Matthew Nock, means men are “less likely to reach out for care [and] less well connected to others.” Feelings of isolation and a lack of purpose are also pushing young men toward the manosphere, a loose network of online communities and misogynist influencers such as the hugely popular Andrew Tate—who with his brother, Tristan, is fighting extradition to the U.K. on charges of rape and sex trafficking—that promote male dominance and blame men’s woes on a “feminized” society. “These spaces are really taking advantage of those insecurities and a need for validation,” said Kalliopi Mingeirou of U.N. Women.

Can young men get back on track? 

Many experts note that the gender gap in academic achievement can be addressed, as shown by the fact that girls have caught up in math with boys in recent years. “So we could help boys catch up in reading,” said Sean Reardon, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. “We just haven’t organized society and schools yet to do that.” Richard Reeves, head of the nonpartisan American Institute for Boys and Men, argues for boys to start kindergarten at age 6 rather than 5, so they’re better cognitively matched with girls, and for more men to be encouraged to enter more-heavily female professions, such as nursing and teaching. “It is not that men have fewer opportunities,” he said. “It is that they are not taking them.” Reeves adds that it’s in all of society’s interest to help lift up boys and young men. “A world of floundering men,” he says, “is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”

‘In the land of billionaire barbarians’

Arielle Pardes at The New York Times

Silicon Valley is “home to four of the most powerful companies in the world,” yet “by looking at it, you’d hardly know this place had any influence,” says Arielle Pardes. Tech billionaires have “donated generously to scientific research and global health initiatives, but little of their money goes to improving their own backyard.” The “lack of investment in the cities where our tech lords work and live reveals a stark reality about how this wealth benefits a select few.”

Read more

‘Should the classroom be more like the gym?’

Dan Rockmore at The New Yorker

The “body offers something that the mind — at least in a traditional classroom — rarely does: clear, immediate loops linking effort and result,” says Dan Rockmore. In the “gym, we can steadily feel ourselves getting stronger,” but in the “classroom, progress can be difficult to see.” This “clarifies our real responsibilities: drawing out the quiet student, asking the question nobody thought to ask, forging a community of mind and friendship from the struggles of a classroom.”

Read more

‘The people — OK, the men — who still love Bitcoin’

Nathaniel Moore at Slate

Among a “predominantly male crowd,” Bitcoin and “other cryptocurrencies offer an appealing alternative because they are not issued or managed by a central bank,” says Nathaniel Moore. The “concept of financial freedom — not having to trust anyone else — is the logical endpoint of the belief that the systems of American life cannot be mended, only circumvented.” Investors are “following the example set by those at the top: looking out for themselves and trying to swell their own stash.”

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‘The first mRNA flu vaccine may be just the beginning’

Sally C. Pipes at the Chicago Tribune

“Flu season is coming. And for the first time, Americans will have an mRNA vaccine to help fight it,” says Sally C. Pipes. Since “mRNA vaccines can be produced faster than conventional shots, manufacturers may eventually be able to wait longer before deciding which strains to target — and respond faster if circulating strains change.” During the “pandemic, mRNA became almost synonymous with Covid-19 vaccines,” but “anger over government coercion shouldn’t become hostility toward a promising medical technology.”

Read more

Currently, in much of England outside major cities, county councils provide one set of services, and district and borough councils another. County councils cover education, transport and roads, town planning, fire and public safety, social care, and services such as libraries; while district and borough councils, covering smaller geographical areas within the counties, look after more locally focused services such as rubbish collection and recycling, council tax collections, council housing and planning.

The government’s plan, known as local government reorganisation (LGR), was to replace this two-tier system with “unitary authorities”, bringing all responsibilities together into one body, by early 2028.

In five authorities – Surrey, Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk – this process was launched in 2025. In one of the last announcements of Keir Starmer’s government, Steve Reed, the then-secretary of state for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), said 14 other councils would also be reorganised.

Why were they being merged?

The two-tier system, which dates back to the 1970s, was brought in to ensure a balance of central services designed to cover a large geographical area, and local responsiveness on smaller-scale matters. But according to Reed, setting out these plans in December 2024, the system leads to “outdated and misaligned structures that slow down delivery, fragmenting public services, hampering housebuilding and slowing down important decision making”.

Unitary authorities already cover much of England. In 1986, 32 London boroughs and 36 other metropolitan districts became unitary authorities. Since the mid-1990s, 62 other unitary authorities have been created, most recently North Yorkshire, Somerset and Cumbria; over 65% of England’s population already lives in one. The hope was that consolidation would produce major savings, reducing management, back-office operations and other kinds of duplication – and that it would help give more efficient services to residents.

So what happened?

LGR has triggered fierce resistance across England. Essex County Council, now led by Reform UK, challenged the government’s proposals in court; Norfolk, Suffolk and Hampshire were following suit. There were objections from Devon to Rutland. Last Monday, the new MHCLG minister, Angela Rayner, officially announced the withdrawal of all LGR proposals for Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Hampshire. A further 14 council reorganisations were paused pending a “rapid review”. The only LGR process now going ahead is Surrey.

Why were the plans opposed?

Many council leaders were furious that central government was choosing to “rearrange the deckchairs”, when they are already facing so many challenges: debt, social care, special educational needs, housebuilding.

The proposed reorganisations were often highly complex. For Essex, the plan was to turn one county council, 12 low-tier councils and two existing unitary councils into five streamlined unitaries by 2028. This would have greatly reduced the number of councillors (from about 700 to perhaps 430), a deliberate policy to reduce costs. The plans, complained Peter Harris, Reform leader of Essex County Council, are “ill-thought, expensive, purely ideological in nature and seek to create further democratic distance between the people of Essex and their elected local politicians”.

What other objections were there?

In some cases, the issue was whether the new authority would be financially viable: the proposed East Norfolk Council would have been one of Britain’s poorest. In Devon, the plan was to merge eight existing second-tier authorities and one county council into four unitary authorities: three based on Plymouth, Exeter and Torbay, and one covering the very large, impoverished “rural rump”, with a vast road network.

The residents of Rutland, England’s smallest county, home to 41,000 East Midlanders, objected that their small unitary authority was to be subsumed into a bigger unitary in neighbouring Leicestershire. The county’s MP, Tory Alicia Kearns, said Rutlanders would “have our identity stripped from us”. Several historic UK cities were also cited as being at risk of being legally demoted to “towns”: Canterbury City Council was to be absorbed into East Kent Authority, perhaps losing its city status.

Is there still a case for going through with LGR?

Yes. North Yorkshire Council, for instance, is an advocate for the process. It has achieved £68 million in recurring annual savings, since it merged seven district councils and one county council into one in 2023 – by removing duplicated senior executives, using smarter central procurement, pruning unneeded offices, and so on.

But the overall financial benefits and costs of LGR are disputed. A PwC report commissioned by the County Councils Network found, in 2020, that savings of £2.9 billion could be made. But this is contested: the BBC found that the government had failed to do “its own analysis of the costs”. The transition itself would be costly: the PwC report found that it could cost £850 million. Norfolk County Council said it would cost it £96 million.

What’s happening now?

It’s unclear whether this is just a pause, or the end of the LGR process. Rayner said: “In light of legal advice, I want to satisfy myself firstly that the right process is in place, that it is robust, and of course complies with the law.” She added that she wanted to be sure it met “the priorities of a new administration”. There was satisfaction in local authorities, but also anger. “The most ambitious change to local government in a generation now looks in danger of becoming a colossal white elephant – a huge drain on time, resources and goodwill,” said the Local Government Intelligence Unit, a think-tank.

‘Security clearances don’t determine whom a president can trust — they reveal risks the president may not know’

Brian O’Neill at The Conversation

One of President Donald Trump’s “closest aides, Natalie Harp, worked in the White House for more than a year without completing the normal security clearance process,” and the “circumstances surrounding Harp are unusual, but the tension they expose is not,” says Brian O’Neill. Spies “do not need an aide to carry classified files out of the West Wing to gain something useful.” For “someone operating within the president’s immediate circle, an undiscovered vulnerability can carry significantly greater consequences.”

Read more

‘Rosh Hashanah offers a lesson from the lasting legacy of Sept. 11’

Yehuda Ceitlin at the Arizona Daily Star

The “25th anniversary of Sept. 11 falls this year on Friday, Sept. 11,” when Jews “around the world will celebrate Rosh Hashanah and welcome the Jewish year 5787,” says Rabbi Yehuda Ceitlin. Sept. 11 “taught us, terribly, how far a human action can reach.” But “human influence works in other ways too.” A “mitzvah can have an impact we may never see,” and “kindness can be remembered.” As “Rosh Hashanah begins this Sept. 11, perhaps that is worth remembering.”

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‘10 years after Sinjar, the world still fails to protect vulnerable communities’

Cudi Zerey at The Hill

On “Aug. 3, 2014, fighters from the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq swept into Sinjar, the ancestral homeland of Iraq’s Yazidi minority,” says Cudi Zerey. Within “days, thousands were killed, thousands more were kidnapped and enslaved, and entire communities were uprooted.” But a “decade later, the most important lesson of Sinjar remains largely unlearned.” The “failure was not simply that ISIS committed atrocities.” The “failure was that nearly every layer of protection collapsed at the same time.”

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‘Head Start offers a model for ending preschool pushout. Don’t weaken it.’

Hillary Linardopoulos at The Philadelphia Inquirer

RFK Jr. has “announced plans for sweeping deregulation” of the Head Start program, says Hillary Linardopoulos. But “suspensions and expulsions of our youngest learners, which are harmful to a child’s development and can profoundly impact their future, disproportionately harm Black and brown children.” Head Start policy “prohibits the expulsion of students in its programs and severely restricts suspensions to extraordinary circumstances.” This “policy is one that should be expanded.”

Read more

Founded in 1440 by King Henry VI, Eton College is a “rarefied bubble of educational privilege” that will have taught the country’s next two kings, said The Telegraph. Prince George will this week follow his father, uncle and 20 British prime ministers by attending the £21,891-per-term boarding school west of London.

Speaking in 2000, Prince William said that he “really enjoyed being able to go about Eton as just another student”, although in his autobiography published in 2023 Prince Harry was critical of his time at the school.

George will be exposed to the same “idiosyncrasies” of the institution, but changing times present new challenges for the young prince.

‘Own language and traditions’

Prince George will be one of “250 apprehensive first years” arriving at the school for their first term, said The Telegraph. In the first few days, George and his classmates will settle into their accommodation and begin learning “Eton’s peculiar geography” and the typical “rhythm of the day”. School days begin with a 10-minute morning chapel service, followed by around seven lessons, and at least two hours of “intense sport”, as well as “EW (extra work)”, Eton’s name for homework.

“Eton has its own language and its own traditions,” said The Sunday Times. Each house has a “dame”, Eton’s version of a matron, who will “regularly pop in for a chat with George and the other F-Blockers”, or first years. He will also be assigned an “‘uncle’” and a “timelord” from among the older boys in his house. The former will explain the intricacies of Eton’s uniform – a “black morning suit with pinstripe trousers” – and mastering the “front studs, back studs and detachable collars”. The latter will help him arrange his schedule and extra-curricular activities, which might include “22-inch calibre rifle shooting on the school range” or “auditioning for a play”.

“The school has so many unique names and phrases that there is an ‘Eton Glossary’ on its website,” said the Daily Express. George will be expected to learn and use the terms “pop” (senior prefects), “dry bobs” (those who play cricket instead of rowing in the summer) and “beaks” (teachers). On day one, new pupils are quizzed on these “unique phrases of the school”, as well as the colours of each of its 25 houses.

Even though Eton is close to Forest Lodge, the Waleses’ eight-bedroom Windsor home, George will be a full boarder, said Hello! This means he will go home “every two or three weeks”, although he will enjoy a room to himself, as “there are no shared rooms at Eton”.

‘Challenge’ for security

For George, going to Eton will be a chance to “find his first tribe away from home”, said The Telegraph. But being a future king does not entitle you to “become a BNOC (big name on campus)” at Eton. “No one cares who your parents are, because almost everybody’s parents are someone.”

However, the young royal differs from his peers in having “greater protection than any heir in modern times”, said The i Paper. The Prince and Princess of Wales have fought for a “tighter approach” to media access than William and Harry experienced at Eton. They were part of a “gentleman’s agreement”, in which photos were traded to the press from a select number of events in exchange for leaving them alone.

While media coverage of the royals has “undergone a sea change since the 90s”, Prince George still faces a “bigger threat” to his privacy and security than his predecessors. The “rise of phone cameras, Meta glasses and other smart spectacles” are a “challenge” for the 24-strong security team at the school. Eton’s facilities are “dotted around the town”, meaning George is likely to encounter tourists who are not subject to the same rules and regulations as the media. “Take a close look at pictures of Prince George released ahead of his first day at Eton. They may be the last we see of him for some time.”

What happened

New York City on Wednesday announced that AI tools will be banned in public grade and middle schools and sharply limited for high school students. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office called the one-year moratorium the country’s “most expansive” limits on AI in schools. The “sweeping new policy” for the nation’s largest school district will also bar individual screens for students until third grade, The New York Times said. “So-called companion chatbots” will be “banned in all grades,” and “all high schoolers will be taught about AI literacy.”

