For the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, English learners' average English-language proficiency test scores did not decline. They held steady or ticked up in most grades during the 2024-25 school year, according to a new report from WIDA, the consortium of 42 states, territories, and federal agencies that runs one of the most widely used English-language proficiency exams, reported by Education Week's Ileana Najarro. A three-year growth analysis in the latest edition found that long-term gains in students' academic English-language proficiency are starting to rebound from the years most affected by pandemic disruption. Scores in the Reading domain, specifically, have proved the most resilient, especially in middle and high school grades, according to the report.
"It's not a complete recovery to pre-pandemic levels. It's just the stop of a decline, which is really great, it's something that we've been waiting for a long time," said Narék Sahakyan, a WIDA researcher and co-author of the report. Co-author Glenn Poole added that Hispanic students, who continue to score lower on average than their non-Hispanic peers, have seen their long-term growth rates increase in the last couple of years, narrowing the disparity in growth even as the gap in average proficiency persists. Rebecca Bergey, a principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research, cautioned against broad conclusions and pointed to the questions that actually matter at the building level: how do scores compare between students in dual-language programs versus English-only services, and are most of a school's English learners newcomers or U.S.-born.
Teachers in Washington state's Peninsula School District have a new tool called LessonLens: film a lesson, upload it, and get AI-generated feedback on pacing and questioning technique. It doesn't exist in any app store because the district's own tech team built it, using Claude Code, in a practice known as "vibe coding," where AI writes the code instead of a human, according to Education Week's Alyson Klein and a companion report from K-12 Dive. Beyond LessonLens, Peninsula has vibe-coded tools for accounting, human resources, a scholarship-search assistant for counselors, a CTE budget-request tool, and a school-comparison app for parents. Chief information officer Kris Hagel adapted an open-source e-signature tool to replace a paid subscription, and an app built by former teacher James Cantonwine to support the school board's strategic planning, which Hagel estimates would have cost $30,000 to $40,000 from a vendor, took a coding agent a few hours. All told, Hagel expects vibe coding to save Peninsula around $220,000 a year, and possibly more.
You are not about to vibe code your own gradebook, and Peninsula's advantage, a tech team with real computer science backgrounds, isn't one every district has. But the assumption underneath most ed-tech purchasing, that a vendor's off-the-shelf product is the only option, is being tested in real time. Torrey Trust, a learning-technology professor at UMass Amherst, told EdWeek that AI-coded tools can introduce more security vulnerabilities and bugs than a human-built product, and districts handling IEPs and student health data have to be especially cautious about what a homegrown tool touches. If your building starts talking about a locally built AI tool, the question worth asking before you use it isn't whether it works, it's whether it has been vetted the way a purchased product would be.
The average math, ELA, or science teacher uses five supplemental resources on top of their core curriculum, according to a RAND Corporation survey, and those extra materials often don't align with core lessons in sequence, terminology, or approach, a problem researchers call a lack of "instructional coherence," reported by Education Week's Sarah Schwartz on July 1. The Gates Foundation has now put three grants behind fixing that mismatch instead of funding another new curriculum: $1.17 million to Great Minds to align its digital math supplements with its core program, $3.58 million to the American Institutes for Research to improve coherence between supplements and the popular Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, and $5,000 to Spokane Public Schools to document lessons from pairing Illustrative Mathematics with the adaptive program MATHia. "I should be able to click one button and say, 'Can you give me 10 more problems so I can get students a little more confident,'" said Dylan Kane, a 7th grade math teacher in Leadville, Colo., describing the gap the grants are meant to close. "Instead, I have to make them myself."
This is a middle school framing problem with a direct high school parallel. Rachel Leifer, a senior program officer on Gates's K-12 education team, said core curricula are built for grade-level content while not every student arrives ready for it, which forces teachers to hunt for or build their own supplemental support. Illustrative Mathematics CEO Kristin Umland told EdWeek her team is now asking what it would look like to design a coherent instructional system from the ground up, rather than treating intervention materials as a separate add-on. If your department runs a core program alongside an intervention tool, worth a direct question at your next PLC: do the two actually use the same vocabulary and strategies, or are you asking students to translate between two different math languages every time they move between them.
Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas projects teens will gain just 790,000 jobs across May, June, and July 2026, the lowest summer hiring total since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the data in 1948, and worse than last summer's 801,000, which was itself the weakest year on record at the time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 219,000 fewer teens working this May compared with last May, according to reporting from NPR's Dianna Douglas. Hiring in entertainment and leisure, the resorts, hotels, and amusement parks that traditionally hire teens, is down 70% year over year, while fast food and retail, historically a teen's first job, have shifted toward self-service kiosks. "They now have more competition. There may be fewer jobs available," said Brad Hershbein, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. "They kind of get stuck with the short straw," as adults carrying college debt compete for the same entry-level openings.
Teen labor force participation has fallen from a peak near 58% in the 1970s to about a third of teens today, and Hershbein notes a growing share of 18- and 19-year-olds are "idle," neither working nor in school, spending the time instead on what he calls leisure, video games among the most common. Separate research NPR cites found teen summer jobs help reduce crime, which means a shrinking market has stakes beyond a resume line. If you have juniors or seniors who seem to have more free time than usual this summer, it may not be a choice. It's worth asking directly whether they have looked for work and hit a wall, rather than assuming it.