Summer Science Program International enrolled 720 high school students this year, the largest class in the nonprofit's 67-year history, spread across 13 college campuses including Colby College in Maine, Albion College in Michigan, and the University of Guelph in Ontario, according to K-12 Dive. Students spend several weeks on topics ranging from astrophysics to bacterial genomics to cell biology, working in small teams rather than competing against each other. Between 65% and 80% of past participants go on to pursue STEM fields in college, according to the program.
Amy Kim, the program's chief program officer, told K-12 Dive the model deliberately avoids a competition format: students get the tools they need and are expected to experience failure along the way. Kim also pointed to a legitimate use for AI in science instruction, citing diagnostic medical literature review as an example, since no single physician can track millions of published case studies. That distinction, between AI as a research tool scientists actually need and AI as a shortcut around the thinking a science class is supposed to teach, is worth bringing into your own classroom before the fall.
Alberto Carvalho resigned as superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, the nation's second-largest school district, effective June 21, according to NBC News and CNN. The resignation comes four months after the FBI raided his office, his San Pedro home, and a property near Miami on February 25, in an investigation district officials have linked to LAUSD's contract with AllHere, a now-defunct vendor that built an AI chatbot called "Ed" for the district. LAUSD signed a $6 million contract with AllHere two years ago and had paid the company $3 million before the deal collapsed. AllHere's founder, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was separately arrested and charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, and identity theft. Carvalho has not been charged with a crime and is not named in the case against Smith-Griffin; Acting Superintendent Andrés Chait remains in the role until the district names a permanent replacement.
The "Ed" chatbot was sold to LAUSD families as a personal assistant that would track grades and surface mental health resources, the same pitch vendors are making to your own district right now. A six-million-dollar contract and a superintendent's resignation are the visible costs of a deal that failed; the invisible cost is the two years LAUSD spent building trust in a tool that never delivered what it promised. Before your school signs onto the next AI platform with a similarly broad pitch, ask what happens to that trust, and to the contract, if the vendor folds.
Stanford HAI researchers Mei Tan and Lena Phalen tested AI writing-feedback tools on identical student essays, varying only a single line describing the student's race, gender, language background, disability status, achievement level, or motivation. The feedback changed substantively depending on which description the tool received, according to their study, first presented at the International Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference in Bergen, Norway, in May and reported by Education Week in June. The paper, titled "Marked Pedagogies," found that large language models do not filter out demographic information the way a human teacher typically would; every detail in a prompt is treated as relevant to the task, including a student's name or background, whether or not it has any actual bearing on their writing.
If you use an AI tool to draft or speed up feedback on student writing, the demographic context built into your gradebook or learning platform, a student's name, an IEP flag, an ESL designation, may be quietly shaping the feedback that tool generates. The bias is not necessarily intentional on the vendor's part; it is a structural feature of how these models process context. The practical move is to read AI-generated feedback with the same scrutiny you would apply to a substitute teacher's comments, not to treat it as a neutral baseline.
Utah's enhanced school cellphone law takes effect July 1, prohibiting phone use from the first bell to the last unless an individual school or district opts for a looser standard, according to the Deseret News and KSL. The law builds on a 2025 measure that banned phones only during class time, a restriction Governor Spencer Cox and many lawmakers, educators, and students argued did not go far enough. Senate Bill 69, School Device Revisions, passed the Utah Legislature in February. Utah joins a fast-growing list of states moving from partial to full-day restrictions; at least 31 states and the District of Columbia now restrict student cellphone use in some form, 22 of them with bell-to-bell bans, according to Education Week.
A bell-to-bell ban changes more than what happens during your class period; it changes lunch, hallway transitions, and the moments between bells where students have historically self-regulated with a phone instead of with each other. If your school is moving toward this model, the open question is not whether students will comply during instruction, since most already do, but what replaces the phone during the unstructured minutes a full-day ban also covers.