Who said what

“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary,” Mamdani said in a speech Wednesday. “We do not see it that way.” A “backlash” from parents “against the growing use of digital devices and AI in the classroom” has pushed many school districts to enact new restrictions, the Times said. The Los Angeles school district — the nation’s second-largest — just began “temporarily blocking access to generative AI tools on student devices across all grades,” The Associated Press said. Other schools are “working to teach children how to incorporate the technology while preventing them from relying too heavily on it or using it to cheat.”

What next?

New York’s new rules will be in place for this school year, which begins next week, and can be extended or amended.

While cooler fall days may be on the horizon, many students returning to school are still dealing with scorching end-of-summer temperatures. As climate change exacerbates the heat, experts say the negative effects of sizzling classrooms are here to stay, especially in school districts that may not have the resources to combat hotter weather.

How do hot classrooms affect students?

Students can often “struggle to learn in hot, stuffy classrooms,” as “air quality, temperature and ventilation” can affect how people “think, focus and perform,” said Time. These factors are aggravated in poorer school districts, where a lack of air conditioning “can impair cognitive function, while excessive heat diverts the body’s energy from learning, slows reaction time and weakens attention.” Average temperatures of 80 degrees to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and above are “known to exacerbate student absenteeism and disciplinary referrals.”

While heat has always been an issue in underfunded classrooms, it “doesn’t just affect places like Phoenix, which is well-known for its scorching temperatures that don’t always drop by much in the evenings,” Allison Poulos and Jennifer Vanos, a pair of health solutions and sustainability professors at Arizona State University, said at The Conversation. A number of cities, even in the northern U.S., are “oppressively hot when the new school year begins in August or September — and they are only getting warmer.”

Many schools have also “moved the start of the academic year earlier into the summer over the last several years,” said Poulos and Vanos, exposing kids to peak heat waves. But these schools “lack the infrastructure — from inadequate air conditioning to fields and play areas that are not shaded — to cope with high temperatures.” In 2025, 156 school districts nationwide saw an average of 30 more school days over 80 degrees Fahrenheit than they did in 1970, according to a study from the Center for Climate Integrity.

How are schools fighting the heat?

Many school districts are working to combat issues with HVAC systems directly amid concerns from parents. The superintendent of the Tulsa School District in Oklahoma “visited several schools and found the buildings she entered were cool but acknowledged that some sites are struggling with their air conditioning systems,” KOTV-DT Tulsa said. For schools that don’t yet have air conditioning, teachers are being asked to “close classroom doors once students are inside and shut blinds to help retain cool air.”

Conditions were even worse during summer school classes. In Boston, classrooms averaged 100 degrees Fahrenheit over several days in June, which parents “say forced teachers in nonair-conditioned buildings to turn off lights and spritz students with water to keep them cool,” said The Boston Globe. Once that heat wave broke, temperatures still “remained stubbornly high in some schools.” The problems continued even after the dog days of summer passed. Toward the end of August, students in a Northern Colorado district “spent the first three school days of the year leaving class two hours early” due to heat, said CBS News.

Experts say modern HVAC systems should “offer schools a way to deliver reliable heating and cooling while reducing exposure to volatile fossil fuel costs,” said Time. Using “energy tax credits and a mechanism known as Elective Pay, public school districts can receive direct financial support to invest in these improvements,” turning “what was once out of reach into a practical, near-term option.” School districts in Indiana, Virginia, Wisconsin and more are already implementing these new systems.

Why is it so hard to find somewhere to give birth? Is the pioneer of the Arab Spring preparing for another revolution? And should we welcome a new round of reading rows?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

A podcast for curious, open-minded people, The Week Unwrapped delivers fresh perspectives on politics, culture, technology and business. It makes for a lively, enlightening discussion, ranging from the serious to the offbeat. Previous topics have included whether solar engineering could refreeze the Arctic, why funerals are going out of fashion, and what kind of art you can use to pay your tax bill.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
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The Trump administration has found another way to put pressure on American universities. This time it’s using the Defense Department.

The Pentagon has ordered a slew of universities to audit their relationships with foreign academic organizations, mostly in China. While some of these universities are pushing back against allegations of wrongdoing, the Pentagon is holding steady.

What is the Pentagon asking for?

The Defense Department is asking for 30 universities to “initiate immediate and comprehensive reviews of their academic, financial and research collaborations with foreign entities of concern,” according to an order released by the agency. The universities have been given until Aug. 31 to “complete a comprehensive audit of all identified foreign collaborations, assess the exposure of sensitive or export-controlled research and implement strict mitigation plans, including the termination of problematic partnerships.”

The Defense Department did not identify which universities it was targeting, but The Guardian later published a full list of the 30 schools. Some of the most prominent include Ivy League institutions Cornell University and Harvard University, as well as prestigious schools like Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University and New York University. Numerous state schools, including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Minnesota and three branches of the University of California system are also listed.

If these universities do not complete these audits, they may not “maintain eligibility for future federal research funding,” said the Pentagon. The order is largely targeted at university research relationships with Chinese institutions and is the “latest effort to clamp down on alleged Chinese influence in the U.S., including in higher education,” said Time. The Trump administration has “argued that China exploits U.S.-funded research to obtain sensitive technology and intellectual property.”

The list of foreign institutions reportedly tied to U.S. universities was released by the Pentagon in July. The majority of these institutions, 88 out of 130, are in “mainland China, while the remaining institutions are in Russia and Iran,” said Time. While some of these Chinese facilities “have more explicit ties to the military, others are prominent civilian institutions with extensive international research partnerships.” Institutional links to the government are common in China given that “Chinese Communist Party structures are embedded throughout the country’s universities.”

What have the various responses been?

While some are supportive of the efforts to weed out Chinese influence among American universities, others fear that the allegations are unfounded. “We don’t appreciate the implication that we are not good partners on research security, given that we helped create this list and given that we’ve always partnered with the federal government when there have been national security concerns,” Sarah Spreitzer, the vice president at the American Council on Education, said to The Associated Press.

China is also pushing back against the Pentagon’s assertions. Beijing opposes the “overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicization or instrumentalization of normal scientific, educational and academic exchanges,” a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

Republicans leading the audit charge are standing firm. “Research partnerships and collaboration with Chinese entities linked to the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese army present undeniable national security risks,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said in a statement.

While hundreds of thousands of people rely on the U.S. government’s Head Start program for low-income children, major cut proposals by the Trump administration have families worried about what it could mean for their kids. Even as there has been some bipartisan pushback to the slashes, aspects of children’s lives from school to home to doctor’s offices could be affected.

Why is the government slashing Head Start?

The plan for the funding cuts is overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which runs Head Start. The goal of the cuts is “removing unnecessary bureaucracy, strengthening nutrition and physical health, trusting parents and local communities, and opening Head Start to hundreds of thousands more children,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement.

The proposed cuts would constitute nearly a complete retooling of Head Start, which was launched in 1965 as the nation’s primary child antipoverty program, providing education, health and nutritional assistance. The agency’s changes would “remove most of Head Start’s 133 pages of federal requirements for math and literacy curricula, class sizes, medical screenings and home visits,” said The New York Times. Even a “requirement that children brush their teeth after meals would end.”

What effect will this have?

Many are concerned that the cuts would have a disastrous impact on the 1,600 Head Start providers who fight childhood poverty. Head Start “ensures children receive healthcare, developmental screenings, nutritious meals, disability services, highly qualified teachers and strong partnerships with families,” Joel Ryan, the director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, said to the Times. HHS’ proposal “would weaken those protections for hundreds of thousands of children.”

Part of the plan involves reducing the cap on federal money that can go to Head Start’s administrative costs from 15% to 5%. Trump administration officials hope this will “free up funding to serve as many as 268,000 more children,” said The Washington Post. It would also give states a “wide leeway to craft the program to their liking.” But some are concerned that stripping away Head Start’s nationwide criteria and shrinking the cap would have a largely negative effect.

“It wouldn’t be Head Start anymore,” Jen Bailey, who operates several Head Start programs in Madison, Wisconsin, said to the Post. Head Start could become a “shell of a program” without national standards, Bailey added. Even some Republicans appear worried. “Just walking away and turning a blind eye toward it, I don’t think that’d be a good idea,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said to USA Today. The program helps “a lot, a lot, a lot of kids.” And “a lot of times we can make it better, but there are ways we can make it worse too,” Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) told the outlet.

“At first glance, these proposed changes might not seem so terrible, but as you dig deeper into it, what we will find is that there really are a lot of changes that will impact what is the heart of Head Start,” Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, the senior vice president at nonprofit Start Early, told The 19th. The current standards aren’t only the federal regulations. They “really are the foundation for how we ensure that programs across the country are supporting children, families and communities in the way that they want best.”

When Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history in 2023, he was “lionised by the academic world” and became a “poster boy for the university’s diversity drive”, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph.

Then only 37, he had defied “almost impossible odds” to get there. Raised on a council estate in south London, he was diagnosed with autism at the age of three. He couldn’t speak until he was 11, and did not read or write until 18. Yet he’d managed to obtain a bachelor’s degree, followed by a PhD, and had gone on to forge a remarkable career in academia. Now, though, the sociology professor – who has tendered since his resignation as a fellow at Jesus College – is “the subject of a bitter row over plagiarism that has pitted his peers against each other”.

Long-standing concerns

His critics note that his PhD thesis contains passages that are strikingly similar to those in other academic papers. His defenders say that these were innocent errors, resulting from a lack of formal supervision when he was doing his PhD, and insufficient support for his complex learning disabilities. They say he cited the sources in question in his bibliography, but failed to do so within the text proper.

Concerns about Arday’s work have circulated in academic circles for several years, said Jennifer Schuessler and Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. But they “exploded into public view” last month, when Nathan Cofnas, a self-defined “race realist” who was sacked from Cambridge in 2024, published a lengthy blogpost about them.

As journalists dug deeper, said Guy Adams in the Daily Mail, other aspects of Arday’s “Hollywood-style life story” were also called into question. For instance, doubts were cast about his claim to have raised £5.5 million for charity, including by running an astonishing 600 miles in six days. He has since said it was actually 12 days, and that the £5.5 million was a collective effort.

Fraught topic

“Academic integrity matters,” said Daniella Maison in The Independent. But Arday was officially cleared of plagiarism some years ago. That he is still being pursued over his PhD, and other achievements that are not even related to his job, suggest that legitimate scrutiny has shifted into something more “punitive”.

Yet leading academics told this paper that the scrutiny was “fair” for a professor at Cambridge, said Lanre Bakare in The Guardian. This is a fraught business, and the stakes are high for all concerned. The university – which appointed Arday at a time when its own track record on race was being scrutinised in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement – is facing questions about its judgement. As for Arday, he could lose his reputation, and his career.

With back-to-school season in full swing across parts of the U.S., many American families are feeling an extra pain in their wallets from buying school supplies. The cost of these supplies ebbs and flows over the years, but economists say 2026 is an especially difficult year for buying new pencils or glue sticks — and families may not feel relief in the near future.

How much have school supply costs increased?

The “price of a typical school supply list has increased 7.7% over the past year, with some essentials seeing much larger jumps,” according to an analysis from progressive think tanks The Century Foundation and Groundwork Collaborative. The highest spikes were seen among lunch boxes, which had a 26.8% year-to-year jump; notebooks, up 23%; index cards, up 22%; and notebook paper, up 20%. In total, families will pay about $175 more on school items in 2026, the think tanks said.

The spike in school supplies isn’t entirely new. The average “school supply list costs about 34% more than it did 10 years ago,“ which “works out to roughly 3 to 4% per year over the last decade,” said WWL-TV. In addition, “today’s supply lists often go well beyond the basics, with requests for disinfectant wipes, paper towels, copy paper and, in some cases, electronics like Chromebooks or laptops.” These requirements can “leave families with fewer opportunities to save.”

Combined with the rising cost of food, the average U.S. household will spend about $4,000 this year between school supplies and school lunches, the think tanks said. At least 45% of parents “plan to take on debt to pay for back-to-school shopping this year,” according to a Credit Karma survey, while half of American parents are “cutting back on other expenses to make room for back-to-school shopping,” said Deloitte.

Why have school supplies become so expensive?

Many are pointing to the economic policies of the Trump administration as a cause. The White House’s tariffs “on a range of imports have driven up the price of binders, pencils and other school supplies,” said CBS News. Many school supplies, including pens, markers and notebooks, are “manufactured overseas, making them subject to higher tariffs.” Newell Brands, the makers of supplies including Sharpie, Paper Mate and Elmer’s glue, announced they’d be implementing price increases to offset the tariffs.

Beyond the tariffs, other “school supply companies also blame higher energy costs due to the Iran war for having to raise their prices,” said CBS. ACCO, the parent brand of Mead and Trapper Keeper, has said that “higher oil prices stemming from the conflict have driven up the company’s costs and led to price hikes for consumers.” With all of these global issues, parents at home “don’t have a lot of wiggle room on the matter,” Julie Margetta Morgan, the president of The Century Foundation, said to The 19th.

