This Week with EdSurge

A student can ask a chatbot about a candidate and get an answer in seconds, but is a fast answer the same as being informed? Elise Blum of TVT Community Day School and Kyle Dell of Vote Smart look back at the 1994 voter hotline they staffed together and explain why Vote Smart’s new Civic Sage chatbot sticks to the facts. Then, journalist April Rubin shares how teachers from fifth grade through high school turned the midterms into a live civics lab, even as 63% of young people say elected officials do not care what they think. Ira Apfel talks with all three guests about preparing students to vote without telling them how.

This episode also includes a sponsored conversation with ConnectED.

To learn more about how to bring ConnectED to your classroom, visit connecteducation.org.

• Why Elise Blum says easier access to information does not make students better informed, and what the 1994 voter hotline taught her about handing over facts instead of answers.
• How Vote Smart spent two years building Civic Sage, an AI chatbot that answers questions about candidates using only its research, and why a question like “Is this candidate good on immigration?” gets a voting record and ratings instead of a verdict.
• What three teachers did to keep the midterms nonpartisan, from assigning each student an out-of-state race to taking the party labels off candidate profiles.
• Why more young people plan to vote than in 2024 even though most say elected officials are not listening, and why April Rubin says media literacy belongs in every civics class.

• AI, Elections and the Making of an Informed Electorate by Elise Blum
• How Teachers Are Turning the Midterms Into a Nonpartisan Civics Lesson by April Rubin

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Host: Ira Apfel, Editorial Director, EdSurge

Featuring:

• Elise Blum, Assistant Head of School for TK-12 Programming, TVT Community Day School
• Kyle Dell, Executive Director, Vote Smart
• April Rubin, Journalist and Researcher
• Avi Posen, Vice President, ConnectED (sponsored segment)

Students cheer when a quiz game starts, but are they learning or just racing for points? Kahoot! Senior Director, Global Education Liz Crawford says engagement means little unless it drives outcomes, and she cites more than 300 independent peer-reviewed studies that she says show an impact on motivation and test scores. Matthew Farber, a University of Northern Colorado professor and former middle school social studies teacher, explains why most quiz games are a review with a timer and why he warns against grading them. Ira Apfel talks with both guests about what separates real learning from a chase for points.

• Why Liz Crawford says gamification works when it drives outcomes, and how she says retrieval practice, instant feedback and lower stakes for mistakes keep learning active.
• How Kahoot!’s accuracy experience and creator settings let teachers remove timers and speed bonuses
• How Matthew Farber separates gamification from game-based learning, and why he says play matters more than points and leaderboards.
• Why Matthew wants teachers to pair narrative games with novels, the way they already pair texts with film and podcasts.

A Decade Into Experiments With Gamification, Edtech Rethinks How to Motivate Learners by Olina Banerji

To Get Serious About Games, Teachers Experiment With Play in the Classroom by Olina Banerji

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Host: Ira Apfel, Editorial Director, EdSurge

Featuring:

Liz Crawford, Senior Director, Global Head of Education, Kahoot!

Matthew Farber, Associate Professor of Educational Technology, University of Northern Colorado

New York City and Los Angeles have paused student AI use, but does a pause actually protect kids? Common Sense Media’s Yvette Renteria says it is the right call for now, and far from enough: In her organization’s survey, more than half of the teens whose school blocked an AI tool started using it on a personal device. Then, former Google education evangelist Jaime Casap argues that backlash to New Mexico’s AI reading screener risks costing young readers early support. Ira Apfel talks with both guests about what it would take to prove a tool is safe and that it works.

• Why Common Sense Media supports a pause “for now,”" and why Yvette says it is only one part of the solution without AI literacy.
• What Common Sense Media says it found when it tested ChatGPT for Teens with simulated teen personas, including gaps in parent alerts.
• Why Jaime argues “AI”" is too broad a label, and how New Mexico’s AI reading screener changes which students get flagged for dyslexia risk (16.7% of first graders, compared with 45% under the previous screener).
• What questions parents and vendors should ask about safety, data privacy and proof of results before a tool reaches a classroom.

• Pause AI in Schools. But Not Before You Do This First by Yvette Renteria
• Will Kids Pay the Price for AI Panic? by Jaime Casap

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Host: Ira Apfel, Editorial Director, EdSurge

Featuring:

Yvette Renteria, Chief Program Officer, Common Sense Media

Jaime Casap, Former Chief Education Evangelist, Google

Pandemic relief money paid for a big expansion of tutoring in schools, but now most of that money is gone. Districts could cancel programs, but University of Maryland researcher David Blazar warns of bigger risks: larger groups, fewer sessions, and tutoring that stops helping kids as much. Then Catapult Learning’s Devon Wible explains how some districts have made tutoring a regular part of the school day. Ira Apfel talks with both guests about how districts decide what stays when money, time and tutors all run short.

