EdSource's John Fensterwald reported July 28 that California's State Board of Education will add science scores as a full accountability metric on the state school dashboard this fall, ending what science advocates call a decade-long campaign for equal standing. Jessica Sawko, education director for Children Now and the California STEM Network, grew emotional during her testimony to the board earlier this month, thanking members for "their commitment to science" while wearing a pair of Next Generation Science Standards earrings she has kept since the standards were adopted in 2013. Science will now sit alongside English language arts, math, suspension rates, and chronic absences as a fully weighted measure, six years after the state introduced the California Science Test, known as CAST, and two years after COVID interrupted the rollout. State Board member Haydee Rodriguez, a multi-subject teacher in Imperial County, called the change overdue: "The skills that young people learn from science, the habits of mind, are so powerful, whether or not they become scientists."
The scores arriving with the new status are not flattering. Just 32.7% of California students were proficient on the 2024-25 CAST, compared with 37.3% in math and 48.8% in English language arts, and the gaps by background are stark: 18.6% proficiency among students whose parents finished high school versus 43.9% among students whose parents graduated college, and 17.1% among Black students versus 60.8% among Asian students. Peter A'Hearn, a past president of the California Association of Science Educators, put the cause plainly: "What's tested gets taught." A 2022 survey by his association found only 55% of districts had even purchased curriculum materials aligned to the standards. California has already put $50 million behind a statewide science and computer science partnership reaching all 58 counties, and Sawko says accountability status is what will finally push districts to finish the job.
Heartlander News' Meredith Cornstubble reported July 30 that Alpha School, the AI-driven private school network, is tripling its campus count this fall to 40 open and enrolling locations nationwide, up from 12. The newest addition sits in Edmond, near Oklahoma City, charging roughly $40,000 in annual tuition, with a $10,000-a-year discount for families enrolling during a new campus's first five years. Students spend two hours each morning working one-on-one with an AI tutoring platform called Timeback, split into 30-minute blocks across math, reading, science, and social studies, then spend afternoons with human "guides" on projects and life-skills workshops. The model is endorsed by hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and partly funded by Alpha co-founder Joe Liemandt, who has put $1 billion into the network by the Oklahoma City Free Press's count.
Alpha's own marketing claims its students land in the 99th percentile nationally and grow more than twice as fast as peers on standardized tests, figures the company generated by uploading its own results into Gemini and Claude and asking the chatbots to compare them with top private schools, not an independent analysis. State Rep. Cyndi Munson, a Democrat from Oklahoma City, called the model disturbing: "These types of schools and models that are being implemented are taking away the seriousness of what it takes to be a classroom teacher." Liemandt is not uncritical of AI in education broadly, either, warning on a podcast that deploying general chatbots to every student "will make us the dumbest country on the planet," while defending his own platform as something narrower. Whatever you think of the model, a tripling in campus count means the pitch you get from a vendor promising Alpha-style results is about to get more specific and more common.
K-12 Dive's Anna Merod reported July 21 on a new RAND Corp. survey of 481 school districts finding that budget shortfalls and declining enrollment have become district leaders' top two concerns, cited by 54% and 36% of respondents, both sharply higher than the year before. RAND interviewed 38 district leaders directly, nearly all of whom described costs, especially contracted cost-of-living raises, special education services, mental health support, and state-mandated instructional materials, outpacing the revenue coming in. Rural districts reported the sharpest enrollment declines, at 39%, while budget pressure landed about equally on rural and suburban districts, at 55% each.
The number that should get a teacher's attention is the one that fell: concern over recruiting and retaining effective teachers dropped from 42% of district leaders in 2025 to 35% in 2026. That is not necessarily good news. It can mean staffing pressure eased, or it can mean leaders are now focused on keeping the lights on rather than keeping people, a shift in what gets budget priority even when the underlying retention problem has not gone anywhere. Forty percent of surveyed districts are now considering marketing campaigns to attract students, and a third are eyeing expanded pre-K as an enrollment strategy, both of which compete for the same shrinking pot of money that used to fund coaching, professional development, and classroom materials.
Bloomberg's Olivia Carville and Alexandra S. Levine reported August 4 that TikTok is finalizing settlements in three more lawsuits alleging its platform is addictive and harmful to minors, resolving the cases ahead of an October bellwether trial. Plaintiffs' attorneys Joseph VanZandt of Beasley Allen and Emily Jeffcott of Morgan & Morgan confirmed the settlements, with terms confidential. The three cases were filed by teenagers identified only by their initials: S.J., a 15-year-old from Illinois alleging self-harm, anxiety, depression, addiction, and an eating disorder; P.M.Y., also 15, from New Jersey, alleging addiction, depression, and self-harm; and K.D.B., an 18-year-old from Mississippi alleging the same pattern of harm. More than 3,000 individual complaints are pending nationally against TikTok, Meta, YouTube, and Snapchat.
TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube have now settled every bellwether case scheduled against them this year, while only Meta and Google have gone before a jury, in February, when a Los Angeles jury awarded a young woman named Kaley Glenn-Mills $6 million after she said the platforms caused anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia. That means the core legal question, whether these platforms were designed to be addictive by intent, still has not been tested at trial for three of the four largest players. Your district's phone policy is being written and enforced without that legal clarity, which means the case for restricting a platform in your building currently rests on the same evidence it rested on last year, not on a verdict that settled the argument.