Many parents are “searching their local back-to-school fairs for supplies, or seeking out backpack giveaways and school supply distributions” to lessen the burden, and others are “working more over the summer to cover increased costs,” said The 19th. Still, not all parents are feeling the relief. Content creator Victoria Albano posted a recent reel on Instagram showing a $230 Target bill for her incoming first grader’s school supplies. “I was up all night trying to figure out what to buy and what not to buy,” Albano told The 19th. “I’m not struggling, but I’m not where I want to be.”

When Michael Gove became education secretary in 2010, the UK’s scores in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), which compares education attainment across 38 developed countries, were “at an all-time low”, said The Times. Gove used the data to “argue for urgent reforms” and introduced a new curriculum in England that emphasised core subjects.

Since then, the UK’s 15-year-olds have “climbed global rankings” in literacy and numeracy; they are now ninth among OECD peers for reading (up from 20th) and 11th for maths (up from 22nd). In the most recent Pisa assessment, the UK’s scores were all “above the OECD average”.

But Andy Burnham’s new education secretary, Lucy Powell, has blamed Gove’s school reforms for Britain’s youth worklessness crisis. Powell argues the “over-focus on academic outcomes” has “left too many young people behind”, said Gove in The Times, whereas “the truth is precisely the opposite”. Powell suggests she will overhaul the curriculum to focus on less academic subjects. “In other words: bring back stupid.”

‘Genuine’ success

I’m not saying England’s education system is “perfect,” said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. But “the focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum” has led to “better outcomes for most pupils”. The proportion of children getting good GCSEs has “continued to climb”, but grade inflation has remained “relatively low”. England’s school system is a “genuine public policy success of the last 25 years”.

And the improvements “have been seen across the board”, said Amanda Spielman, former chief inspector of Ofsted, in The Spectator: for children who are both less and more academic, for disadvantaged and advantaged. There is “plenty of space” within the curriculum for teenagers to “take up technical and vocational subjects” – we have some excellent courses and qualifications on offer. But there is “nothing wrong” with expecting all pupils to study the core subjects too, “as would be normal in the countries whose technical education systems we look to and admire”.

Many people believed Gove’s “deeply unpopular” reforms were a “big step backwards”, said The Economist. But countries that “pressed on with more fashionable approaches” have seen their scores fall. Experts “downplay the importance of learning crunchy stuff”, but “more tedious methods” appear to “get better results”. The data comparing us to other developed nations gives us “good reason to think that England’s reforms are starting to bear fruit”.

‘Partial’ success

Comparisons with international averages disguise a “decline in national educational attainment”, said The Times. Our actual scores have “hardly risen”. England is outperforming Scotland and Wales, which “took a different approach to reform”, but overall the UK’s latest Pisa figures for science have dropped 14 points compared with 2009. Maths has dropped three, and reading has remained the same.

It’s the declines among OECD peers that have “pushed the UK’s schools up the rankings”. According to the OECD, the pandemic “caused attainment to drop globally”, which reduces the ability of the Pisa scores to “serve as an accurate barometer”.

And ultimately, “success is more than educational attainment”. According to the Education Policy Institute, UK students have “the second lowest average life satisfaction of 15-year-olds across all OECD countries”.

“From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap,” wrote Andy Burnham in The Times. The prime minister’s new government has unveiled “fundamental changes” to England’s curriculum and education system.

From the age of 14, pupils will be able to combine technical subjects like manufacturing and AI with core subjects like maths and English. They will also be able to get experience with local employers, to give them a clearer pathway into work. “For too long, we’ve built a school system around the idea that there’s only one route to success: university, a degree, a desk,” wrote Burnham. But in “the age of AI”, practical and technical skills have “become more valuable than ever”.

‘Westminster will be less involved’

Burnham is “on a mission” to reduce the number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neets) – more than one in eight of the UK’s 16- to 24-year-olds: the highest level in more than 12 years. This overhaul “doesn’t actually do anything about Neets, in that it will not be of any benefit to them”, said The Times’ sketch writer Tom Peck. But in theory, it will help “prevent the emergence of the next generation of Neets”.

It also “gives Burnham a chance to distance himself again” from previous politicians, said Politico’s London Playbook. Because “we’ve heard this type of thing a lot over the last few years”. But the difference now, Burnham argues, is that “Westminster will be less involved”; the new routes will be shaped by local mayors, schools and employers.

It’s modelled on his Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, or MBacc, which he launched as mayor in 2024, said the BBC’s education correspondent Hazel Shearing. The MBacc “may well be scalable”, but “there will be challenges”. Will kids living in deprived areas, without thriving industries, have fewer options?

Neets ‘downstream of economy, not classroom’

I agree that England “has never built a technical education system worthy of the name”, said Joshua Vallance, vice principal of Trinity Academy, Brixton in Schools Week. But should children “begin sacrificing a broad academic education at 14” to get one? “As a Labour member and teacher, I think they should not.”

Telling kids to organise their curriculum around a “presumed occupational destination” means we “narrow their field of possibility before either they or we can know what they might become”. Plus, one of “the beauties of our education system” is “common academic entitlement”: that children at a Brixton academy “have access to the same knowledge as the children at Eton and Harrow”: a “great leveller in society”.

In Burnham’s system, more well-off children at independent or selective schools will still study languages, history and sciences “before deciding what to become”. Poorer children will be “asked to decide first”, with “fewer options”.

England’s education system isn’t perfect, but “the focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum” has led to “better outcomes for most pupils”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. We’ve climbed international rankings in both literacy and numeracy, and the proportion of kids getting good GCSE results has risen while grade inflation stayed “relatively low”.

Unless John Healey “does something very radical in the Budget”, Burnham’s overhaul has to be “balanced by cuts elsewhere in the schools budget”, which imperils a “genuine public policy success”, but “to no good end”. Because the Neet problem is “not a consequence of our education system”: it’s “rooted in the labour market”.

Kids are “twice as likely to become Neet in the northeast of England than the southwest”, not because schools in the southwest are better at tailoring education to “the needs of local businesses”. The rate of young people who become Neets is “downstream of the strength of their local economies, not the curriculum”.

The education system is “not set up to serve white working-class children and families”, an independent inquiry has found, and has created a “white working-class disadvantage gap”.

The Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes, found that in 2025, just 36% of white British pupils on free school meals achieve a Grade 4 or above in English and Maths GCSE, compared with 72% of non-free school meal pupils.

This independent investigation is the “biggest piece of research in recent years into white working-class underachievement in England”, said education editor Nicola Woolcock in The Times. But without immediate investment and implementation of recommendations, the gap could widen.

What did the commentators say?

Realising the reasons of why white working-class children “don’t make it” in education “may not be rocket science but it is complicated”, said social affairs editor Jackie Long on Channel 4 News’ Substack. “Behaviour, disengagement and absenteeism” seem to be the most significant factors for low attainment, but the “intersection between geography, culture, opportunity and aspiration” has yet to be “fully unravelled by the inquiry.” “There will be no quick fix.”

Nigel Farage and the political right have “overreached” by blaming the Equality Act and a “proliferation of critical race theory” in British institutions, said Dr Rakib Ehsan on UnHerd. There is an “endemic” problem, facilitated by a “broader economic malaise of regional and class disparity, deindustrialisation, a lack of secure local employment”. This is a lesson for the right: they should be “wary of indulging in the very types of racial victimhood and identity politics they seek to condemn”.

This demographic group has “dominated the headlines” in recent years, said educator Sir John Townsley in The Telegraph. Recent analysis by University College London revealed that 40% of white working-class pupils miss a day of school every fortnight, and that they are “more than twice as likely” than the average pupil to be “severely absent” from school.

But the reality is harsh. Blame lies not just with the government and wider society, but also with “the families in question” for perpetuating a “culture of low-expectations” and placing “no value whatsoever on education”. Without “radical change” and “generational” planning, we are headed for “further disaster”.

The narrative that white working-class boys have been neglected by the system is “set like concrete”, said Terri White in Prospect. But “what about our white working-class lasses?” White working-class girls still marginally outperform their male counterparts (by 38% to 35%) to achieve the “expected standard” at GCSE level, the girls’ numbers have “dropped dramatically” over the past six years, while boys are “seeing change in the opposite direction”.

And once girls leave school, they are “plunged” into an earning disparity which resembles a “yawning chasm”, with boys out-earning them even when they have fewer qualifications. White working-class girls are “walloped by” a “double disadvantage”: discrimination by both class and gender.

In an environment where education has become “increasingly politicised”, white boys are seen as a “problem”, said Joanna Williams on Spiked. With the prime example of Keir Starmer’s initiative to show Netflix’s “Adolescence” in every school, it appears the government has offered white working-class boys nothing except “panic-fuelled hectoring”. They have been let down by a political class that has done little to provide “well-paid, meaningful employment”, and been ignored by a schooling system that “prioritises therapeutic interventions over discipline and high standards”. “All children deserve better.”

What next?

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said that there is “clear” evidence that children “arrive at school not ready to learn, having not achieved the levels that they should”. Opportunities for progress lie not just with schools but “beyond the school gate, because so much of what a child is able to achieve in their life comes down to the support their family have”.

The inquiry has raised free transport for under-21s, a “crackdown on excessive screen use” and for high-performing schools to “take more white working-class children” as possible solutions, said Woolcock in The Times. In order to achieve progress, there must be a “clearer definition” of the term white working-class and that communities should “provide significantly greater access to sport, arts, culture, volunteering, outdoor activity and employer engagement, backed by sustained long-term funding”.

More than 1,000 schools across England and Wales are closing or finishing the day early this week to protect students against extreme heat.

Teachers and pupils are struggling to cope in school buildings never designed for sky-high temperatures fuelled by global warming.

Twelve school days a year could be lost

With the UK experiencing increasingly extreme weather, temperatures in schools have become a “major concern”, said The i Paper.

Modelling by the Met Office and University College London for the Department for Education published last year found some schools may already have one or two days a year when indoor temperatures hit 35C and learning becomes “very difficult”.

But “without the implementation of any adaptation measures, students could potentially lose up to 12 days of learning per year on average, as a result of generally warmer temperatures and not just from extreme heat”.

There is evidence that children struggle to sleep at night when temperatures remain above 20C. So government guidance warns teachers and school leaders to look out for the symptoms of “heat stress”, including discomfort, irritability and signs of dehydration.

“The kids can’t cope,” said Nottingham junior school teacher Radhika Sanghani in The Independent. “One of the kids didn’t sleep well because of the heat, so he was falling asleep at his desk, literally dozing. They’re only seven to nine years old. It’s a lot to expect them to study in that heat. They’re tired, they’re red-faced, they’re finding it all horrendous.”

Extreme heat is already forcing schools to postpone sports days and cancel trips, while some primaries are having to resort to “hot play”, where children are kept indoors because it is simply too hot to go outside.

Air conditioning ‘only real solution’

The problem is that most schools are not built to cope with temperatures that regularly hit 35C.

“Many schools don’t have any ventilation systems other than opening and closing windows,” said Tim Fulford, a teacher and National Education Union health and safety representative. In some of the newer Blair-era private finance initiative (PFI) schools “you can’t even do that”.

Last month, a landmark report from the government’s Climate Change Committee warned the UK is “built for a climate that no longer exists today and will be increasingly distant in years to come”.

Among its many recommendations was a call for air conditioning to be installed in all schools within 25 years.

This is the “only real solution”, said Sanghani, “but they’re never going to fit out all schools with AC. The cost would be astronomical.”

In the meantime, the CCC has said exams should be held at cooler times of the year. It cited research that showed taking a test on a 32C day reduces a pupil’s chance of passing by around 10% compared with a 22C day.

The UK Health Security Agency has gone further, advising that schools should “consider rearranging school start, finish and play times to avoid teaching during very hot conditions”. This happens in countries like France, which have longer summer holidays and have earlier start and finish times on very hot days.

“That would still be an inconvenience for parents to have to find childcare solutions, but it’s the best solution I can think of,” said Sanghani. “I’d personally be very happy to start the teaching day earlier when it’s cooler and head home by the time it gets unbearable.”

What’s the goal of the SAT? 

A dreaded rite of passage for generations of high school students, the SAT—formerly called the Scholastic Aptitude Test—aims to gauge a student’s ability to handle collegelevel material. Last year, more than 2 million juniors and seniors took the exam, a two-and-a-half hour ordeal consisting of 44 questions in the math section and 54 in the reading-and-writing section. A high score on the scale of 400 to 1600 won’t by itself guarantee acceptance to a selective university, but it’s often a prerequisite. Yet over the 100 years that the test has been administered, its value has been fiercely debated, with critics saying it merely reinforces race and income inequality. Those allegations were a main reason more than 1,200 colleges and universities stopped requiring SAT scores in 2020 and 2021, instead basing admission on factors like GPA, essays, and extracurriculars. Since then, though, dozens of those schools have reinstated the requirement. “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,” said Brown University president Christina Paxson. In an era of grade inflation, they “reveal useful information.”