• Why tutoring may not be canceled but could quietly weaken as districts cut costs
• The three features David says to look for in a quality program: dosage, who delivers the tutoring, and group size
• Why David believes intensity — how many days and hours per week — is probably the most important feature, and what his national scan found about how much tutoring schools provide
• How Maryland districts are finding tutors and finding time
• What Devon says the districts that kept tutoring going do differently
• How a third grader’s day works when tutoring is built into the schedule

• Can High-Impact Tutoring Survive Post-Pandemic Funding Loss? by Cameron Goodnight

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Host: Ira Apfel, Editorial Director, EdSurge

Featuring:

David Blazar, Associate Professor of Education Policy, University of Maryland College of Education

Devon Wible, Vice President of Teaching and Learning, Catapult Learning

AI tools can generate a lesson in seconds, but educators still lack a shared way to check whether that lesson is evidence-based and aligned to state standards. Learning Commons, a nonprofit backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, launched an open platform to address this gap. Ira Apfel sits down with Learning Commons President Sandra Liu Huang about how the platform works and who gets to build the underlying AI infrastructure in K-12 schools.

Disclosure: Learning Commons is a financial supporter of EdSurge. This episode was produced independently by EdSurge and Learning Commons had no editorial role or influence over its recording, production or editing.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• How Learning Commons uses a knowledge graph to map state standards and learning progressions – showing how early concepts (like fractions) connect to advanced subjects (like Algebra) years later.
• Why AI outputs need custom evaluators to score pedagogical quality and standards alignment, replacing static testing with real-time quality control.
• How an Illinois district used the platform to build its own math assessment tool – and what it took to tackle privacy and scaling challenges.
• Critical questions district leaders should ask AI vendors, including where standards data originates, how it stays current and whether the model treats standards as a source of truth.

STORIES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Learning Commons Launches Open Platform for K-12 Edtech by Ira Apfel

STAY CONNECTED

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HOST AND CONTRIBUTORS

Host: Ira Apfel, Editorial Director, EdSurge

Featuring:

Sandra Liu Huang, President, Learning Commons

A few weeks into the school year, the adrenaline wears off and many teachers hit a wall that has a name: the October Blues. Ira Apfel sits down with author Mike Anderson, who crashed hard as a rookie teacher and swim coach working more than 100 hours a week. Together they explore why the slump hits new teachers hardest, how teacher stress can spill over to students, and what one year-long experiment revealed about where teaching time really goes.

• The October Blues are a predictable slump that arrives approximately three or four weeks into the school year, and they hit new teachers hardest because many have never been told the crash is coming.
• A study of roughly 400 fourth and fifth graders in British Columbia found that teachers who reported higher workplace stress had students with higher cortisol levels, which suggests that stress can travel in both directions in a classroom.
• Mike uses six intrinsic motivators from his book, “Rekindle Your Professional Fire” (autonomy, competence, purpose, belonging, curiosity and fun) to help teachers find the need in deficit and pick one small step, such as drinking a tall glass of water before coffee or a short walk after the last student leaves.
• A group of teachers in Fairfax County, Virginia, had a far better second October even with harder classes, and Mike credits concrete classroom management strategies and a stronger sense of competence rather than rest alone.

The “October Blues” Are Coming. Here’s How Teachers Can Beat Them. by Ira Apfel

Rekindle Your Professional Fire: Powerful Habits for Becoming a More Well-Balanced Teacher

Hugging Porcupines

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Host: Ira Apfel, Editorial Director, EdSurge

Featuring:

Mike Anderson, Educational Consultant, Former Classroom Teacher, and Author

From tutoring tools to grading platforms, edtech vendors are frequently adding AI features to new and existing instructional materials. Almost every company selling these products says the features are educationally effective, so EdReports went looking for the evidence behind those claims. EdReports CEO Dr. Lewis Ferebee and Chief Academic Officer Courtney Allison join Ira Apfel to unpack what their new brief found and what district leaders should ask before signing their next vendor contract.

• AI is blurring the lines between core curriculum, supplemental materials, and standalone grading or tutoring tools, which makes it harder for district buyers to know what they are actually purchasing.
• Only one of the 10 providers in the EdReports scan cited third party evidence on student outcomes for its AI tool, and only two named an independent evaluator for their AI feature.
• Courtney Allison, a former New York City middle school math teacher, explains what is at stake when AI content reaches students in real time without a teacher reviewing it first.
• Lewis Ferebee, the longest serving chancellor in DC Public Schools history, shares the questions he would ask vendors, including whether a teacher can override the AI and whether the evidence covers the version a district is actually buying.

