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We're back after a few days away, with a larger-than-normal issue to work through. A few pieces worth your time tonight.

In The Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay covers a new working paper from the University of California, Irvine's Sina Rismanchian and researchers at McGraw Hill that analyzed millions of student interactions with the ALEKS math platform before and after ChatGPT. On word problems — the kind easily pasted into a chatbot — high schoolers spent 31 percent less time, and correct-answer rates on proctored placement tests fell from about 80 percent to 60 percent. On graphing problems, which are harder to outsource, performance held steady. The researchers call it "cognitive surrender." The paper hasn't been peer reviewed and can't prove students were using AI, but the divergence showed up only where outsourcing was easy and disappeared under supervision.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten's own turn is the clearest version of this. A year ago, TIME honored her for launching a $23 million AI teacher-training academy with Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI; "shame on you if you hide from it," she said of a technology she compared to the printing press. In May she called for banning student-facing AI in elementary schools, screens before third grade, and a tax on Big Tech. This week, Chalkbeat Newark reported that a school visit shortly before that speech left her more skeptical, not less—which raises the question of whether this is a real evolution or a tidier retelling of where she stood all along.

In Fast Company, Digital Promise's Jean-Claude Brizard and TNTP's Tequilla Brownie argue the country has the framing backwards: "hardware without human capability is just hardware." We're spending heavily on AI tools and little on the capacity to use them, they write, and success should be measured by educators making better decisions about where AI belongs, not by more students using it.

And in The 74, Birmingham's Waymond Jackson offers a counterweight to the screen-time debate: for millions of students, the problem isn't too much technology but none at all. He points to the 9 million children without adequate home internet nationwide and the roughly half of U.S. high schools that offer no computer science.

The rest of today's edition is below.

— Thomas

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