This Week with EdSurge

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

New guidance was supposed to help teachers make sense of screen time. New laws were supposed to keep phones out of the way. On This Week with EdSurge we look at what happens when teachers are left to make sense of rules that were never built with their classrooms in mind. Adam Stone talks with pre-K and kindergarten teachers about the guidance that excludes them, and civics teacher Dan Clark explains why he thinks Missouri got its phone ban wrong.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• The American Academy of Pediatrics updated its screen time guidance for the first time in a decade, but the update is scoped around children and adolescents and offers little direction for pre-K classrooms.
• Pre-K and kindergarten teachers are relying on tactile, low-tech strategies, such as forming letters out of Play-Doh, to reinforce face-to-face interaction instead of defaulting to screens.
• Missouri's new law bans any portable communication device on a student's person from the first bell to the last, which cut off students working on a community advocacy project from the platform they knew best how to use.
• We explore if blanket phone bans skip the harder work of teaching digital citizenship, comparing the debate to longstanding arguments over whether schools should still teach cursive.

STORIES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Early Childhood Education Teachers Grapple with Screen Time by Adam Stone

The Case Against the Classroom Cellphone Crackdown by Dan Clark

STAY CONNECTED

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HOST AND CONTRIBUTORS

Host: Ira Apfel

Featuring:

• Adam Stone, Education and Technology Journalist
• Dan Clark, Eighth Grade Civics Teacher, Missouri

The Department of Education just issued its first major classroom technology guidance in years, urging schools to judge tools by outcomes rather than screen time. Digital Promise president and CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and outcomes-based contracting expert Brittany Miller join This Week with EdSurge to break down what the new Dear Colleague Letter gets right, what it leaves out, and what happens now that Washington has handed implementation to the states. They agree the letter marks real progress, but they do not agree on how much it accomplishes.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• The Dear Colleague Letter draws a clear line between recreational and instructional technology use, giving school leaders new language to push back against blanket bans, but it also leans on randomized controlled trials as a measure of evidence, a standard Brittany Miller says moves too slowly for how quickly edtech itself changes.
• Ten states already run statewide outcomes based contracting efforts, including a new Michigan law tying fifty million dollars in tutoring funding to results, which Miller points to as proof the model is working even without a federal mandate behind it.
• Jean-Claude Brizard argues schools should demand third party certification rather than commission their own research, compares scattered anti-technology sentiment to the anti-vaccine movement, and calls on school and district leaders to reclaim the public narrative around edtech.
• Both guests agree the guidance leaves out direct support for the teachers, principals, and superintendents actually implementing it, and both point to procurement, not classroom policy, as the real lever for turning the letter into practice.

STORIES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Department of Education Issues Long-Awaited Edtech Guidance for States and Districts

by EdSurge Staff

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HOST AND CONTRIBUTORS

Host: Ira Apfel

Featuring:

• Jean-Claude Brizard, President and CEO, Digital Promise
• Brittany Miller, Center for Outcomes-Based Contracting

This week, two guests trace the true cost of AI, one in the classroom and one behind the scenes. Michael Hernandez explains how he taught himself to code so he could build a free tool that flags weak assignments before students ever think about cheating. Mi Aniefuna follows the electricity powering that same technology, tracing the invoice that lands on a district's desk long after the contract is signed. Together, their stories ask what schools are really paying for when they bring AI into the building.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Michael Hernandez used vibe coding, describing an idea in plain language and letting AI write the code, to build the Cheat Vulnerability Index, a free tool that scans an assignment and flags where it is exposed to cheating.
• Michael identifies three traits, originality, personal connection, and purpose, that he believes make an assignment resistant to cheating.
• Mi Aniefuna reports that United States data centers used about 176 terawatt hours of electricity in 2023, roughly 4.4% of the countrys total electricity consumption.
• Mi points to a Stanford review of more than 800 studies on AI in K-12 education, only 20 of which met the bar for rigorous, causal-impact research, even as adoption keeps outpacing the evidence.

STORIES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Story 1 I Used AI to Build AI-Resistant Assignments by Michael Hernandez

Story 2 Can Schools Afford an AI-First Future? by Mi Aniefuna

STAY CONNECTED

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HOST AND CONTRIBUTORS

Host: Ira Apfel

Featuring:

• Michael Hernandez, Educator and Author
• Mi Aniefuna, Public Health and Behavioral Sciences Researcher, EdSurge