Fresno Unified, California's third-largest school district, has offered personal finance courses at most of its high schools since the 2023-24 school year, well before state law required it. EdSource's Lasherica Thornton reported June 8 that 17 Fresno teachers are now instructing 730 students in the course, taught by teachers like KongMia Her, who has students track credit scores, build stock portfolios with pretend money, and pitch business plans in a Shark Tank-style project at Edison High. The California Department of Education liked what it saw enough to select Jeff Allen, the district's teacher on special assignment for personal finance and a 20-year veteran of Fresno's social science classrooms, to author the state's official personal finance curriculum guide and lead the statewide rollout.
Assembly Bill 2927, passed in 2024, made California the 26th state to require a stand-alone personal finance course, covering 13 mandated topics including budgeting, credit, and investing. Every high school must offer the course starting in 2027-28, and every graduate must have taken it starting with the class of 2031. Fresno's classes already meet all 13 required topics. The one change coming to Fresno itself: starting 2027-28, only teachers credentialed in four specific subject areas will be eligible to teach the course, tightening a bar that today lets any single-subject credential holder in the district teach it.
New York State United Teachers sent a letter Monday, July 27, to the state Education Department, thanking officials for intervening in Salamanca City Central School District's paused humanoid robot pilot but arguing the episode exposed a gap no statewide policy currently fills. NYSUT President Melinda Person wrote that the department should adopt "specific, heightened protections wherever AI is humanoid, embodied or designed to mimic human relationships," and did not soften the underlying point in her public comments: "What stopped this robot was a news story, alarmed parents and educators, and a Commissioner's letter, not any law or policy of this state, because none exists." A spokesperson for the state Education Department said such rules have been in development for months.
Yesterday's edition covered Salamanca's paused robot and Wakulla County, Florida's product-neutral AI policy as two different approaches to the same problem. Today's development says New York, the state at the center of that story, has neither approach codified. If your state hasn't written AI rules for classrooms, your district's next pilot is one bad headline away from becoming the next Salamanca, regardless of how well-intentioned the purchase was. Teachers who can point administrators to a specific written standard, rather than a general sense of caution, hold more ground in that conversation than teachers who can't.
Colorado's State Board of Education opened public comment on rules implementing the state's 2025 dyslexia screening law, with a rulemaking hearing set for its August 19-20 meeting, the Canyon Courier's Suzie Glassman reported July 20. The law requires every district to adopt a state-approved universal dyslexia screener, or an equivalent process, by the 2027-28 school year. The open questions: which specific skills, such as rapid automatized naming and encoding, a test must measure before it counts as a dyslexia screener, and how much latitude districts get to keep familiar tools instead of buying new ones. The most common assessment in use today, DIBELS 8th Edition, reaches roughly 57% of Colorado students free through a state grant, but only functions as a dyslexia screener when a district activates optional add-on measures its publisher markets separately. Dr. Emily Anderson Elder, a Windsor family physician, told lawmakers her son Luke was told to simply "try harder" before a private evaluation confirmed dyslexia the school's screening had missed.
The pattern here extends past Colorado: a single composite reading score can average away the exact deficit that identifies a struggling reader as dyslexic specifically, rather than struggling generally. Researchers call the older pattern "wait to fail," and the National Center on Improving Literacy puts the average gap between when help would work best and when a reading disability actually gets diagnosed at roughly ten years. If your district's screener produces one overall number and nothing more granular, you may be missing the students the newer generation of screening law is built to catch.
A study published in Current Psychology, led by Zeynep Seda Albayrak of Koc University, used a clustering algorithm on 158 adolescents ages 9 to 18 recruited from child and adolescent psychiatry outpatient clinics to identify how problematic internet, gaming, smartphone, and social media use actually breaks down. Rather than one generic pattern of "too much screen time," the researchers identified three distinct psychosocial profiles, each tied to different emotional, psychiatric, and demographic characteristics. The study's core conclusion, covered July 28 by Medical Xpress and News-Medical: problematic digital use should be evaluated in relation to a young person's broader emotional and psychiatric picture, not screen time alone.
A student flagged for "too much phone use" in your classroom is not automatically the same case as the student sitting next to them who shows the identical symptom. One may be using a device to avoid a specific anxiety, another to manage social isolation, a third for reasons that track closer to compulsive gaming than social media at all. Treating all three with the same blanket response, a phone policy, a lecture, a confiscation, addresses the visible behavior without addressing what's actually driving it. Passing along a specific observation to a counselor, what the student does with the device and when, is more useful than reporting the raw amount of time.