OTHER STORIES

Microcredential PD Approach Has Spread to More Than 30 States

EdWeek

Report Shows How Kids Are Doing in Education and Beyond

AECF

School Counselors Worry About Misguided Student Social Media Use

EdSurge

Let DEI Practices Die. Replace Them With Something Better

EdWeek

Trump Grounded Middle Schoolers’ Drones - and Other STEM Research

Chalkbeat

State Role in PD

Since 2009, nearly every U.S. state has adopted specific standards and teaching frameworks for literacy and math. Yet, despite these efforts, the implementation of these standards in classrooms has fallen short. The author argues that, to ensure policy goals reach the classroom, states need a sustained, standards-aligned system that supports educators throughout their careers. States should adopt research-backed features of effective PD programs and create strategic plans to ensure consistent implementation. Current PD practices are flawed and lack alignment with instructional goals. The author says that emerging strategies like micro-credentials show promise but require stronger regulation and infrastructure to be effective at scale. Brookings

Four Day School Week

In recent years, hundreds of school districts across the U.S. have responded to labor issues and straitened budgets by switching to a four-day weekly schedule. But new research from Missouri suggests that cutting out a day of instruction doesn’t yield the benefits proponents hope to achieve. School administrators were optimistic that the schedule change helped keep teachers from leaving, but a study found that teacher retention actually stayed about the same over the longer term, despite the schedule change. And some studies have found significant drops in student performance after adopting the four-day school week, despite lengthening the remaining four school days. The74

GenAI in Early Math

LLMs give expert-sounding early math advice but make frequent errors of various types. AI isn’t inventing these problems; it’s reflecting and amplifying the gaps that already exist in our collective understanding of early math. This is a major concern as LLMs have become a resource for struggling educators and parents. These LLMS are also frequently used as the foundation for math apps that claim to help struggling children. And these struggling parents and teachers are the least likely to be able to detect these subtle but critical errors. For children, this could establish foundational confusions that persist throughout a their math development. Learning Agency