Study: EdTech Is Rushing AI Integration Before Proving It Work by Ira Apfel

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Host: Ira Apfel, Editorial Director, EdSurge

Featuring:

• Dr. Lewis D. Ferebee, CEO, EdReports
• Courtney Allison, Chief Academic Officer, EdReports

A new workforce survey finds that men now make up less than a quarter of public schoolteachers, and the ones who do stay often walk into assumptions before they even introduce themselves. Meanwhile, a flood of AI generated videos aimed at toddlers is teaching young kids things that are not true, sometimes in unsettling ways. This week, Ed Finkel and Adam Stone join Ira Apfel to look at two very different classrooms, one in a school building and one on a screen, where nobody stopped to check the story before deciding it was true.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• Men now make up about 23% of public school teachers, down from 30% in 1988, according to a survey of 145 male teachers commissioned by the Male Educator Network & Policy Institute.
• Only 25% of the men surveyed said they experienced recruiting efforts aimed specifically at men, but 72% of those who did found those efforts effective.
• A children’s YouTube channel called Bright Tunes posted nearly 5,500 AI generated videos in under a year, and some of that content shows scenes that do not match reality, such as a school bus catching fire in the middle of a video about colors.
• The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a Stop, Wait and Go framework to help parents and teachers evaluate AI generated video content before showing it to young children.

STORIES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

As Male Teachers Vanish From the Classroom, Schools Look for Ways to Bring Them Back by Ed Finkel

AI Videos Are Warping Early Learning, Teachers Say. Here’s How They’re Responding by Adam Stone

STAY CONNECTED

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HOST AND CONTRIBUTORS

Host: Ira Apfel

Featuring:

• Ed Finkel, writer covering education and public policy for EdSurge
• Adam Stone, education technology journalist

The lowest-performing middle school readers aren't just behind, they're falling further behind every year, even as reading scores recover elsewhere.

On This Week with EdSurge, NWEA's Megan Kuhfeld shares new research that explains why the K-3 literacy laws that fixed early reading aren't reaching the middle school.

Then Dacia Toll, who spent years running schools before co-founding the AI literacy platform Coursemojo, describes what she calls the comprehension wall, the point where a middle schooler can read every word on a page and still miss the meaning, and makes the case for AI tools built to ask questions instead of just answering them.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Megan Kuhfeld's NWEA research shows the same decline at the 10th percentile of middle school reading scores across three separate assessments: NWEA's MAP Growth, i-Ready and NAEP, drawing on data from more than 20 million K-8 students.
• Dacia Toll's "background knowledge problem" means two students with identical reading skills can perform two full grade levels apart on the same text, depending on how much they already know about the topic.
• K-3 literacy laws mostly stop at third grade and many didn't take effect until 2022-2024, so they miss students who are already behind by the time they reach middle school.
• An individual struggling reader typically needs two to three years of above-average growth to catch up to grade level, and building a system that catches every student takes even longer.
• There's a meaningful difference between "indulgebots," AI tools that just answer a student's question, and purpose-built instructional AI that responds to a wrong answer by sending the student back to a specific sentence or paragraph to work it out themselves.

STORIES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Reading Scores Continue to Drop for Many Middle Schoolers by David Weldon

AI Can Help One of K-12's Biggest Challenges: Middle School Reading by Dacia Toll

STAY CONNECTED

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HOST AND CONTRIBUTORS

Host: Ira Apfel

Featuring:

• Megan Kuhfeld, PhD, Director of Growth Modeling and Data Analytics, NWEA
• Dacia Toll, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Coursemojo

Two Voices of Change Fellows had the same kind of moment this year, when a student comment that could have been brushed off as attitude turned out to be a warning sign. On This Week with EdSurge, Melinda Medina explains what happened when a student answered a literature question with "I use ChatGPT, how am I supposed to know that?" and what it revealed about students quietly outsourcing their own thinking. Then Beth Yirga describes the eighth grader who asked her, "If AI will do everything, then what's the point of learning?" and how that question sent her looking for answers outside of education entirely.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Melinda Medina cites a Brown University economics class where students averaged nearly 96% on a take-home midterm, then under 49% once the professor switched to an in-person proctored exam, a trend she now sees echoed in her own classroom.
• When Melinda's 11th graders were asked how author Kate Chopin uses irony, one replied that she'd used ChatGPT instead of working through the text, a moment Melinda says worried her less as cheating and more as a sign students no longer wanted to engage with productive struggle.
• Beth Yirga's question came from an eighth grader during a planning meeting for a new career exploration program at Freire Charter School Wilmington, and it sent her to the Women Who Code Summit in New York, where she was the only K-12 educator in a room of more than 500 people.
• Beth is building an "identity year" for students, pairing AI literacy with outdoor hikes, a trip to the opera, and a visit to the state capitol, on the belief that students need to know who they are before they can direct any tool toward a future worth having.

STORIES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Protecting Student Cognition in the Age of AI by Melinda Medina

The K-12 Silo Won't Survive AI, But Our Relationships Might by Beth Yirga

STAY CONNECTED

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HOST AND CONTRIBUTORS

Host: Ira Apfel

Featuring:

• Melinda Medina, English and Special Education Teacher, Brooklyn, NY
• Beth Yirga, Assistant Head of School, Freire Charter School Wilmington, DE