How was the test created?

Before the SAT, elite universities mainly admitted students from a handful of prep schools, such as Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire or Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. In the early 1900s, when intelligence tests were becoming all the rage, institutions began considering general entrance exams. Princeton University psychologist Carl Brigham created what would become the SAT in 1922, when he modified a version of the Army’s IQ test and administered it to Princeton freshmen. Yet bias was built in from the start: One of his goals, Brigham wrote in his book A Study of American Intelligence, was to prove the superiority of “the Nordic race.” By June 1926, the College Board—an association of dozens of universities and colleges— had adopted the test as a general entrance exam. The first time it was administered, 8,040 students were given 97 minutes to race through 315 questions covering foreign languages, logic skills, vocabulary, and arithmetic. Word problems reflected the culture of the day, with one math problem asking: “If a package containing 20 cigarettes costs 15 cents, how many cigarettes can be bought for 90 cents?”

How did it get so popular? 

Mainly because of the G.I. Bill. In the aftermath of World War II, some 2.5 million veterans poured into colleges, and universities turned to the SAT to help them evaluate the applicants. By 1960, more than 500,000 students were taking the test each year, and 350 colleges had made it a requirement. To meet this growing need, the College Board employs teams of teachers, professors, and testing experts to write the questions. For decades, though, that committee consisted almost entirely of white, well-off, highly educated men from the Northeast, and the test reflected their experiences—with word problems and reading passages referring to upperclass activities like sailing or riding. More recently, test makers have tried to eliminate cultural and socioeconomic bias.

Does bias in questions harm students? 

While that can’t be proved, there are certainly disparities in scores among different races and economic classes. In 2024, the average combined score was 1228 for Asian students and 1083 for white students, compared with 939 for Hispanics and 907 for Black students. A 2023 study found that over 33% of children of the top 1% in income scored a 1300 or higher, versus only 2.4% of children from the poorest 20% of households. Wealthy families, of course, can more easily pay the $68 test fee multiple times, and many can drop thousands on special SAT prep courses. Such issues were cited in a 2019 lawsuit demanding the University of California system abolish its SAT requirement. In 2020, it did, as did hundreds of other universities, including MIT, Stanford, and the entire Ivy League.

What was the result? 

Top schools received a larger, more diverse set of applications. But before long, professors complained that incoming freshmen lacked even rudimentary math skills. “I realized that for students to follow me,” said UC Berkeley string theorist Mina Aganagic, “I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.” A 2024 Harvard study found that GPA alone “does a poor job of predicting academic success in college” in the absence of standardized test scores. Dozens of colleges, including every Ivy League university, have now reinstated a standardized-test mandate, and 1,400 instructors in the University of California system have signed an open letter urging the state to do likewise. “Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers,” it states. “It moves them into the classroom.”

Are there alternatives?

There’s the ACT, developed in 1959 specifically to rival the SAT; most schools accept it in lieu of the SAT, and last year 1.4 million students took it. The Classical Learning Test, created in 2015 by conservative Jeremy Tate to focus on works in the Western canon, was taken by over 180,000 students last year, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered all U.S. military academies to accept it in place of SAT scores. But are these tests fairer or more accurate than the SAT? It’s impossible to know, and some academics believe that’s the wrong question. Harvard economist David Deming says any test is bound to reflect the shortcomings and disparities embedded in the American education system. “The problem isn’t the test,” he says. “The problem is everything that happens before the test.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to dismantle the Department of Education took a major step forward this month after the White House reassigned the agency’s special education and civil rights programs to other federal agencies. His administration says the adjustments will maximize efficiency by pairing programs with the departments best suited for their execution. But critics claim the reassignments are an illegal effort to circumvent congressional funding challenges and will harm children and the country’s educational prospects.

What did the commentators say?

At the center of this latest episode is the Education Department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which protects the “rights of children with disabilities,” and its Office for Civil Rights, working with students who “experience discrimination based on race, sex or religion,” said The Associated Press. Those offices will now be operationally reassigned to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department, respectively.

Shifting the programs is “among some of the most high-stakes moves the Trump administration has made to end the agency,” said Politico. More than 100 of the Education Department’s programs and offices are “already relocating to five agencies — Interior, Labor, State, Treasury and Health and Human Services,” said Education Week. This spring, the Education Department also announced plans to “leave its Lyndon B. Johnson headquarters” and “turn the space over to the Energy Department,” said The Washington Post.

This latest change comes as “both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have raised concerns” with Education Secretary Linda McMahon over a “growing backlog of civil rights complaints in schools,” said The New York Times. Last month, the secretary told lawmakers she “wanted to hire more civil rights lawyers” for her department “despite a budget request from the White House to reduce funding for that office.”

By relocating the department’s programming now, critics say the White House is “weakening oversight after already drastically reducing staffing” in the affected offices, said the Times. McMahon has said that using interagency agreements will “help build the case for skeptical lawmakers” to “support abolishing the Department of Education as an independent agency” at large, said Education Week. But lawmakers “across both parties” seem “reluctant to affirmatively endorse this plan.”

“The irony here is that every action” the Department of Education claims will “reduce fraud, waste and abuse” ultimately creates “more chaos and confusion,” said former Office of Civil Rights attorney Beth Gellman-Beer to Inside Higher Ed. “No one understands how this is going to operationalize.” Ultimately, the shift could “make interagency coordination involving education programs more difficult,” said The 19th.

For instance, The 19th said, approximately “12% of students with disabilities are English learners” with about half attending Title I schools “serving economically disadvantaged children.” Rather than operating within a single department as they had in the past, the associated programs will henceforth be administered by “various federal agencies” across multiple departments.

What next?

Per the text of the agreement between the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services obtained by NPR, the latter “would do much of the work of administering formula grant programs” mandated under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, said NPR’s “All Things Considered.” The Department of Education would provide “management and leadership,” as required by law. The plan is “likely to garner some pushback” from legislators, “including among Republican lawmakers” who want to ensure the government meets its “legal obligations to students with disabilities,” said Politico.

The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights will similarly “refer cases to the Department of Justice for evaluation and resolution” but will “continue to decide whether to pursue administrative enforcement action,” said Education Week. Legally, however, the agency’s Office of Civil Rights is “mandated to evaluate every complaint they receive,” while the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division “can pick and choose which complaints it pursues,” said Inside Higher Ed. Critics fear “this partnership could lead the Office of Civil Rights to become more like the DOJ” by “picking and choosing which cases it will address based on political priorities.”

‘San Diego’s big bet on salt water’

The Washington Post editorial board

While “cities across drought-stricken western states struggle to meet their water needs, San Diego has a surplus of the all-important resource,” says The Washington Post editorial board. This is “largely thanks to the county’s investment in desalination, which other localities would be wise to consider.” The “strategy has had plenty of critics, especially environmentalists who say desalination is not worth its hefty price tag.” But the “problem with the opposition to desalination is that there are few good alternatives.”

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‘Here in Georgia our festivals are full, but our poets are in prison — and now we feel abandoned by Europe’

Archil Kikodze at The Guardian

There are too few Georgians to “create communities and diasporas abroad,” says Archil Kikodze. Georgians “will simply dissolve, scatter across the world and disappear. Or rather, the part of us that loves thinking and is incapable of flattery will disappear.” For “those of us who remain here, literary festivals and similar cultural events are places where it is possible to breathe freely.” The “doors are open to everyone, but regime conformists have no need to meet foreign or Georgian authors.”

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‘America’s teachers can’t afford to teach’

Randi Weingarten at Time

Teachers’ salaries “have never fully reflected their passion or professionalism, but as America’s cost-of-living crisis persists, educators increasingly cannot afford even life’s basic necessities,” says Randi Weingarten. Educators “play a crucial role in our society, and the affordability crisis among America’s teachers can no longer be ignored.” The U.S. “has lionized teachers as ‘heroes’ and then turned around and underinvested in public education, chipping away at the wages that once made teaching a stable middle-class profession.”

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‘The bald eagle perfectly embodies America’s flaws’

Alexandra Tay at The Nation

The U.S. “has invested its identity in the bald eagle as a noble apex predator, but the eagle of our national imagination distorts the real bird along lines that parallel our country’s deepest flaws,” says Alexandra Tay. In “truth, the bald eagle is a larcenous opportunist that gets by on brute strength.” But Americans “have come to identify a set of virtues in the bald eagle that we claim for ourselves — when, in truth, they are virtues we both lack.”

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Reading test scores have been on the decline since the mid-2010s, then the pandemic made recovery that much more difficult. And the proliferation of screens, student absenteeism and a push away from phonics-based teaching has further led to the reduction in scores.

Contributing factors 

The U.S. entered a “learning recession” in 2013 as “student progress in math and reading stalled and began to decline,” said Education Scorecard. From 2017 to 2019, “students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024,” said The New York Times. Reading scores were “down last year in 83% of school districts where data was available,” while “math scores were down in 70%,” compared to a decade ago. The declines have “affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.”

The reduced scores “coincided with a dismantling of test-based accountability in schools and a dramatic rise in social media use among young people,” said Education Scorecard. While it “remains unclear whether and how much each factor caused the decline in scores, both are likely candidates.” The shift is an "enormous problem that’s not getting enough attention,” Nat Malkus, a senior fellow studying education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said to the Times.

A variety of factors have reduced reading capabilities in students. For years, “schools taught reading using approaches that deemphasized phonics and encouraged strategies such as guessing words based on context clues,” said The Associated Press. In addition, the pandemic “accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students,” and to this day, student absenteeism “remains higher than prepandemic,” said the Times.

Over the past decade, screen time has also increased exponentially. “There’s no question that swiping has decreased students’ focus and persistence, and time on devices has displaced time spent reading or studying,” said the Times. “Far more teenagers — nearly one in three — now say they ‘never or hardly ever’ read for fun.” The good news is that “some states and school districts are making progress,” said the AP. A “common factor was a shift toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support in other ways as well for struggling readers.”

Little recovery

“Scores inched upward in reading last year and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022,” said the Times. But “it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground.” Only “five states plus the District of Columbia had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025,” said the AP. Nationally, “students remain nearly half a grade level behind prepandemic reading scores and only slightly better in math.”

The country has also seen a U-shaped recovery, which “suggests the middle has been left behind,” said Education Scorecard. There have been “larger improvements among the highest-income and the lowest-income school districts in the country,” while “middle-income districts (those with between 30% and 70% of students receiving federally subsidized lunches) have seen the least improvement on average.” The pandemic “was the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion in achievement,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor who helped create the Education Scorecard, said to the AP.

How has Mississippi improved?

For years, Southern states with struggling education systems could console themselves: No matter how poorly they were doing, they weren’t as bad as Mississippi. Just 12 years ago, Mississippi ranked 48th in K-12 education, based on metrics like attendance, reading proficiency, and on-time graduation. Now the state is no longer a punch line. It’s up to 16th in K-12 rankings and has achieved particular success in fourth-grade reading comprehension, jumping all the way to the top 10 in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). When adjusting for poverty and other demographic factors, Mississippi actually tops the nation in that category. Crucially, improvements are seen among students at all reading levels, “rather than just among higher achieving or lower achieving students,” says Dan McGrath, a retired federal education official who oversaw the tests. “It’s as if Mississippi had moved a mountain.” And it did this despite spending just $12,000 per student, much less than the national average.

What did it change?

Mississippi passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013, paving the way for implementing the “science of reading” in K-3 classrooms. This multifaceted approach—which involves teaching phonics, word recognition, vocabulary, and text comprehension—gets much of the credit for the state’s turnaround, but it’s just one tenet of the law. Accountability, from both students and schools, is another. Mississippi grades its schools A to F and sends coaches to train teachers in low-performing ones. Students get to see and track their own testing data. “I like it,” one pupil, Johnny, told The New York Times. “If I make a bad grade, but I’m going up, it’s like a staircase.” At the end of third grade, those who don’t pass a literacy exam after multiple attempts are automatically held back. That “third-grade gate” has drawn praise as a tough but beneficial rule that’s paying off: a record 77.3% of third graders passed the initial administration last year. Yet it also has its share of critics.

What do they say?

They say Mississippi has stacked its deck. Of course all the fourth graders can read, they say—the kids who couldn’t were kept back in third grade. In 2023, fully 7% of Mississippi third graders, over 2,000 kids, were held back. One study in the statistics journal Significance said Mississippi’s approach amounts to “gaming the system.” Others point out that Mississippi scores didn’t even improve much, it’s just that other states got worse. Still, some research indicates that something real is happening. A Florida State University study found compulsory grade repetition alone can’t explain higher test scores. Mississippi’s literacy gains have also remained consistent across every decile on the NAEP exam. A 90th-percentile score, for instance, leaped from 249 in 2005 to 262 in 2024, and a 10th-percentile score from 157 to 170. Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard, told ChalkBeat that he doesn’t “see any smoking guns or red flags” around Mississippi’s success. That’s why other states are starting to copy it.

