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Listen to the article 3 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Most clicked story of the week: Hampshire College, in Massachusetts, will shutter after the fall semester as it “no longer has the resources to sustain full operations and meet our regulatory responsibilities,” according to President Jenn Chrisler. The pending closure brings an end to the private liberal arts institution’s yearslong quest to balance its budget and reach financial sustainability. Number of the week: 175 The number of faculty to whom Syracuse University has offered early retirement packages, as the private New York…

Image of Ancient Egypt­ian Den­tistry, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons When we assume that mod­ern improve­ments are far supe­ri­or to the prac­tices of the ancients, we might do well to actu­al­ly learn how peo­ple in the dis­tant past lived before indulging in “chrono­log­i­cal snob­bery.” Take, for exam­ple, the area of den­tal hygiene. We might imag­ine the ancient Greeks or Egyp­tians as prone to ram­pant tooth decay, lack­ing the ben­e­fits of pack­aged, brand­ed tooth­paste, silken rib­bons of floss, astrin­gent mouth­wash, and ergonom­ic tooth­brush­es. But in fact, as tooth­paste man­u­fac­tur­er Col­gate points out, “the basic fun­da­men­tals” of tooth­brush design “have not changed since the…

In the past three years, intercollegiate athletics has undergone a structural shift unlike anything in its modern history. Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) compensation has evolved from endorsement deals to revenue sharing. Media-rights contracts in the Power conferences stretch into the billions. Conference realignment reshapes competitive and financial landscapes almost annually. And athletic departments at major public universities now manage nine-figure budgets, complex capital projects and enterprise-level risk. Yet at most institutions, the title at the top has remained the same. When the University of South Florida launched its most recent athletics leadership search, the conversation did not begin with…

Listen to the article 7 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Donna Independent School District, located in South Texas just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, has seen declining enrollment for years — and an even sharper than expected drop this school year. The district’s enrollment peaked at almost 15,500 students around 2015 and has since fallen to 12,500 for the 2025-26 school year, said Superintendent Angela Dominguez. A majority, 95%, of the student population comes from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and 56% are English learners.  This school year saw a higher than expected drop…

The debate over AI in K-12 education has stalled in the wrong place. For the past year, district leaders have treated this as a philosophical question regarding whether to adopt, how much to allow and which platform to endorse. Meanwhile, the data has moved on without them. An analysis of nearly 1.2 million student AI conversations across 1,312 districts in 39 states makes the situation unambiguous. Roughly 117,000 students are already using these tools on school-issued devices. ChatGPT holds 42 percent of the market, Gemini accounts for 21 percent and the rest is splintering across a growing roster of EdTech-embedded…

For years, the most common financial narrative at small residential colleges has followed a familiar arc: the undergraduate model is under pressure, non-traditional revenue is the path forward and sustainability depends on building around the core rather than fixing it. It’s worth asking whether that narrative is actually supported by the data. New research from Rize Education, The Subsidy Trap: Why Non-Traditional Revenue Rarely Fixes the Core, examines the volatility and competitive dynamics of the markets small colleges are increasingly depending on — and what the data shows about the model they are leaving behind. The assumption driving the strategy…

Designing for Depth: When High Achievement Isn’t the Whole Story  contributed by Laura Mukerji, InterestEd Educational Solutions  In most classrooms, we rely on visible indicators like grades, accuracy, and finished work to tell us whether learning is happening. While those measures are useful, they do not always show how students are actually thinking.  Many students become very good at ‘doing school.’ They learn how to meet expectations, follow directions, and produce the right answers, often without needing to extend their thinking in meaningful ways. As this pattern develops, efficiency can begin to replace curiosity, and correctness can take the place…

by Cynthia Taines, The Hechinger Report April 20, 2026 Our national politics are divided and angry in a way that often feels beyond our control. The division doesn’t just stay “out there” but filters down to the community and school level. I worry about what kind of environment that creates for young people, growing up in a world of so much misunderstanding and disregard for each other’s humanity. And yet, as educators know all too well, hopelessness is not an option when we are in front of students every day. That’s why we need to think about the levers of…

Financial aid offer letters are supposed to tell families how much they will have to pay for college, which can be the deciding factor in where — or even whether — students go to college. But too often, the letters leave out important information and use terms that make it confusing to figure out the final cost.  Some student advocates say the letters are downright deceptive. Others believe the lack of consistent language causes confusion; each college has its own format with its own vocabulary. This can make it difficult to answer the critical question: How much will this cost…

Frustrated with reading countless AI-generated take-home essays and long ago disillusioned with scantrons, I plunged into oral exams this finals season. The classes were lower-division history courses: one comprised mostly of history majors, the other mostly students fulfilling a GE. Using Google Calendar, students picked half-hour time slots beginning the day after the last class and ending the day before my grade submission deadline. The 20 in-person slots quickly filled. These in-person slots occurred in our classroom during our allotted three hours followed by two hours in my office. Students naturally spread out evenly, though weekends were the least popular.…