Ten years ago, Chapman Unified School District, a rural district about 80 miles west of Topeka, Kansas, dropped the traditional Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II sequence for "integrated math," which blends all three subjects across each course. The Hechinger Report's Holly Korbey reported June 23 that the switch was driven by Kansas's 10th-grade state math test, which blends algebra and geometry concepts rather than testing them separately. Chapman teacher James Bell says the approach now helps students see connections the old sequence kept apart. Principal Kate Thornton has the result to back him up: the district's state-test proficiency rate rose from 11 percent in 2015, the first year of the switch, to 67 percent in 2025.
That result is the exception, not the rule. Roughly 16 percent of U.S. districts now offer integrated math, according to a 2023 Center for Education Market Dynamics report, with growth concentrated in California and the West. California has run integrated math for over a decade and sits at just 37 percent proficiency. Elizabeth Huffaker, a University of Florida researcher who just completed a study of California districts, found a "small and positive" effect on 11th-grade scores, equivalent to two to three months of additional learning, but cautioned that the gain coincided with simultaneous Common Core implementation. "I would not make this change expecting giant, transformative, high-impact-tutoring-type impacts," she said. Maryland will require a two-year integrated sequence statewide starting fall 2027, betting on Chapman's result. Utah, a decade into its own integrated math policy, is revisiting it after teacher pushback, despite strong, consistent state test scores.
Microsoft released its third annual AI in Education Report on June 24. The research, conducted by PSB Insights through interviews with 3,345 respondents across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, found that 92 percent of students and education leaders and 88 percent of educators now use AI for school-related purposes. Use is still climbing: 78 percent of education leaders, 76 percent of educators, and 65 percent of students reported increased AI use over the past year. Microsoft paired the release with a wave of no-cost AI tools for Microsoft 365 Education and a new AI Literacy for Educators credential pathway, co-created with ISTE and ASCD and grounded in the OECD and European Commission AI literacy frameworks, timed ahead of ISTELive 26.
Microsoft is not a neutral source here; it sells the tools this report measures adoption of. That doesn't make the underlying gap fake. A 92 percent adoption rate with no comparable jump in formal training means most of your students and colleagues are teaching themselves to use AI through trial and error. The new credential pathway is free and runs through Microsoft Elevate for Educators, which makes it one of the few no-cost options on the table if your district isn't funding training of its own this year.
The EdWeek Research Center's Teacher Morale Index, published June 24 as part of its 2026 State of Teaching project, puts the national morale score at +13 on a scale of -100 to +100, down from +18 in 2025. Sterling C. Lloyd, who oversees the index for EdWeek, built the score from three survey questions covering teachers' past, present, and expected future morale. The drop still leaves 2026 well above 2024's average score of -13, the year the index launched. State results vary widely: Arkansas posted the highest score at +24, while Pennsylvania posted the lowest at +1. By region, the South leads at +17 and the Northeast trails at +4.
A five-point national drop tells you whether what you're feeling in your own building is a local problem or a shared one. If your school's morale conversation has been framed as a staffing issue or a leadership issue specific to your district, this data says otherwise; the decline is broad and regional, not isolated. That's useful ammunition in a department or administration meeting where the instinct is to treat low morale as an individual complaint rather than a measured trend.
Medical Daily's Dorothy Brooks reported June 25 on a new NBER working paper, authored by economist Henry Saffer and issued in May, that examined the causal effects of school smartphone bans using synthetic difference-in-difference models against National Survey of Children's Health data from 2016 to 2024. Saffer's early conclusion: "these early results provide no clear evidence that the school ban policy reduced screentime or improved psychological wellbeing." He's careful to flag the data as preliminary, available for only one state with two post-ban periods and two states with one. Separately, Pew Research Center data Brooks cited show the share of U.S. teens reporting they're online "almost constantly" fell from 46 percent in 2024 to 40 percent in 2025, the same window bans spread across more than a dozen states. Researchers told Brooks the timing points to a structural explanation, students simply can't use phones during the school day, rather than a voluntary shift in behavior.
If your school enforces a phone ban, the honest pitch to students, parents, and yourself is that it protects classroom attention during the hours it's enforced. It is not yet evidence of a mental health fix. Saffer's paper is the first causal study of its kind, and it found nothing on the wellbeing side. The Pew researcher's line is the one worth remembering: what happens at 3 p.m. still matters, and a ban that ends at the final bell hasn't touched the other seventeen hours of a student's day.