📌 Deportations, enrollment declines — and a Trump school visit.
📌 Can tough truancy laws improve attendance after all?
📌 Everything you think about fixing edtech is wrong, says Taylor Lorenz.
📌 There’s a sex doll classroom robot now. So gross.
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The big education story of the week is the connection between ICE deportation efforts and school enrollment declines.
Nationwide, shrinking student populations are causing a wave of consolidations, boundary studies, and school closures (Washington Post, Montgomery County Banner, STLPR , The 74, New Jersey Monitor, Journal Sentinel, Willamette Week).
Shifting demographics have caused most of the 1.5 million student decline, which is taking place in 40 out of 50 states (Reason). However, deportation efforts have continued to affect schools and communities (Chicago Tribune, Houston Public Media, EdSource, Banner, EdSource).
In Boston, officials say that roughly half of the enrollment decline is due to fewer English language learners — a trend that experts suggest could accelerate (Boston Globe, WGBH, NPR, LA Public Press).
Immigration raids don’t have to take place on or near school grounds to have a chilling effect on attendance and enrollment — with direct effects on students’ lives and school resources.
Other big education news of the week include new actions and results on the reading front (CalMatters, AP, K12 Dive), student protests in India (NYT, BBC, Reuters), and President Trump’s first school visit (AJC, The 74, NewsHour, USA Today).
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If you’ve been following The Grade for any length of time you’ve heard all about the attendance woes of Oregon’s school system. But this story by the Oregon Journalism Project’s James Neff shows how one county is doing relatively well — by bucking a state rollback on truancy laws and reintroducing penalties for families of absent students alongside a robust support network. Neff’s data reporting shows there’s clearly something going right in Malheur County, which is about 20 points above the state average on attendance. The argument from local officials that the truancy citations work as an attention-grabbing mechanism is compelling.
🏆 The Fight for Control Over New York’s Charter Schools Is Escalating
New York City may get its newest charter school this fall — open year-round, 7 days a week to support the schedules of working parents. The school’s been approved by a governor-appointed board over the objections of other charter-school authorizing bodies and possibly in violation of state law, prompting a lawsuit. It’s a tangled tale of education bureaucracy, overlapping authority, and union-backed restrictions that is told clearly and fairly by New York Focus’s Melissa Manno.
🏆 What Were the Funniest Stories of the School Year? We Asked Educators
It’s not deeply reported investigative work or innovative data analysis but after all, school is on break and everyone’s taking it a little easier. So during the mid-summer lull in education reporting let’s enjoy this delightful collection of classroom anecdotes — from lost pants to fly memorials — by EdWeek’s Arianna Prothero.
Taylor Lorenz is skeptical of tech in schools. But she’s also skeptical of the restrictions that many politicians and parents are advocating for — from a federal ban on cellphones in schools to age verification for social media.
These proposals, she argues, are just more tech propaganda.
“How it’s being discussed is pretty bad, I would say,” she says about the current backlash. “I think we’ve lost the plot on so many issues.”
Did you know you can watch our interviews on YouTube or listen to them on Spotify or Apple?
I wish I’d pressed her more on cellphone bans — which she compared to punitive beeper bans from decades ago — but her heterodox approach to the biggest story in education right now is well worth listening to in full.
Also if you missed my column last week, you can read about how I almost missed the edtech backlash and why it’s such an important story: Parental rage, educator remorse, & lackluster results have stripped edtech of its seeming inevitability — and created a much-needed opportunity for journalists to demonstrate their value.
Bethany Barnes on investigating school predators, Charol Shakeshaft on the Trump crackdown, and Susan Gonzalez on Interstellar.
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Above: A 7-year study of nearly 4,000 social science papers found only about half could be replicated — and none of the education papers.
📰 People: We’re sending good wishes to Jenny Brundin, who’s retiring from Colorado Public Radio after 33 years. If you want a look back at what made her such a great reporter, read our 2023 profile. For more newsroom changes, look here. This week Chalkbeat published interesting Q&A’s with Jude Julien, founder of New York City’s first fully remote high school and with school integration activist Ary Amerikaner. If you’re looking for a career change and have experience teaching middle or high school, Press Pass NYC is hiring. And WHYY is looking to hire an education reporter in the Philadelphia area, which is great news since they haven’t had one for a while now.
📰 Numbers: This week’s deep-dive dataset is the new District Policy Pathfinder, which collects teacher contracts from across the country. AI usage remains widespread in K-12 classrooms, but 33% of educators and 30% of parents want restrictions on its usage. Typically teachers and students use about four learning applications as part of their instructional workflows — even when thousands are available. Given that a recent study found the best models produced “client-ready” work just 16% of the time in an office environment, that may be for the best. While Black students make up 15% of public-school students they were just 6% of AP math students in the 2021-2022 school year.
📰 Episodes & Books: EdSec Linda McMahon was on Fox News talking about AI and CTE, among other things. Former DCPS head Michelle Rhee was on a podcast talking about her efforts and what should happen next. NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo reported on how blockbusters can interest students in old texts again. Planet Money interviewed author Dana Suskind about her new book, “Human Raised.” Science Magazine editor Valerie Thompson spoke with former Stanford student Theo Baker about his book “How to Rule the World.” Jared Cooney Horvath’s “The Digital Delusion” is coming out in a new edition with the promise of “25% more book.” We’re excited for NYT reporter Natasha Singer’s forthcoming “Coding Kids.” Also coming in September — “Artificial Intimacy” by sociologist Sherry Turkle. And in case you missed it like we did, the “Have you Heard” podcast tackled Silicon Valley’s dystopian intervention in education not too long ago.
📰 Quotes
“The people most harmed by school, the ones who disengaged, dropped out, or barely survived it, almost never return to run it.”
“Fun fact: you can build your own personal Large Language Model (LLM) inside of your brain by reading more books.”
“Internalised facts are your bullshit filters and your raw material for creative association.”
“A lot of school is actually just state-funded daycare with a curriculum stapled on… it’s the floor, not the ceiling.”
“Democrats, I’ve found, simply aren’t very good at running things, especially school systems.”
“August is summer. No one should go to school in the summer.”
📰 Events: Chalkbeat is hosting a conversation about the data on teacher turnover at 12 p.m Eastern on July 30. If you missed last month’s conversation at the Brookings Institute on AI and the future of education, you can catch it here. And don’t forget about education writer (and friend of The Grade) Holly Korbey’s book club!
“It’s unclear if Sally will qualify for membership in the teachers union.”
With research and writing from Abraham Kenmore.
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