What are other states doing?

Across the South, states from Louisiana to Virginia have adopted at least some of Mississippi’s strategies, including teacher-training methods, curriculum reform, and high standards. Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have even copied the third-grade gate approach. Now Louisiana leads the country in recovery from pandemic-related losses in reading, while Alabama takes the crown for math recovery. These states particularly shine when NAEP scores are adjusted for demographics. After considering factors like poverty and race, the Urban Institute think tank determined, Mississippi tops the nation in fourth-grade reading, fourth-grade math, and eighth-grade math, and it’s fourth in eighth-grade reading. Still, not everyone is satisfied with Mississippi’s middle-school progress.

What happened in middle school?

If you don’t adjust for demographics, Mississippi eighth graders rank a dismal 41st in reading. Things are getting better—between 2013 and 2022, its eighth graders cut their gap with the national average in half—but the pace has been slower than in lower grades. That’s hardly a surprise, since the 2013 law focused specifically on improving early-education literacy. The state hasn’t invested the same time, money, and resources into middle-school reading, the time when literacy instruction shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Critics say Mississippi needs to ensure that older children can read—and that students’ math skills get the same attention as their reading skills.

Is the state planning to do that?

Mississippi is now looking to pass a bill that would expand the 2013 literacy reforms into higher grades. The teachers tend to appreciate the help from literacy coaches, Mississippi education official Tenette Smith says. “We hear from teachers and administrators who say, ‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know.’” The state also seeks to adopt similar reforms for primary-school mathematics, mandating math coaches in all schools, prioritizing grades 2-6, and placing a cutoff gate for fifth grade so that only students who are ready will move on to sixth-grade algebra classes. Pilot programs are already underway to improve reading comprehension in upper grades. While it’s too soon to tell whether those efforts will pay off longterm, the early test results are promising. The Mississippi miracle is “proof positive that, yes, children in poverty can learn and can succeed,” said Carey Wright, Mississippi’s former superintendent of education. “As educators, our job is to do whatever it takes.”

A new report by Human Rights Watch argues that the compulsory use of Chinese as the primary language in schools in Tibet raises “serious concerns under international human rights law”.

Detailing the effects of the “Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan” five years ago, as well as more recent updates to the “National Common Language Law”, the organisation argues that measures are marginalising Tibetan identity to the point of erasure.

“International concern about these developments has grown,” said Jianli Yang in The Diplomat. These language laws fit into a pattern in recent years of “intensified policies” aimed to “reshape” Tibetan identity through “cultural control”.

‘Eroding’ Tibetan culture

Both politically and legally, “China is steadily narrowing the space for minority autonomy in education, language, and religion”, said The Diplomat. In December last year, the National People’s Congress revised the “National Common Language Law”. It now requires Mandarin to be the “fundamental teaching language” and mandates standardised textbooks throughout the education system. The codification of assimilation policies “marks a new phase” in Beijing’s strategy: it seeks “not merely to manage ethnic diversity but to fundamentally reshape it”.

Videos from Tibet on social media have shown young children “not even able to say their names in Tibetan, pronouncing them as if they were Chinese”, said Kris Cheng in The Guardian. Children, who have been brought up speaking Tibetan stop speaking it within a year of beginning school.

Parents face a “dilemma”: education in Chinese improves employment and career prospects, but it often comes at the cost of associating Tibetan with “social disadvantage”. Some are sending their children to Tibetan language classes in the school holidays, but authorities have been “cracking down” by “banning unsanctioned schools and classes in many places”.

Perhaps the most “profound policy shift” from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Tibet was the 2021 “Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan”, said Human Rights Watch. For the first time, it mandated the use of Chinese language as a “medium of instruction” in all preschools. Though not explicitly banning Tibetan in educational settings, it effectively “downgrades” the freedom for minorities to develop and continue their language.

This law was not a “sudden rupture”, however, but the “near final step in a decades-long process” of “eroding the role of Tibetan as a medium of instruction”. It was a “key acceleration point” in the drive to reshape the “linguistic, cultural, and social foundations of Tibetan society”.

‘Narrowed’ tolerance

China’s stance “turned sharply against expressions of separate ethnic identity among minorities” when Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, said Josh Chin and Niharika Mandhana in the Wall Street Journal. Officials targeted Tibetan alternatives to state schools and expanded the boarding school system. Resistance since the uprising of 1959 has persisted under the current Dalai Lama, a “potent force despite decades of propaganda, political crackdowns and education drives aimed at undermining his authority”, living in exile in India.

During the earlier years of Communist Party rule China “espoused a certain notion of pluralism for non-Han people”, but the space for tolerance has “narrowed”, said Joe Leahy in the Financial Times. Look no further than Xinjiang, where more than a million Uighurs have been “subjected to mass internment”. China denies mass detentions of Uighurs and “blames unrest on terrorists”.

Recent years have seen a gradual transformation from a “first-generation ethnic policy” to the “second-generation ethnic policy”, said The Diplomat. The earlier framework, under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, “formally emphasised” ethnic and language autonomy. For instance, legislation in 1994 stipulated that all schools should “use Tibetan as the principal medium of instruction”, whilst “improving a bilingual Tibetan-Chinese education system”. Implementation was often “uneven”, but it at least “recognised the legitimacy of cultural pluralism within the Chinese state”.

Second-generation ethnic policy, however, marks a “significant departure” from this philosophy. It seeks to “minimise” the significance of ethnic distinctions, instead of preserving diversity. The Chinese state now sees minority languages as “potential threats” to Xi’s “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. Viewed more broadly, China’s current policies in Tibet represent “more than a shift in language education”, they reflect a “structural transformation” in how China perceives ethnic minorities.

More than a decade ago, U.S. schools started putting Chromebooks and iPads in the hands of young students. Now, parents are pushing back and demanding less screen time and more analog work for their algorithm-addled kids. The movement could partially undo the tech revolution in the classroom.

Los Angeles parents are “fed up with schools loading up students with laptops and tablets,” said The New York Times. The L.A. school board last week passed new rules to “eliminate digital devices entirely through first grade and develop screen time limits for higher grades,” a major development in “escalating national reckoning for the powerful classroom technology industry.” New York parents are asking for ChatGPT limits in schools, while Utah last month passed a law to let parents monitor their kids’ screen time on school devices. “Big Tech” is “encroaching into our public schools,” said Schools Beyond Screens’ Anya Meksin to the outlet.

Reducing screen time “isn’t as simple as hitting an off switch,” said Education Week. Tech is “infused into nearly every part” of K-12 education. Federally required reading and math assessments are “largely digital,” and digital learning management systems are “now staples for school districts.” Educators do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Technology can “be misused” in the classroom, North Carolina educator Casey Rimmer said to the outlet, but when used thoughtfully, it has “a lot of power” to enhance education.

What did the commentators say?

Technology is “not the answer or the problem,” Matthew Yglesias said at Slow Boring. Companies once “were making a lot of unrealistic utopian promises” about the promise of iPads in education, but those promises have fallen short. To educate students well, schools need “solid standards” and a curriculum “aligned with those standards.” Technology works when it is also “aligned with those standards.” Schools have too often “signed up for too many apps” without a plan to “integrate them with each other or a curriculum.”

Schools should “take stock, set goals and develop strategy around learning-tech use,” Meredith Coffey said at Education Next. Educators frequently buy hardware and software “regardless of its relevance to their students’ needs.” They should instead “pursue solutions, not shiny objects” by focusing on “evidence-based tools that align with defined goals.” Administrators and educators largely agree that lessons should be “device-based only when it provides a clear advantage.” That will allow for “more face-to-face time” with teachers and kids while still letting students build “those 21st-century skills we keep hearing about.”

What next?

Education debates can often turn partisan, but conservative parents and liberal teachers unions have “become unlikely allies” to fight back tech in schools, said NBC News. The tech backlash “cuts across partisan lines in a way that I haven’t seen in a long time,” The Heritage Foundation’s Corey DeAngelis said to the outlet. Both sides “really want the best for our kids,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

‘Report cards are sending parents the wrong signals’

Bloomberg editorial board

Most “students in the U.S. aren’t proficient in reading or math — but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their report cards,” says the Bloomberg editorial board. Grade inflation “has been seeping through the nation’s education system for decades and worsened during the pandemic,” and “today, more than half of schools use at least one ‘alternative grading’ strategy, including ‘no zeros.’” It “isn’t hard to see how such measures might obscure academic weaknesses and mislead parents.”

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‘Why we should agree to agree’

Lisa Sherman at Time

At a “time when many of our most important conversations feel increasingly polarized, it’s easy to fall into patterns,” says Lisa Sherman. When a “conversation begins to feel too complex or emotionally charged, we often reach for a common refrain: ‘agree to disagree.’” But “building on the common ground that already exists is the key to bridging what divides us.” What “matters more than perfect agreement is what we do with disagreement once we’ve chosen to move forward.”

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‘African governments need to take urgent action on fertilizer shortages’

Martin Fregene and Chakib Jenane at Al Jazeera

The “conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran is disrupting global fertilizer trade flows — and this stands to leave millions of African farmers without the ammonia, urea, phosphate, sulphur and other fertilizer inputs vital to growing more food in sub-Saharan Africa,” say Martin Fregene and Chakib Jenane. When “global supply falters, Africa’s farmers often feel the economic shocks the hardest.” Fertilizer security is “tied to food security, which, in turn, is linked to economic and social stability.”

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‘Newspapers face tight supply as mills cut newsprint production’

Brier Dudley at The Seattle Times

As if “they didn’t have enough to deal with, America’s newspaper publishers are facing a tight supply of newsprint that’s driving up prices,” says Brier Dudley. The “crunch may be temporary but it highlights the uncertainty and cost pressures straining a local news industry that’s largely online nowadays but still heavily dependent on printed newspapers.” There is “little consolation” for “some local publishers scrambling for enough paper to print the next week’s newspapers.”

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‘This degree changed my life. And it’s essential to a changing America.’

Thurka Sangaramoorthy at The Washington Post

Anthropology is a “discipline that teaches students to do something remarkably difficult and remarkably rare: to move between close attention to individual lives and systemic analysis of the structures that shape them,” says Thurka Sangaramoorthy. Americans are “living in what is called the age of big data,” but the “hardest problems facing institutions, governments and companies right now are not technical ones. They are human ones.” Anthropology is an “essential skill in the age of big data.”

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‘Don’t look to my patients for Medicaid fraud. Look at Dr. Oz.’

Tyler Evans at USA Today

Dr. Mehmet Oz “posted a video accusing New York state of running a fraud-ridden Medicaid program,” but the “people being targeted by these claims are not fraudsters,” says Tyler Evans. The “personal care services Oz attacked in New York are the clinical alternative to nursing home placement.” Oz is “constructing a caricature to make the public comfortable with cutting their care.” This is the “person now running the largest health care financing program in the United States.”

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‘Millions of clicks on sexual assault — where’s the outrage?’ 

Jodi Bondi Norgaard at Newsweek

According to “CNN’s reporting, one porn site, Motherless.com, hosts 20,000 videos of so-called ‘sleep content,’” with “men logging on to learn how to drug and violate their wives, their partners, the women sleeping beside them, the people who trust them most,” says Jodi Bondi Norgaard. This is “not a niche crime or a fringe corner of the internet. This is a global network that teaches men how to drug and rape women, and it is met with near silence.”

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‘The ABA is a joke. So why is it still accrediting law schools?’ 

Sarah Parshall Perry at the National Review

The American Bar Association’s “monopoly over the accreditation of U.S. law schools has long been defended as essential to maintaining excellence in the legal profession,” says Sarah Parshall Perry. But this “authority rests on an implicit premise of institutional neutrality, a premise that no longer holds — if it ever did at all.” The ABA “doesn’t represent a majority — or even a plurality — of American lawyers.” The “profession, the academy and the public deserve better.”

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‘Hormuz fertilizer block will upend world’s food production’

Chris Krebs at the Financial Times

Before the “first strike on Iran, the global food system was already running on reduced redundancy,” says Chris Krebs, and the Strait of Hormuz closure “isn’t breaking a healthy system. It is breaking one that was already compromised.” The “food security clock runs in months,” but the “geopolitical clock runs in years.” If “fertilizer isn’t moving through the Strait of Hormuz in two weeks’ time, we won’t be debating any more, we’ll be sending in aid.”

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‘Education decisions aren’t inevitable. They are rooted in history.’

Erika M. Kitzmiller at The Philadelphia Inquirer

Cities like Philadelphia have “always had choices — choices to enact educational policies and practices that replicate inequality or to pursue alternatives that disrupt it,” says Erika M. Kitzmiller. Too “many times in our city’s history, those with power have chosen the former.” The city’s “current challenges — shrinking school enrollments, outdated school facilities and persistent resource disparities — did not suddenly appear in the 21st century.” They “have a long history marked by injustice and disinvestment.”

