Author: Reporter

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Each day, hundreds of rural south Texas high schoolers wake before sunrise to board vans that bump for miles over back roads, crossing ranch land and thickets of brush. Their destinations aren’t their local schools, but distant districts where specialized academies offer them training in nursing, teaching and welding, along with associate degrees. The students’ home districts — Agua Dulce, Premont, Brooks County, Freer and Benavides — used to operate separately. They had a shrinking student population, were unable to provide much career and technical…

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter When school districts sign contracts for educational technology, they typically buy a set number of licenses. The software company delivers the product and the district cuts a check. Whether students actually benefit or even use the tools doesn’t factor into it. Over the past few decades, that has generated a growing tension among parents and educators, who have begun questioning the very idea of ed tech. But a new kind of funding scheme may turn that dynamic on its head: A recent report finds that…

Don’t Let Your Learning Culture Quietly Fail What sort of learning culture do you have? If you have one, could anyone else at your organization describe it? Most can’t. Usually, that’s because learning culture centers on L&D rather than on learners. It gets measured by LMS usage, program completion rates, and activity metrics, none of which tell you if there was any impact at all. That’s a design flaw worth sitting with. It’s why proving ROI feels impossible and why influencing without authority feels like pushing water uphill. When the system is built around L&D’s outputs rather than closing real…

Not too far back, we revis­it­ed some Cold War pro­pa­gan­da that taught upstand­ing Amer­i­can cit­i­zens How to Spot a Com­mu­nist Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism. It’s a gem, but it has noth­ing on the 1954 film, The House in the Mid­dle. Select­ed for preser­va­tion in the Nation­al Film Reg­istry by the Library of Con­gress, the short doc­u­men­tary makes the ulti­mate case for clean­li­ness. Bring­ing view­ers to the Neva­da Prov­ing Grounds, the 12-minute film shows what hap­pens when clean, white hous­es are sub­ject­ed to heat waves from an atom­ic blast, ver­sus what hap­pens when a dingy, ill-kept house goes through the same drill. It turns out…

At Shenandoah Conservatory, interdisciplinary collaboration provides students with unique opportunities to expand their experience across the performing arts. This spring, the Dance Division lends its artistry to this season’s main stage opera of Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hänsel und Gretel” by contributing original choreography to the production’s “Dream Pantomime” and “14 Angels” sequences. Adjunct Assistant Professor of Dance Jessie Li, M.F.A., leads the choreographic development of this section, working with student dancers to integrate movement into the operatic storytelling. The process began prior to scheduled rehearsals, with early phrase development and musical study shaping the foundation of the work. Inspired by the…

James Diddams, Providence When conservatives appeal to “Western civilization,” they are referring to everything they like that has ever come out of Europe and nothing they don’t like, with the…

The University of Chicago is taking a broad, interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning with AI. Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Getty Images The University of Chicago has received a $50 million gift to assemble a diverse cohort of faculty who are at the forefront of using artificial intelligence in their respective fields. It will support the university’s broader mission of establishing an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and advancing AI. The gift comes from trustee Rika Mansueto and her husband, Joe, both alumni and generous benefactors of the university. Joe is the founder and executive chairman of Morningstar, an investment research firm. The funds will…

by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report April 6, 2026 It’s easy to get swept up in the hype about artificial intelligence tutors. But the evidence so far suggests caution.  Some studies have found that chatbot tutors can backfire because students lean on them too heavily, get spoonfed solutions and fail to absorb the material. Even when AI tutors are designed not to give away answers, they haven’t consistently produced better results than learning the old-fashioned way without AI. Still, researchers who have produced these skeptical studies haven’t given up hope. Some are still experimenting, trying to build better AI tutors.…

As more higher education institutions adopt artificial intelligence tools, consumer protection advocates are asking colleges and universities to adopt a student bill of rights declaring that “students are not merely data points or test subjects for emerging technologies.” On Friday, the National Student Legal Defense Network unveiled the Student AI Bill of Rights as part of its Safeguarding Higher-Ed through AI Practices & Ethics (SHAPE AI) initiative. The group’s advisory committee is composed of institutional leaders, policy experts and consumer advocates.  “As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms the landscape of higher education—from recruitment and admissions to classroom instruction and wraparound support—students…

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania proposed new draft Guidelines on Open Expression that are a disturbing threat to free speech at a campus with a track record of suppressing dissent. The goal of suppressing all protests is apparent in these principles: “Actions taken beyond making one’s thoughts heard or read—particularly when such actions violate these Principles, Penn policy, or relevant law—do not constitute speech and expression protected by these Principles.” The presumption should be that all expressive acts—including the right to protest—are protected by principles of open expression. To claim that “actions” have no protections even when they do…