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The Trump administration is pitching an AI robot teacher named "Plato," but under Utah's new tech-in-schools law, signed by GOP Gov. Spencer Cox, it would be illegal. That's the distillation Alyson Klein offers in Education Week today of the "funky politics" around the edtech debate. And Richard Culatta's op-ed in The 74 argues the wave of state bills conflates TikTok with text-to-speech and imposes no quality bar on what replaces digital tools — a teacher could swap an effective math program for a dot-to-dot worksheet and satisfy the law. The sharpest costs, he notes, fall on the roughly 8 million students in special education whose IEPs rely on assistive tech like screen readers and text-to-speech, tools Tennessee's original bill would have banned outright. Banning technology for learning, he writes, "doesn't make us principled, it makes us negligent."

One perspective largely missing from the debate on tech: students themselves. EdSource reports on a California bill co-authored by members of the student coalition GenUp that would require schools to teach digital wellness — social media, AI, healthy screen habits — in health class. "The cellphone ban only gets us halfway," said Elise Choi, the 11th grader behind the bill. "We need to teach kids and give us skills for what happens when we get our phones back at the end of the day."

With enrollment declines deepening — the Education Commission of the States projects another 2.7 million fewer students nationwide by 2031 — we'll continue to see schools trying new methods to reach families. The New York Times has a piece on how NYC schools are turning to TikTok, subway ads, and "scholar recruiters" to fill seats. Pair it with a GreatSchools survey finding that parents who are highly likely to recommend their school were nearly four times more likely than less-likely recommenders (74% vs. 20%) to say it's easy to find relevant information about it. Clear information travels further than a subway ad.

— Thomas

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