Miriam Washut, an incoming Wyoming Catholic College student from Lander, won the first-ever Presidential 1776 Award on June 30, taking the $150,000 grand prize after outlasting more than 8,000 entrants from all 50 states and U.S. territories. The competition, run by the U.S. Department of Education, moved students through online qualifying rounds and regional testing before the top 20 finalists faced oral questions on the Constitution, the founding period, and the Revolutionary War in a nationally broadcast final judged by vetted history and civics teachers. Summer Brondstetter of Mercer Island, Washington, took second and $75,000; Rowan Kozminski of Grand Rapids, Michigan, took third and $25,000. Washut, second-place, and third-place finishers met President Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in the Oval Office on July 1.
The format is the part worth studying, not the prize money. NAEP's most recent civics results put eighth-grade proficiency at roughly 23%, a number built almost entirely from multiple-choice testing. The 1776 Award tested the same content area with live, unscripted oral answers in front of judges, and a homeschooled teenager from a town of 7,600 people outperformed thousands of students with more institutional resources behind them. That gap between recognizing a correct answer on a test and constructing one out loud is exactly the gap a lot of civics instruction never closes.
The OECD and the European Commission released "Empowering Learners for the Age of AI: An AI Literacy Framework for Primary and Secondary Education" on June 17, presenting it the next day in Brussels at a European Digital Education Hub event. The framework organizes AI literacy into four domains, engage with, create with, manage, and shape AI, spanning 19 competencies that define what a student should know and be able to do around AI by the end of secondary school. A draft opened for consultation in May 2025 and drew feedback from more than 2,000 teachers, education leaders, policymakers, and researchers across over 100 countries before this final version locked in. The published framework includes classroom scenarios and offline, low-tech activities built for schools without a device for every student, and will be available in all 24 official EU languages by the end of July.
Most AI literacy language reaching your district right now comes from a vendor, a state department, or a single consultant's framework. This one was tested against feedback from thousands of working teachers before publication, which is unusual for a document operating at this scale. If your school or department is writing its own AI literacy scope and sequence, the four domains give you a vetted starting vocabulary instead of one you have to invent, and the offline activity set means you can use it even if your building isn't one-to-one.
Roughly 5,800 voting delegates at the NEA's Representative Assembly in Denver elected current Vice President Princess Moss the union's next president with 50.3% of the vote, narrowly avoiding a runoff against Kate Dias, president of the Connecticut Education Association. Moss, a former elementary school music teacher who taught 21 years in Louisa County, Virginia, defeated Dias along with New Jersey union leader Sean Spiller and Oakland teacher Tania Kappner. She takes office in August, leading a union that grew by roughly 32,000 members this year to more than 2.8 million active, retired, and student members. Education Week reported the result.
NEA presidents typically move up a rung unopposed. A contest this close means Moss starts her term without the kind of unanimous mandate her predecessor, Becky Pringle, carried, at the exact moment the union has to set a national bargaining posture on AI in grading, lesson planning, and the companionship risks this brief has covered before. Watch which AI-related resolutions and new business items get priority in her first 90 days. That agenda typically becomes the template state affiliates cite in local bargaining within the year.
Senior U.S. District Judge John Gerrard granted a preliminary injunction on June 27, blocking the core of Nebraska's Parental Rights in Social Media Act four days before its scheduled July 1 start date. The 2025 law would have required platforms to verify a user's age before allowing account creation and to obtain signed, express parental consent before a minor could open an account. NetChoice, the trade association representing TikTok, Meta, and other platforms, sued to stop it. Gerrard ruled the age-verification and consent requirements likely violate the First Amendment rights of both users and platforms, though he let one piece of the law stand, a requirement that platforms build a dashboard letting parents view a minor's posts, interactions, and private messages.
Nebraska is not the first state to run its age-verification law into this exact First Amendment wall, and courts are drawing a consistent line: requiring a government ID to open a social media account doesn't survive scrutiny, but giving parents visibility into an account their child already has does. If your state is drafting similar legislation, or if parents ask why phone and app rules feel inconsistent from one district to the next, this ruling is a preview of where the legally durable version of these laws is landing, transparency tools for parents, not ID checks at the door.