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‘Why corporate America is coming home to the heartland’

Derek Kreifels at the National Review

For “decades, a handful of states such as Delaware, with its hospitable corporate law, and California, Illinois and New York, with their capital resources, held too strong a grip on the American corporate engine,” says Derek Kreifels. But taxes are “harming innovation, growth and the economic prospects of the people who live there.” As a “result, we are now witnessing a historic migration, as some of America’s most iconic companies pack their bags and head for the heartland.”

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‘Congress can’t protect radio without protecting artists’

Michael Huppe at The Hill

There is a “question for Congress: What good is radio without music?” says Michael Huppe. There are “thousands of artists across America” whose “performances are the product that AM and FM radio use to earn nearly $14 billion in advertising revenue each year.” But “unlike every other democracy, the U.S. still does not require radio corporations to pay the artists for that privilege.” Congress can pass “bills protecting AM radio in every vehicle and protecting the artists who make every recording.”

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‘Is the US running out of ammo?’

The Wall Street Journal editorial board

The Iran war is “still in its early days, but the press is playing the wrap-it-up music by warning that America and its allies lack air defenses for a long fight,” says The Wall Street Journal editorial board. The White House will have to “elevate U.S. weapons lines to a national priority.” The U.S. “can choose to build more weapons,” but it “doesn’t matter how many missiles are in the cabinet if our enemies conclude America won’t accept risk to defend itself.”

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‘Gucci needs fresher ideas than “sex sells”’

Andrea Felsted at Bloomberg

The “luxury sector must excite customers enough to tempt them to buy, rather than repel them with missteps such as the rampant price increases of the past five years,” says Andrea Felsted. After a “two-year, industry-wide slump, even competitors are rooting for Gucci.” The company wants to “re-establish Gucci at the cutting edge,” but “relying on nostalgia can only take the brand so far.” Making a “more rounded collection with wide-ranging appeal” will “take time.”

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‘University presidents face a “Star Trek”-like Kobayashi Maru moment’

James T. Harris at the Chicago Tribune

In some “academic circles, especially at public universities, it is now common for presidents to adopt a policy of neutrality,” says James T. Harris. Educators are “currently facing their own Kobayashi Maru moment — defend social justice on their campus or openly criticize the actions of the federal government and put the federal funding vital to their students and the institutions they serve at risk.” One “could argue that silence is understandable given the certain retribution.”

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‘A middle powers club would make the world more dangerous’

Manjari Chatterjee Miller at Foreign Policy

The “sight of a North American country working with three of the Indo-Pacific’s largest economies” underscores the “new salience of middle powers,” says Manjari Chatterjee Miller. But “while middle-power diplomacy has suddenly become ubiquitous, there is a widespread misunderstanding of not only the nature of these countries but also the risks of their collective rise.” These countries are “unable or unwilling to step up regionally or globally to define a more general agenda for international order.”

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Many graduates who took out student loans feel they got “an incomprehensibly unfair deal that they did not understand and now cannot escape”, says John Blake, formerly of the Office for Students. The problems are worst for the estimated 5.8 million people who took out “Plan 2” loans, the main scheme from late 2012 to mid 2023. While the interest rate on other loans is set at the Retail Prices Index (RPI) measure of inflation, Plan 2 loans are charged at RPI plus up to 3%.

Then at the last Budget, Rachel Reeves froze the threshold at which repayment in England starts between April 2026 and 2030; it was meant to rise with inflation. This means that more people will have to pay, while interest has snowballed, even for those with hefty monthly repayments. The result is a large cohort of angry indebted graduates.

How do Plan 2 loans work?

They were introduced for students in England and Wales in 2012, after the coalition government tripled tuition fees from £3,290 to £9,000 per year (there are no fees for students from Scotland, and they’re capped at about half the rate in Northern Ireland).

While studying, each borrower was charged interest at the RPI rate plus 3%. Afterwards, it moved to tiered rates starting at RPI, rising up to RPI+3%, depending on earnings (those making £51,245 or more currently pay the full rate). However, borrowers don’t have to pay anything until they reach the repayment threshold, now set at £28,470. Then they pay back 9% of their earnings above the threshold. After 30 years, any outstanding balance is written off.

How does this affect people in practice?

To take one example, Patrick Ba Tin, 30, borrowed some £50,000 in student loans – around average as a total – and was told he would hardly notice the repayments. Now a regulatory analyst earning a decent wage, Ba Tin has paid £5,000 towards his loans since graduating, with the current rate at £300 per month. Even so, the loan is actually growing: he now owes £75,000 in total; he will probably have to keep paying for the full 30 years. Of course this affects his finances, and his ability to buy a home. A typical graduate from the Plan 2 cohort has to earn at least £66,000 a year just to make his or her debt go down. Nadia Whittome, a Labour backbencher, has only managed to pay off £1,000 of her £49,600 debt despite six years on an MP’s salary. And repayments come on top of already high tax rates. So a Plan 2 loan holder earning £51,245 will take home only 49% of their earnings above that.

How have loans changed since?

Plan 5 student loans replaced Plan 2 for courses starting in August 2023. These don’t charge interest above the rate of inflation: the rate simply follows the RPI. But borrowers have to start paying them back sooner – the repayment threshold is only £25,000, not far off the minimum wage – and the repayment term is ten years longer: 40 years. Under this system, in contrast to Plan 2, no one will have to pay back more than they borrowed in real terms, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that 79% of initial borrowers will repay their loans in full. However, lower earners will pay more and higher earners less than they would have under the previous system. Plan 5 will also be costlier for the taxpayer in the long run.

Is the system unfair?

It is harsh for holders of Plan 2 loans. A loan holder who started a course in 2022 will pay around £8,700 more on average than someone who took one out a year later. Tinkering with the repayment threshold, by Conservative and Labour governments, has made repayments unpredictable.

The finance guru Martin Lewis has called on Reeves to reconsider her repayment threshold freeze, saying it isn’t “moral” to change the terms of a loan; polls suggest half of Plan 2 loan holders think the product was “mis-sold” to them. The National Union of Students and The Times have also called for an end to the freeze, along with cuts to the Plan 2 interest rate and a cap on the total amount of interest payable. Arguably, the RPI measure shouldn’t be used at all: the government is phasing it out – because it is deemed about 1% too high – in favour of the Consumer Prices Index (CPI).

Beyond that, there is the wider issue of inter-generational unfairness. The Plan 2 cohort were the first to be hit with substantial tuition fees, which were not charged at all until 1998. In addition, young people face high property prices, and governments that arguably protect the finances of pensioners at the expense of younger generations.

Can Plan 2 loans be defended?

They are in some respects generous, and more like a graduate tax than a bank loan. They do protect low earners; and during the ultra-high inflation period after Covid, the government intervened to cap interest rates. More broadly, the student loan system reflects important trade-offs. Britain has a mass university system – some 50% of young people in the UK go into higher education – and it has to be paid for somehow. All the main parties in England have decided that those who benefit most directly – well-paid graduates – should bear much of the burden. The costs are considerable: the total outstanding Plan 2 debt is about £200 billion.

What is likely to happen?

Reeves has insisted that the student loans system is “fair and reasonable”, and that the freeze was necessary for getting “the balance right between tax and spending”. But sources suggest discussions are taking place about possible measures to make the loans fairer, perhaps by tweaking interest rates. Kemi Badenoch has announced that the Tories would abolish the “unfair” additional interest, at the cost of some £2 billion per year, paid for by cutting funding for “low-quality degrees”. But this – unlike raising the earnings threshold – would only benefit those earning enough to clear the debt within 30 years.

Is a graduate tax the solution?

The idea of funding universities with a graduate tax has been mooted since the 1960s, when economists pointed out that a relatively small group of people were getting an expensive benefit paid for out of general taxation. The idea came up again during the expansion of higher education in the 1990s, and at one time or another it has been backed by the likes of Gordon Brown and Vince Cable. In practice, the loans function much like a tax – repayments are collected through the tax system – and proponents argue that presenting them with a future tax obligation is less stressful than being saddled with a large debt.

Implementing a tax would raise major administrative issues, though. There is no register of graduates. And might it incentivise students not to graduate? Or encourage high-earning graduates to move elsewhere? There are already problems in this area: at least 70,000 loan holders living abroad were reported not to be making repayments in 2024. No country in the world imposes a pure graduate tax, though many use income-contingent loans. The UK loans are high, though, since people here contribute more to their education: only 23% of higher education is paid for by public funding in the UK, well below the OECD average of 67%.

Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence have educators from elementary to university seemingly fighting an uphill battle as they struggle to manage students’ dependence on the technology. Meanwhile, one company has decided to fully embrace the new tools. But critics question whether replacing teachers with AI is worth the risk.

How does Alpha School work?

Alpha School is an AI-powered private school that was founded in 2014 by educational podcaster and 2 Hour Learning founder MacKenzie Price and software and private equity billionaire Joe Liemandt. Despite being around for more than a decade, Alpha’s recent “rise has coincided with technological leaps in what artificial intelligence can do,” said CNN. The company has several branches across the country, with plans to expand.

Students typically start the day with a group activity that introduces a life skill, before sitting down in front of “laptops, plug-in headsets or even virtual reality sets to learn academics through an AI tutor,” said CNN. The program’s two-hour curriculum includes “four 30-minute sessions in math, science, social studies and language,” and “20 minutes of additional learning concepts, like test-taking skills.”

The schools do not have traditional teachers; they employ “human guides” who do not “manage grades or curriculum,” but can offer “specialized teaching, like handwriting,” said CNN. They do not need postgraduate or educational degrees to work for Alpha. Last year, the school reported serving 200 K-8th-grade students and another 50 high school students, with plans to expand to dozens of locations, said The New York Times. Tuition ranges from $10,000 to $75,000 a year.

During a visit to Alpha School’s Austin, Texas, campus in September, Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the school had great potential, calling it an “exemplary” case of what tech can do for American education. “Harnessing AI thoughtfully will be critical to expanding opportunity and preparing students for tomorrow’s workforce,” she said. The school’s co-founders say there is strong interest in their system, which has “gained favor among advocates of expanded school choice and alternative learning,” said CNN.

Is the program effective?

Despite McMahon’s stamp of approval, the AI-driven program has attracted growing criticism. An increasing number of families have chosen to leave the school’s Brownsville, Texas, campus, said Wired. That has not stopped Alpha’s leaders from “pointing to Brownsville as an example” of how 2 Hour Learning can “succeed in communities with low SES,” meaning socioeconomic status. For more than a dozen former employees, students and parents, “what they expected from Alpha School wasn’t what it delivered,” said Wired.

Former guides, “many of whom requested anonymity because they fear negative consequences,” say Alpha’s educational philosophy was “driven by software metrics and, sometimes, Liemandt’s whims,” said Wired. Alpha wanted to “prepare students for a hypercompetitive ‘late-capitalism, dog-eat-dog’ environment,” said one guide to the outlet.

Experts say there is “little outside scrutiny” of Alpha’s model and “how successful it really is at teaching children,” said CNN. A major concern is that Alpha refuses to “allow any independent research to evaluate the claims or to really scrutinize what’s going on from disinterested parties,” said Victor Lee, an associate professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, to CNN. That behavior “sort of implies there’s something to hide.”

What happened

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is stepping down as a professor at Harvard over his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, he and the university said Wednesday. Summers has been on leave from Harvard, where he once served as president, since the depth of his friendship with Epstein was revealed in emails released by Congress in November.

Who said what

The resignation “marks an extraordinary unraveling for Summers, long one of the most influential figures in American economics,” The Harvard Crimson said. His “standing began to collapse” after the cache of released emails showed he “regularly exchanged messages with Epstein about women, politics” and other topics after the disgraced financier pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor in 2008, and up to “the day before Epstein’s final arrest” in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges.

Summers’ “stunning fall from grace” was the “latest fallout among high-profile academics over Epstein associations,” The Wall Street Journal said. Harvard Wednesday said mathematics professor Martin Nowak was on paid administrative leave “pending further investigation” of his Epstein ties, and Nobel laureate Richard Axel resigned Tuesday as co-director of Columbia’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who later served as university president at the New School, told The New York Times Wednesday he had quit the board of clean-energy startup Monolith over concerns that emails showing he had met with Epstein in 2013 would “make it difficult for them to succeed.”

What next?

Summers’ resignation from all faculty and academic positions takes effect at the end of the academic year, but he stepped down Wednesday as co-director of a Harvard Kennedy School business-government center. Once “free of formal responsibility,” Summers said, “I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis and commentary on a range of global economic issues.”

‘Where are all the “Don’t tread on me” Americans?’

Chris Truax at The Hill

We have a “package of constitutional rights that we created to keep the government from becoming oppressive,” says Chris Truax. These rights “aren’t just a defense against an intentionally tyrannical government; they also protect us against well-meaning bureaucrats.” For “all the patriots out there who fly ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags and talk about upholding the Constitution,” this is “your moment. You’ve spent your entire lives talking about resisting tyranny. Now it is happening right before your eyes.”

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‘How to have a good first date’

Sonya Gurwitt at Time

A “lot of first dates do not turn into second dates,” and dating “can feel like a chore,” says Sonya Gurwitt. There is a “scriptedness to dating in a big city,” a “dance that nobody choreographed, but with distinct steps we’re supposed to pick up as we go.” People should “approach first dates as an opportunity to step into somebody’s world. When else do you get to spend a few hours getting to know a stranger?”

