The National Assessment Governing Board, meeting May 15, approved a plan to expand state-level NAEP data to include civics for the first time, with state-level eighth-grade civics results beginning in 2028 and twelfth-grade civics added in 2032. The board also formally launched the process to update the NAEP Civics Assessment Framework itself, last revised in 1996, targeting a new framework by 2032. Until now, civics has been tested only at the national level, leaving states and districts without the state-by-state comparisons they already have for math and reading. NAGB used the same meeting to rename the Trial Urban District Assessment to the Trends in Urban Districts Assessment, a small but telling acknowledgment that the "trial" program has been running for 25 years.
A framework written in 1996 predates smartphones, social media as a news source, and any conception of AI-generated political content, all of which now sit at the center of how students actually encounter civic life. NAGB's redesign process will run for several years and includes a public comment period before the 2032 framework locks in, which means classroom teachers have an unusually direct channel to shape what the next generation of civics testing actually measures.
AB 2148, introduced by Assemblymembers Al Muratsuchi and Josh Hoover, amends state education code to specify that a public school employee or a contractor providing services in a public school means a natural person, closing the door on an AI system being classified, employed, or contracted as a teacher under California law. The bill passed the Assembly 76-0 on May 4 and the Senate 38-0 on June 18, and was sent to Governor Newsom on June 24. As of this week, Newsom has not announced a decision. The bill is one of roughly 30 AI-related measures still moving through California's legislature this session, covering everything from chatbot safety to AI use in employment decisions.
No state currently allows an AI system to hold a teaching position, so AB 2148 is not blocking something already happening in classrooms. What it does is foreclose the ambiguity before it becomes a dispute: a district leaning on AI tools to cover a staffing gap cannot describe that arrangement as employment, contracting, or anything resembling a teacher of record. If Newsom signs it, California becomes the most prominent state to put that boundary into statute, and the "natural person" language gives every other state legislature a drafting template to borrow from this fall.
Education Week's Sarah D. Sparks reported June 9 on Cloquet Middle School, a grades 5-8 school in eastern Minnesota, where math teacher Alexis Sorenson now spends part of algebra instruction on Greek and Latin word roots, the same roots that show up in math vocabulary like "circumference" or "perimeter." Principal Tom Brenner built the program around a finding from literacy researcher Joan Sedita and San Diego State University's Douglas Fisher: many students who struggle with grade-level texts are not struggling with comprehension, they are struggling with decoding words they were never taught to break apart, a gap that becomes easy to miss past elementary school because older students compensate well enough to mask it. Since the program launched in the 2023-24 school year, Cloquet's share of eighth graders flagged high-risk for reading comprehension fell from 15 percent to 4 percent, and the share of incoming fifth graders with decoding gaps dropped from 40 percent to 2 percent by eighth grade. The national backdrop: eighth-grade NAEP reading scores sit at their lowest point in more than 30 years, with below-basic readers up eight percentage points since 2013, to 30 percent.
Cloquet's approach treats literacy as everyone's subject, not an ELA problem to hand off. A math, science, or history teacher who spends two minutes on a word's Greek or Latin root before using it is not taking time away from content; they are removing the decoding tax a struggling reader pays on every new vocabulary word, in every class, all day. The data suggests that tax is larger and more hidden in older students than most teachers assume.
The Los Angeles Unified School District's board approved a sweeping new screen-time policy on Tuesday, June 23, building on the district's existing cellphone ban, FOX 11 Los Angeles reported June 24. The policy bars screens entirely for pre-K through first grade, caps use at 60 minutes a day for second through fifth grade, and sets weekly limits of six hours for middle school and 10 hours for high school. It also bars student-led use of video streaming platforms in class and requires the district to produce a public report reviewing every existing classroom technology contract. Board member Nick Melvoin, who introduced the resolution with co-sponsors Karla Griego, Tanya Ortiz Franklin, Kelly Gonez, Rocío Rivas, and student board member Jerry Yang, framed it as a correction: "During COVID, student devices became a necessary lifeline... Our charge now is to recalibrate, evaluate the role of educational technology in the classroom, and balance access to that technology with the kinds of instruction and interaction we know help students thrive."
The contract-review mandate is the part worth watching closest, more than the time limits themselves. A public accounting of every existing classroom technology contract will surface tools the district is paying for and barely using, alongside tools that may not survive the new limits at all. If you teach in a district that has not done this kind of audit, LAUSD's report, once published, is a usable template for asking your own administration the same questions.