The Governor's School for Entrepreneurs Summer Startup program ran 147 Kentucky high schoolers, grades 9 through 11, through three weeks at the University of Kentucky's Gatton College of Business and Economics, June 20 through July 12. On July 17, the program announced its 2026 Pitch Fest results: 30 teams split into two leagues presented business ideas to a live panel of judges, competing for cash prizes of $1,000, $750, and $500. The winning team, LightHouse Finance, built an interactive game that teaches middle schoolers smart spending, saving, and investing. A second first-place team, Bink, designed a wearable band that monitors a toddler's health and relays it to a parent's phone. Gov. Andy Beshear called the students "some of the bright minds and businesses of tomorrow." The program is free, funded by the state and private donors, and does not screen applicants by GPA or test scores.
The graduation requirement is not the story. The judging panel is. GSE Summer Startup runs on a structure any CTE or business teacher can borrow at any budget: give students a real problem, put them on a small team, make them build an actual solution, and put that solution in front of judges who are free to say no. A grade from a teacher who eventually has to pass every student is not the same pressure as a stranger deciding whether an idea is worth $1,000 of real money.
Anthropic launched Claude for Teachers on July 14 as a free tool for verified K-12 educators, and by July 17, Education Week's Lauraine Langreo was reporting on the pushback. Dylan Kane, a middle school math teacher at Lake County High School in Leadville, Colorado, questioned how much value comes from a tool aligned to state standards, saying large language models are "pretty good at this type of thinking when they're prompted well, and mediocre at it when they're asked for a generic lesson attached to a standard." Benjamin Riley, founder of the think tank Cognitive Resonance, tested the product and found "there's really no differentiator here" compared with tools from OpenAI or Google. Mark Racine, a former Boston Public Schools tech leader now working as an ed-tech consultant, welcomed the competition but criticized Anthropic for marketing directly to teachers instead of going through the district leaders who vet and approve classroom tools. The story was updated July 21 as reactions continued to surface.
FERPA does not govern ed-tech companies directly, it governs school districts, so a vendor's "FERPA compliant" language on a marketing page is not the same as a signed data agreement your district controls. Racine's point is specific: teachers can rarely consent on their own to sharing student data with a third-party company, that decision belongs to the district. A free tool that a teacher signs up for individually, without district review, can create exactly the kind of ungoverned data flow that a privacy officer, not a press release, is built to catch.
A South Carolina law that took effect July 1 bars districts from requiring a minimum "grade floor" and lets teachers assign a true zero when a student turns in no work. Districts that keep requiring inflated minimums lose 10 percent of a category of state classroom funding. At least 18 of South Carolina's 72 districts had adopted a no-zero policy before the ban. Nationally, these policies have more than doubled over the past decade, and about half of K-12 teachers said their school had adopted some version, according to a 2025 Fordham Institute study. Laura Link, a University of North Dakota researcher who studies grading, explained the underlying math in a July 20 piece for The Conversation: on a 100-point scale, a single zero averaged against four scores of 90 or better produces a 72, a C, because failure spans 60 points while every passing letter grade fits inside the 40 points above it.
Link's own research finds the evidence on no-zero bans mixed: some studies tie grade floors to higher graduation rates, others say they prop up grades that no longer reflect learning. Her argument is that both the floor and the law removing it treat the symptom, students struggling academically, without touching the cause, a grading system built to average two different things, what a student learned and how hard the student worked, into a single number. North Carolina already has voter support behind a push to follow South Carolina's lead, and Texas has protected teachers' right to record a true zero since 2009.
South Dakota reached a settlement with Roblox Corp., announced July 13, in which the platform will pay the state nearly $10 million over four years and adopt new protections for young users, South Dakota Searchlight and South Dakota Public Broadcasting reported. The deal follows separate April 2026 settlements totaling $35.8 million between Roblox and attorneys general in Nevada ($12.5 million), West Virginia ($11.1 million), and Alabama ($12.2 million), all tied to child-safety complaints. As of July 2026, Roblox faces roughly 170 lawsuits consolidated in a federal multidistrict litigation alleging the platform facilitated child sexual exploitation and grooming. The settlements require Roblox to verify user ages and limit adults' ability to contact users under 16.
Part of South Dakota's settlement money is earmarked for safety education and after-school programming, which means a teacher or counselor in the state may see new funding appear in their building without knowing a lawsuit against Roblox paid for it. Students in your classroom who use the platform, and Roblox skews heavily toward kids and young teens, are the population the new age-verification and contact-limiting rules are meant to protect. A payout this size signals states now treat the underlying safety gaps as established fact, not a disputed claim.