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‘This Pam Bondi photo captures the justice system’s contempt for Epstein’s victims’

The Miami Herald editorial board

If there is a “single photo that captures the contemptible way the Jeffrey Epstein victims have been treated by the justice system, it’s a picture of Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general,” says the Miami Herald editorial board. The picture shows Bondi “sitting in front of a group of more than a dozen victims,” but it “looks as though she is determined to ignore them.” It is a “heartbreaking image for many reasons” and shows the “default response by authorities.”

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‘The homeschooling hack’

Lauren Hilgers at New York magazine

“Homeschooling, long associated with hippies and religious conservatives in the U.S., is in the middle of a rebrand and a boom,” says Lauren Hilgers. Homeschooled kids are “more self-motivated, better rested, and less anxious than their peers in normal classrooms,” and “can read a book without distractions or devote hours of attention to a single subject.” Parents “can carefully measure their child’s interests, skills, and learning styles, teaching them to become discerning à la carte consumers of classes.”

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American higher learning is considered among the best in the world, but recent rankings show the top of the food chain may be changing. While U.S. universities still dominate most lists, foreign institutions have been slowly superseding them. And with the Trump administration’s continued attacks on higher education, the trend may be here to stay.

Which universities are considered the best?

Six major rankings use a variety of factors to calculate the best universities. The Leiden Rankings at Leiden University, U.S. News Best Global University Rankings and the University Ranking by Academic Performance all focus on the “number of research publications, citations to those studies, and other measures of scholarly quality,” said Forbes. The other three, Quacquarelli Symonds’ QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education Rankings and the Center for World University Rankings, measure the “success and employment records of graduates, the perceived quality of the faculty, the relative presence of international students, and general institutional reputation.”

In the “initial iteration of each system, an American university was ranked first in the world,” said Forbes, with Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology taking the various rankings’ top spots. But in the “most recent rankings, we see different outcomes. In four of the systems, the number of top-10 spots occupied by U.S. universities declined.” Notably, Chinese schools have been replacing many American institutions on these lists.

The most recent Leiden list ranks China’s Zhejiang University first and Harvard third, with “12 of the following 13” based in China, said The Daily Beast. In the most recent edition of the Times Higher Education list, more than 60 U.S. schools fell in the rankings, including “well-known institutions suffering significant downgrades, such as an eight- and 17-place drop for Duke University and Emory University, respectively.” The Times Higher Education list also named the U.K.’s Oxford University the world’s best college for the tenth year in a row.

Why are foreign schools gaining steam?

It is largely due to a global reordering, which comes as the Trump administration has been “slashing research funding to American schools that depend heavily on the federal government to pay for scientific endeavors,” said The New York Times. President Donald Trump’s policies “did not start the American universities’ relative decline, which began years ago, but they could accelerate it.”

The disparity between people who can afford college may also be a factor. The data shows that “access for talented students from families outside the traditional ‘elite’ is much more restricted than it ought to be,” said Time, and “students from wealthy backgrounds are heavily overrepresented: More than 15% come from families in the top 1% of the U.S. national income distribution,” which translates to over $600,000 per year.

U.S. institutions also strive to attract foreign students, but are facing challenges from “travel bans and an anti-immigration crackdown that has swept up international students and academics,” said the Times. All of these combined issues could be leading to a decline in U.S. education supremacy. There is a “big shift coming, a bit of a new world order in global dominance of higher education,” said Phil Baty, the chief global affairs officer for Times Higher Education, to the Times. “It’s not as if U.S. schools are getting demonstrably worse, it’s just the global competition: Other nations are making more rapid progress.”

‘How the world fell in love with climbing’

Josh Noble at the Financial Times

That “climbing has piqued the interest of the world’s largest subscription streaming service is a sign of how big the pursuit has become,” says Josh Noble. The “number of people climbing has exploded — fueled by the post-pandemic boom in exercise, the sport’s addition to the Olympic program and awe-inspiring achievements from daredevil climbers.” But “some in climbing are wary of how the most dangerous version — free solo climbing — is typically what garners the most attention.”

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‘T-maxxing has gone too far’

Yasmin Tayag at The Atlantic

American men are “attempting to increase their testosterone levels — whether they need to or not,” says Yasmin Tayag. Low testosterone “really can be debilitating,” but the “average decline in testosterone is not especially large.” Up to a “third of men on TRT don’t have a deficiency,” and this “maximalist approach to testosterone is risky.” Pumping the “body full of testosterone may not alleviate the problems that patients set out to solve,” as “every patient responds to testosterone differently.”

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‘The real “civilizational erasure” is happening in America’

Fareed Zakaria at Foreign Policy

Many “MAGA luminaries often proclaim that the grave danger facing the West is ‘civilizational erasure,’ which they claim is happening in Europe,” says Fareed Zakaria. But the “West’s defining character has not been tribal or religious solidarity — that describes most of the world.” The West’s “precious, almost unique, achievement has been the limitation of state power,” but the “second Trump administration has moved sharply to erode these traditions.” The “Trump administration has declared war on civil society.”

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‘When courts become quality control’

Ronell Smith at The Dallas Morning News

Competence is “usually invisible,” says Ronell Smith. People “notice it when it’s missing — when major decisions are made quickly, explained incompletely, then ‘resolved’ only after legal challenge.” The “Trump administration’s recent Title X reversal is a case study.” Reversals are “normal. What’s different is when reversal starts to feel like the governing method: act first, clarify later and let litigation serve as the cleanup step. It’s a method we might call churn governance.”

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Colleges and universities are facing a new fraud tactic that has made them more susceptible to digital theft. Known as ghost students, hackers are exploiting pandemic-related vulnerabilities to steal millions of dollars in student financial aid.

Over the past five years, the federal government has uncovered more than $350 million in fraud perpetrated by ghost student schemes, said Jason Williams, the assistant inspector general for investigations at the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, to ABC News. "And that's only in the universe of what we know, and what we have adjudicated."

‘Scourge’ on America’s colleges

For thousands of colleges across the country inundated with ghost students, these “sophisticated thieves have become a scourge,” ABC News said. The scammers use stolen or fake identities to enroll in online classes and apply for grants and loans, then disappear once they receive the funds. The fraudsters are “robbing the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving an untold number of victims.”

"It's a huge issue," Williams said to ABC. As they steal identities, these “loans are not being repaid.” They are being assigned to people who “don't even know they have a debt” with the DOE until the Internal Revenue Service alerts them. Thieves have tried to steal financial aid for decades, but when the pandemic hit, “everybody went to online learning,” which “really did open the door” for more widespread fraud.

The ghost students have even “resorted to submitting homework” completed with AI: “anything to try to keep from getting dropped from a class,” said Fortune. Sometimes, “all they’ll get away with is a college email address,” but even that is valuable, “giving the scammers a veneer of legitimacy as a college student,” a security expert said, per Fortune.

The scope of the fraud is “enormous,” said ABC. In California alone, “nearly a third of all community college applicants in 2024 were identified as fraudulent,” according to the California Community Colleges system. Other states are affected by the same problem, but “with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target,” said The Associated Press. In some cases, “professors discover almost no one in their class is real.” Community colleges are targeted because “their lower tuition means larger percentages of grants and loans go to borrowers.”

Fighting back with AI

The federal government is “on the hook for tuition aid lost to scammers,” said ABC News. But it is the community colleges, which “accept almost all applicants through open enrollment,” that often “carry the burden of sniffing out fake applications.” Doing so requires “resources, technology and expertise that many institutions do not possess.”

The Department of Education implemented “enhanced fraud controls and identity verification requirements” last year, which “helped schools combat fake applicants,” said ABC. The DOE found that $90 million had been disbursed to ineligible students, including $30 million that went to deceased individuals whose identities had been stolen. To help “root out the fraud,” community colleges have turned to a “growing marketplace of identity verification software vendors,” ABC said.

Minnesota is using AI and has partnered with other schools and security consortia to identify new techniques used by ghost students to infiltrate their schools, said Craig Munson, Minnesota’s chief information security officer, to Fortune. “Just as we leverage AI to protect ourselves, the attackers also continue to leverage it in new and interesting ways.” It’s like an “arms race.” Every six months, the attackers “tend to stop one way of doing things and move to a different tactic.”

After being hit hard by ghost students in 2024, the California Community College system “started fighting the AI-driven scheme — with AI,” said Fortune. The CCC began using N2N’s LightLeap.AI platform to detect fraudulent enrollments last summer. Following the rollout, 79,016 fraudulent applications were detected across over half a million applications. “The only answer for a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI,” said the CEO and founder of N2N Services, Kiran Kodithala, to Fortune.

‘The “Mississippi marathon” is teaching kids to read’

Rahm Emanuel at The Wall Street Journal

Mississippi “chose to spend less time on topics that dominate Washington’s education agenda and instead maintained a focus on what happens inside the classroom,” says Rahm Emanuel. It “restored phonics-based systems that rigorous scientific studies have shown to work” and “constructed a system to train teachers so that they are effective at teaching students to read.” Rather than “discarding public schools or educator accountability, the rest of America should adopt a model that has been proven to work.”

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‘The World Cup is out of reach for many. The hope lies outside the stadiums.’

Leander Schaerlaeckens at The Guardian

If the “shocking ticket prices for the actual World Cup will make it exclusive and inaccessible,” something “like a shadow World Cup may nevertheless emerge,” says Leander Schaerlaeckens. With a “wall built around the genuine article, scalable only by a bundle of money, a kind of bootleg version may be fashioned out of the scraps and flashes of the tournament.” It may be a “lower-case world cup, as it were, consisting of fan fests and open training sessions and pre-tournament warmup matches.”

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‘Always beware a declining superpower’

Janan Ganesh at the Financial Times

America “remains the strongest country on Earth, if by a reduced margin,” but in “another sense American decline is worse,” says Janan Ganesh. Even “under a normal president, the U.S. might be behaving badly,” as “status-anxious countries have to puff themselves up. It is a rare superpower that takes decline well.” Because the “performance of the U.S. this century has been so awesome in absolute terms,” the “nation’s relative decline can be hard to visualize. But it is there.”

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‘Mamdani might actually pull off universal child care in NYC’

Sara Pequeño at USA Today

When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “presented universal child care as part of his campaign platform,” some “thought it was a remarkable goal – and a far-fetched one,” says Sara Pequeño. But it “seems that dream is closer to reality, and the entire country may be better for it.” If “all goes well, this program could cement the city as a guiding light for other metropolitan areas looking to retain talent and keep parents, particularly moms, in the workforce.”

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Mississippi’s upward progress has made it the center of conversation in the education world over the past few years, as people consider how one of the poorest states could manage such significant jumps in statistics. While some are in awe of what the state has accomplished, others question whether the “Mississippi miracle” was achieved with the right kinds of strategies.

Climbing the ranks

Mississippi has risen from 49th in the country on national tests in 2013 to a top 10 state for fourth-grade reading levels, “even as test scores have fallen almost everywhere else,” said The New York Times. Adjusted for poverty and other demographic factors, Mississippi ranks first in fourth-grade reading and math and is at or near the top in eighth-grade reading and math, according to the Urban Institute.

In terms of the states that are “helping kids coming from difficult circumstances learn as much as they can,” Mississippi is doing “much better than many other states, said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to the Times. This is “including wealthier states in affluent progressive areas.”

The state’s fourth graders “exceeded the national reading average” for the first time in 2024, said the International Business Times. The state’s overall education ranking rose to 16th nationally by 2025, its “highest ever.” Mississippi’s low-income fourth graders “now perform better than those in every other state, surpassing Michigan by 17 points.​”

How it happened

The turnaround in educational achievement has many wondering how Mississippi, with its “low education spending and high child poverty,” managed such a change, said the Times. It did not rely on common proposals such as “reducing class sizes or dramatically boosting per-student funding.” Instead, the state made sweeping policy changes, including “changing the way reading is taught,” relying on an approach known as the science of reading. It is also “embracing contentious school accountability policies other states have backed away from.”

The science of reading was a “key piece of what we did,” said Rachel Canter, the longtime leader of education reform group Mississippi First who now works at the Progressive Policy Institute, said to the Times. But people are “missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.”

In addition to adjusting reading instruction, Mississippi “raised academic standards and started giving each school a letter grade, A to F,” said the Times. The state takes an “unusually strong role in telling schools what to do.” The Department of Education also deploys literacy and mathematics coaches in low-performing elementary schools to assist educators. State officials vet and approve the curriculum used by the majority of districts, which is “unusual in a country that prizes local control of schools.”

Perhaps the most controversial policy is holding back third graders who cannot read proficiently. The state was able to enact changes, in part, because it has “weak teachers’ unions,” which have “traditionally resisted accountability linked to standardized testing.”

