The College Board's AP Central confirms that AP European History, AP United States History, and AP World History: Modern exams will change starting with the May 2027 administration, tied to course and exam descriptions already effective this fall. The short-answer section moves from a menu with some optional questions to three mandatory short-answer questions, each anchored to a different source, a secondary text, a primary text, and a primary or secondary non-text source, and each drawn from a different historical period. The long-essay question drops entirely from a choice of prompts to a single broad prompt with a brief introductory statement, and the document-based question widens to cover a broader chronological range of the course. Course content, the multiple-choice section, and the scoring rubrics are unchanged.
The practical effect lands on the two skills students have long used to manage the exam strategically: picking the long-essay prompt tied to their best-rehearsed period, and skipping a short-answer question outside their strength. Both options disappear in 2027. A student can no longer bank on a favorite unit carrying the essay score, and every short-answer response now requires reading and using a source rather than reciting from memory. Because the new course and exam descriptions are already in effect for fall 2026, this is a syllabus-planning decision for this school year, not a problem to defer until next spring.
ROCORI Area Schools in Cold Spring, Minnesota is finalizing an AI use policy ahead of the new school year, WJON's Paul Habstritt reported July 26. Superintendent Kevin Enerson said the district built the policy by starting from a model produced by the Minnesota School Boards Association and then refining it with "students at the table, we had teachers, we had parents, we also had, of course, administrators and school board members." Enerson framed the policy's purpose as governing "how to use AI to learn and be more efficient, not to cut corners," comparing the moment to when calculators and computers first entered classrooms: some uses should be prohibited, others adopted responsibly. The district aims to have the policy in place before the school year starts and will review it every two years.
Most AI policies landing in districts this year start from a state mandate or a model document adopted with little local editing. ROCORI's process inverts that order: the state association's model was a starting draft, not the final word, and the people who will live under the policy, including students, helped rewrite it. If your district's AI policy was written entirely by administrators or adopted wholesale from a state template, ROCORI's process, not just its content, is worth raising with your own policy committee before the semester starts.
A new NWEA analysis released July 21 and covered by K-12 Dive's Kara Arundel on July 23 finds that districts with persistently high chronic absenteeism, defined as at least 20% of students missing that much school across 2022, 2023, and 2024, are roughly 50% further from pre-pandemic math recovery than districts that never had high absenteeism. The gap is sharper in high-poverty districts, which sit about 40% further behind on math recovery when absenteeism stayed high, even compared with other high-poverty districts that kept attendance in check. The analysis draws on MAP Growth data from 2,000 U.S. districts, grades 3 through 8. Separately, the American Enterprise Institute's Nat Malkus found the pace of national attendance improvement is "slowing dangerously": chronic absenteeism fell nearly 3 percentage points in 2023, just over 2 in 2024, and under 1 in 2025.
Every high school teacher inherits the compounded version of this. A student with an elementary or middle school attendance gap doesn't arrive in your classroom with a labeled deficit; they arrive with a hole in prerequisite math skills that can look like low effort or weak aptitude until you trace it back to instructional days missed years earlier. NWEA's finding puts a number behind that pattern: the recovery gap is not closing on its own, and in high-poverty schools it is compounding faster than in low-poverty ones. That turns an attendance memo from a compliance reminder into information about which students are most likely to need remediation before they can access grade-level content.
A wave of so-called "teen takeovers," mass gatherings of young people organized through social media, has produced real violence this summer: nine people were shot in Raleigh, North Carolina over the July 4 weekend, a 19-year-old was shot and killed in Pensacola, Florida, and more than 400 people were arrested in Newport Beach, California after police said teens launched "explosive mortars and other projectiles" at officers, the Associated Press's Safiyah Riddle and Corey Williams reported July 25. Cities are responding differently: Detroit says it has "thwarted" 19 gatherings this year by monitoring social media coordination, Blue Island, Illinois fines parents to cover cleanup costs, and Florida officials say prosecutors can apply racketeering statutes if a takeover looks organized. Teens interviewed by the AP point to a different cause: two decades of curfews and group-size limits at malls, movie theaters, and even basketball courts, some of which cities stripped of nets to discourage gathering, have closed off the informal hangout spaces teens once had by default.
Melissa Milchman of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice told the AP that "the stakes are not going to be what prevents a young person from engaging in risky behavior," citing adolescent brain development research that undercuts the deterrence logic behind harsher penalties. That has a direct classroom parallel: students who feel they have nowhere sanctioned to be themselves in a group will find an unsanctioned version, whether that's a beach flier or something smaller inside your building. Detroit's response, a youth advisory board, a late-night basketball league, and city funding for a resident-led event, suggests the more durable fix is capacity, not enforcement.