Education

Education

The government has promised to create 50,000 more places for children with special educational needs (Send) in mainstream schools in England. It plans to invest 3bn over the next three years, partly funded by cancelling the building of some planned free schools. Councils - who will receive the funding - have argued the money needs to be diverted to the right areas and to the people who know what is needed in their local communities.

Kids are struggling academically and teachers are struggling right beside them as they deal with issues like politics in the classroom, low pay, and lack of resources. In other words: education is a struggle right now. One third grade teacher, who shares content as @salami4prez on TikTok, posted a simple video saying that things would improve if parents just consistently sent their kids to school.

Frustrations ran high Wednesday night as the Oakland Unified School District faces a $100 million budget shortfall next year.

The most recent data from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), which monitors the spread of winter viruses, found there were 107 acute respiratory incidents in educational settings in England between 24 and 30 November. An "acute respiratory incident" is defined for a school as two or more cases occurring among pupils within a five-day period. It could apply to a range of respiratory illnesses like influenza, RSV, covid or the common cold.

Tadgh O'Donovan, science teacher in Carrigaline Community School and content creator @teachwithtadgh, took a chance during the pandemic, and he hasn't looked back since

Tadgh O'Donovan, science teacher in Carrigaline Community School and content creator @teachwithtadgh, took a chance during the pandemic, and he hasn't looked back since

Facing a job market that had shed thousands of newsroom positions and a landscape where one-third of working journalists now identify as "creator journalists," academia will have no choice but to pivot - or risk losing its relevance. The journalism curriculum of the future won't just teach students how to report the news; it will teach them how to be their own newsroom: part reporter, part product manager, part audience strategist and part small business owner.

Learning is not the result of exposure to information. Learning is the result of the brain actively pulling information out. When learners reread, rewatch, or review content, it feels familiar. Familiarity creates the illusion of mastery. The brain recognizes the material, and the learner assumes recognition means understanding. Recognition is not learning. Memory is strengthened not by putting information into the mind, but by bringing it back out. Retrieval practice is the process of recalling information without referring to the original content.

As AI becomes integral to modern learning, these platforms are now expected to deliver predictive insights, automated workflows, and highly personalized learning experiences. Yet many providers still operate legacy LMS systems, unable to support modern workloads or data-intensive features. These platforms are rigid, costly to maintain, and slow to update. Release cycles can often stretch into quarterly or annual updates, creating a widening gap between user expectations and the platform's capabilities.

Frustrated families are being left in the dark about how Boston's leaders are deciding which schools need to close, councilors said. The Boston City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to call for more transparency from the Wu administration and Boston Public Schools regarding ongoing efforts to close schools and consolidate the BPS system. There are many allies of Mayor Michelle Wu on the City Council, and the body has occasionally faced criticism for falling in line too easily with the mayor's agenda.

They were terminated by the Trump administration in a March reduction-in-force, but the courts intervened, temporarily blocking the department from completing their terminations. That left 299 OCR employees, roughly half of its staff, in legal and professional limbo because the department elected to place them on paid administrative leave while the legal battle plays out rather than allow them to work.

"active aggressor"

In a report conducted by the Guardian, the proposal of a four-day week for schools was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. Parents cited everything from their children's mental health to not worrying so much about absences as reasons for the four-day week to work. Teachers even loved the idea, noting that if the fifth day of the week were simply a teacher workday, it would free up their weekends from school and teaching tasks, allowing them to actually get a much-needed (and deserved) break.

To be able to see students, to get to know them, to get to see how they grow and change during these four years, and then to see them have success as they launch into the world, and then to see that they reach back so quickly to give back and to see the way that our community supports our students as they are navigating, exploring their values and their purpose and what they're feeling called to do. All of that is just really rewarding.

NEW YORK -- Digital Girl is empowering inner city youth, especially young girls, to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). Founded in 2014 and based in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the nonprofit serves students across all five boroughs. More than 6,000 students have learned computer science since its inception. The nonprofit is on a mission to close the gender and diversity gap in the tech industry through its hands-on, engaging STEM programming.

"My husband was amazing and made it very clear he wouldn't be offended if I didn't want to take his last name," Glasscock tells TODAY.com. "But I thought about it for a while, and it was really important to me that we have the same last name for our future kids."

My own sleepless thoughts on why the future of learning must go beyond crash tutorials and tackle ethics, accessibility, and human-centered design. It's 3:47 AM. I should be asleep. Instead, I'm lying here, staring at the ceiling, replaying a single restless thought: We don't need more courses. We need better ones. Everywhere I look, someone is launching a "Learn Figma in 5 Days" crash course or a "Top 10 AI Hacks for Beginners" tutorial. And don't get me wrong - those courses aren't useless. They scratch an itch, they help you pick up a tool, and sometimes they even get you a quick win.

From nurturing curiosity to harnessing cognitive science principles and designing learning for co-intelligence, November's Guest Author Article Showcase spotlights some excellent pieces on human-AI convergence. What happens when humans focus solely on technology when designing learning with Artificial Intelligence? Why do we need to teach and cultivate critical thinking? Can AI tools amplify our humanity? In no particular order, here are last month's top guest author articles on this hot topic.

Not thinking about something you rely on is the ultimate expression of trust. Around the world, Wikipedia has achieved that level of trust with an immense number of people. Such is the summation of Jimmy Wales, 59, of the secret to the success of his creation, the most popular online encyclopedia, whose monthly page views number 26 billion. And that is, I must say, the fulfillment of my very personal dream, he continues.

Two days after San Francisco public school teachers voted 99.34 percent to authorize a strike, and Mission Local reported that the district is considering deep cuts that could include layoffs, Superintendent Maria Su announced that the school district is on track to stabilize its budget, and return to local control over its finances. But that's only if the school district "continue[s] to make budget cuts for next school year and avoid any significant cost escalations," Su said.

"Currently struggling with a kid who has no desire to do well in school and doesn't care they fail," the parent wrote. "Shows no desire to get to school on time. It's impossible for them to get their schoolwork done on their own and do not take initiative until I have to intervene. Doing this daily is becoming impractical (the days I don't intervene - nothing gets done) and I am hoping for the day they have the sense of urgency to take ownership."

Thankfully, AI can help by easing some of this workload and supporting teachers, not replacing them. How? With the right AI prompts, teachers can quickly create lesson plans, assessments, differentiated materials, rubrics, and parent communications. Prompts are clear instructions that help AI tools produce what you need. For example, a simple prompt could be "Create a vocabulary quiz for Grade 5 using these words."

Was there ever a time when Americans believed that kids were actually being educated well? A look back through The Atlantic's archives shows that bouts of optimism are very occasional. I recently joined this long line of pessimists when reporting on the stunning decline in educational performance among K-12 students in the United States over the past decade. After a temporary period of improvement