Next steps

Mississippi is intensifying its efforts, with the education department planning to request $9 million from state lawmakers this year to “expand literacy coaching beyond the early elementary grades,” the Times said. Other states have “gone in the opposite direction” by “backing off accountability and lowering proficiency standards, sometimes in the name of equity.” Still, a handful of states, including Louisiana and Alabama, are “seeing promising results using a similar set of strategies as Mississippi.”

To fail to improve education is to “lastingly abandon a significant fraction of our children to a lifelong struggle,” said The Argument Substack. “And blue states have been failing.” They have been spending heavily on schools but have been unwilling to “muster the political will and effort necessary to hold those schools accountable for results and adopt teaching practices that actually work.”

What happened

The University of Oklahoma has removed a graduate student after she gave a student a failing grade on a psychology paper that cited the Bible as proof that “belief in multiple genders” is “demonic.” A review determined that the instructor, Mel Cuth, was “arbitrary in the grading of this specific paper,” the university said Monday, and she “will no longer have instructional duties.”

Who said what

The junior psychology major who wrote the essay appealed her zero grade and filed a religious discrimination claim. “Her case became a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over academic freedom on college campuses” after the university suspended Cuth and struck the student’s failing grade, The Associated Press said. Conservative groups and commentators made it an “online cause, highlighting” the junior’s argument “she’d been punished for expressing conservative Christian views.”

The University of Oklahoma’s Graduate Student Senate called Cuth’s removal “reprehensible.” The failed essay, meant to discuss academic research on gender expression and bullying in middle school, included a “prayer” that America’s youth “would not believe the lies being spread from Satan” about multiple genders. Cuth responded that the paper “does not answer the questions for the assignment,” relies on “personal ideology” and “is at times offensive,” though “I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” according to a screenshot posted online by the school’s Turning Point USA chapter.

What next?

Cuth said through a lawyer yesterday she was “considering all of her legal remedies, including appealing this decision.”

‘A lesson in false limits’

Sally Jenkins at The Atlantic

Few “professionals suffer more from ageism than athletes,” says Sally Jenkins. Fans “want athletes to retire before they lose the luster of their prime and start looking knee sore,” an “expectation that, judging by the recent exploits of the skier Lindsey Vonn and the quarterback Philip Rivers, has cheated audiences.” Too many “athletes, however, are discouraged from competing as they age.” Vonn and Rivers “both saw an opening to compete again, and something adventurous in them said, ‘Why not?’”

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‘This Christmas, let’s ban the world’s most miserable gift-giving game’

Dave Schilling at The Guardian

It is “forced frivolity season,” and people can “say yes to just about every holiday party invite — save for one massive exception. White elephant parties,” says Dave Schilling. There isn’t a “more dispiriting feeling than unwrapping a hardcover edition of a book you’ve been meaning to read or a pair of Bluetooth headphones and having it ripped from your hands.” The “person who invented this cursed activity takes more pleasure in witnessing pain than a dominatrix.”

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‘Without railway reform, your town could be the next East Palestine’

Jess Conard at The Hill

“Three years ago, a 149-car train pulled by three locomotives carrying tons of toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio,” and the “scars — physical, emotional and economic — remain today,” says Jess Conard. The “safety protocols that exist are ineffective,” yet the “standards that would make railroads operate safely are ignored.” These “safety technologies are reasonable and available and could have prevented the disaster in East Palestine.” If “implemented quickly, they could also prevent a disaster in your community.”

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‘More math, not less, will lead students to success’

Bloomberg editorial board

Educators have “embraced trendy curricula that seek to make math more fun, incorporating coursework that feels more relevant to students than, say, dividing polynomials,” says the Bloomberg editorial board. These “approaches, though well-intentioned, tend to lower standards.” Not “only are core math concepts missing by design, but the rigorous statistics and computer science skills needed for more advanced coursework are also lacking.” Math “becomes fun when you practice, and to that end interventions must start early.”

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The advantage of having a college degree while job hunting is “becoming a thing of the past,” said Jonnelle Marte in Bloomberg. Historically, recent college grads have snatched up jobs more quickly than peers with only a high school diploma. But the job-finding rate for college-educated workers ages 22 to 27 has dropped sharply over the past 20 months, and is now “roughly in line” with that of young high-school-educated workers, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. That concerning convergence is another sign of the dearth of entry-level opportunities for young, mostly white-collar workers. The overall unemployment rate overall for 20-to-24-year-olds hit 9.2% in September, “up 2.2 percentage points from a year prior.”

Given those vanishing job prospects, it’s no surprise that more Americans are saying college isn’t worth it, said Ben Kamisar in NBCNews.com. As recently as 2017, 49% of Americans felt that an advanced education improved their chances “to get a good job and earn more money,” compared with 47% who did not. Today, the sentiment has completely flipped, with 63% now disputing the value of a college degree. “Exploding tuition prices” are a huge factor, but the labor market is also making Americans sour on a traditional “ingredient of the American dream.” Artificial intelligence is making white-collar jobs feel riskier, while blue-collar work “is looking like a safer bet,” said Julie Jargon in The Wall Street Journal. Just ask Hannah Talley, 25, who dropped out of Texas A&M to become an auto mechanic and is now earning $53,000 a year at a Firestone shop. Meanwhile, her 22-year-old sister, Sophia, is struggling to find her way as a freelance journalist after graduating from the University of Texas.

“We can’t all be plumbers,” said Callum Borchers, also in The Wall Street Journal. There was a time after the pandemic when “skills-based hiring” that ignored credentials was in vogue. Employers at the time “didn’t have much choice” in a tight labor market. Now they “have their pick of available talent.” Faced with options, employers will increasingly “revert back to the degree as a proxy,” HR experts say, partly because it takes “more effort to determine whether someone without a degree can handle a job.” The value proposition of going to college “has stopped being a no-brainer,” said Allison Schrager in Bloomberg, but that doesn’t mean it “isn’t worth the expense for many people.” Having a degree is “a lifetime asset,” and “the average college graduate can still expect to earn $1 million more over their lifetime” than those with high school diplomas. That’s enough to give college at least a passing grade.

‘Teachers want to help English learners. We owe them the right tools.’

Javaid Siddiqi at The Hill

English learner students are “capable of making multi-year academic gains in a single school year and represent some of the most motivated learners,” says Javaid Siddiqi. The “question isn’t whether they can succeed. It’s whether we’re equipping their teachers with the tools to help them.” Every “teacher should understand strategies to help students deconstruct texts. You can’t teach students who can’t access the reading.” The “problem is that most educator preparation programs don’t teach these strategies.”

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‘Is Queens the new political bellwether of America?’

Michael Massing at The Guardian

As the “extraordinary Oval Office meeting” between President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani shows, “there’s a new bellwether in American politics,” says Michael Massing. Queens “contains multitudes. With a population of 2.3 million, it would be the nation’s fifth-largest city if it stood alone.” It is “thoroughly middle and working class — a swath of heartland America set down in pulsating, cosmopolitan New York.” Yet “national news organizations have treated the borough like flyover country.”

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‘Banning AI regulation will endanger American kids’

Michael Kleinman at Time

Despite “horrific incident after horrific incident, AI companies retain carte blanche to sell products with zero meaningful safety standards or oversight,” says Michael Kleinman. No “other industry is given such freedom to endanger people with total impunity.” A “broad range of states including Utah, Texas, and California have already stepped up with important AI regulation that would be eviscerated by preemption.” This “dramatically limits the ability of states to enact commonsense regulations to protect our children.”

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‘The Nuzzi seizure of power’

Chris Lehmann at The Nation

Future “chronicles of the utter debasement of American political journalism will have to devote an entire chapter” to oral sex, says Chris Lehmann. This “salacious discourse comes off as positively quaint next to the revelations recounted by Beltway journalist Ryan Lizza in his serial Substack breakdown of the demise of his relationship with Olivia Nuzzi.” What “becomes clear across the dreary narrations” is “that all parties are in thrall to the act of portentous narration itself.”

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As the Trump administration sets its plans in motion to reallocate the responsibilities of the Education Department, the initial steps are illuminating how President Donald Trump could fulfill his campaign pledge to bulldoze the department entirely. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has launched a public campaign to argue that states and other federal agencies could better handle the department’s work.

How does the administration plan to break up the department?

American schools are funded mainly by state and local money. Still, the Education Department “serves as a conduit for billions of dollars of federal aid going to state and local education agencies,” said The Associated Press. Agency officials said the money will continue to be distributed as outlined by Congress, but under the newly signed agreements, much of it will come from a different agency.

The Department of Labor will take over some of the largest federal funding sources for schools and colleges, including Title I money for schools serving low-income communities. Adult education programs were already moved to Labor in June. Another agreement puts the Health and Human Services in charge of a grant program for parents attending college. The State Department will oversee foreign language programs, and the Interior will take on programs supporting Native American education.

Some of the department's roles remain unchanged, such as managing the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio. While student aid is unaffected, both McMahon and Trump have suggested a different federal department could better handle it. Pell Grants and federal loans will continue to be disbursed, and student loan borrowers will continue making payments. The Department of Education will also continue to oversee the accreditation process, which allows colleges to accept federal financial aid.

Money for providing educational support for students with disabilities will continue to come from the department as well. However, McMahon has suggested it could be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Investigations into schools and universities that have violated disability rights law and civil rights violations will also remain untouched, though McMahon has pointed out that the Department of Justice could take those over.

Is this the end of the Department of Education?​​

Not necessarily. McMahon has acknowledged that “only Congress can eliminate the department,” but she has “vowed to work to dismantle it from within,” said The Washington Post. The Trump administration is “taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” McMahon said in a statement. “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.”

Shifting the responsibilities of the department to other agencies “will not by itself remove red tape or alter the power that Washington exerts over states and school districts,” said the Post. States and school boards already control most decisions related to education, but the department “enforces rules embedded in federal programs, such as grant requirements.”

The proposed disbanding of the department has elicited pushback from education experts and politicians. It is “difficult to see how transferring cornerstone programs” out of the department will “result in streamlined operations, especially for the nation’s small, rural and low-capacity districts,” said David Schuler, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, in a statement.

The administration is acting as if the constitutional separation of powers is a “mere suggestion,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) in a statement. This is an “outright illegal effort to continue dismantling the Department of Education.” Students and families will “suffer the consequences as key programs that help students learn to read or that strengthen ties between schools and families are spun off to agencies with little to no relevant expertise.”

Others praised the administration’s decision to move forward with its plans to try to shut down the department. The shutdown of the federal government “made one thing clear: Students and teachers can go to class without heavy-handed federal intervention,” said House Education and Workforce Chair Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) in a statement, per Politico. The administration is “making good on its promise to fix the nation’s broken system by right-sizing the Department of Education to improve student outcomes.”

While most Americans may think of being a school crossing guard as a relatively safe profession, it appears that this is not the reality. A new investigation has shed light on just how deadly being a crossing guard can be, with hundreds of people injured and even killed on the job over the past decade. Experts also say there are gaps in how these statistics are gathered, meaning crossing guard injuries may be underreported.

How dangerous is it to be a crossing guard?

The investigation was helmed by The Associated Press alongside Cox Media Group television stations across the country. It found that during the last 10 years at least “230 school crossing guards across 37 states and Washington, D.C., were struck by vehicles,” said the AP. Nearly three dozen of these crossing guards were killed. The AP compiled this data from “incident and accident reports requested from nearly 200 police departments,” but it still represents “only a portion of guards injured and killed nationwide.”

Often, the drivers involved in these incidents received very little punishment: More than “70% of drivers who hit crossing guards received just traffic tickets or no charges at all,” said WSB-TV Atlanta, one of the stations that worked on the investigation. And the drivers regularly didn’t stop: As many as 40 of the 230 accidents were hit-and-runs, and “in at least six of those, law enforcement was never able to identify the driver who fled the scene.”

There are problems when it comes to tracking this data, and a “full accounting is impossible,” said the AP. There are no federal agencies that keep a comprehensive list of crossing guard accidents, and “only two states have made a serious effort to track crossing guard safety: New Jersey and Massachusetts.” Crossing guard protection “remains a patchwork of state and local policies.”

What can be done about this?

Certain states are looking at solutions through legislation. Some hope that “improved technology could eliminate the need for crossing guards to direct traffic,” said WSOC-TV Charlotte, which also worked on the investigation. There are also efforts being made to “give towns and school districts more authority to make safety changes, like lowering speed limits.”

In “2025, there are alternatives to having somebody standing out there holding up a sign and waving it,” South Carolina State Rep. David Martin (R) said to WSOC-TV. School districts “should have resources and the power to be able to do that instead of going through the government.”

Other communities are working on implementing additional safety measures. To assist with a lack of crossing guards in the Seattle School District, officials are using “community help, flashing crosswalk signs and trying to reroute traffic away from schools,” said KIRO-7 Seattle, another investigative partner.

But this still hasn’t made the job of a crossing guard any less deadly. Crossing guards and school flaggers “were in the top fifth of deadliest jobs” in 2023, said the AP, citing the most recent year with available data. This death rate is “on par with power line installers and air transportation workers.” A crossing guard is also the “only occupation in that top fifth that interacts with children daily.”