Good evening,

Three storylines worth pulling on tonight.

The K-12 career-pathway expansion keeps getting more deliberate. Jobs for Maine's Graduates — a state soft-skills credentialing program running since 1993 — is going national through a new nonprofit, Generation US, with pilots underway in Kansas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Wisconsin. In LAUSD, a new study finds students who complete Linked Learning pathways are 16% more likely to finish college-prep coursework. And in Midland, Texas, the oil and gas industry is pouring millions into high school pipelines, with the administration's energy push reinvigorating programs that had been slowing. None of this is in isolation: Fortune today reports a record number of 18-year-olds graduating into "an economy designed against them"; CNBC reports an Ivy League school putting $30 million into career outcomes; the Wall Street Journal reports an academic scramble to prepare accountants for AI. K-12 pathway-building and the "what is college for" debate are increasingly the same story.

The declining-enrollment problem isn't going away. Education Next finds declining-enrollment districts are spending more per pupil, not less, and carrying more staff per pupil along with it. Derek Thompson interviews Penn demographer Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on why the global fertility crisis is moving faster than anyone projected — including the UN. Two weeks ago I flagged NYC's projected loss of another 153,000 students over the next decade, LA County's 250,000, Boston's 20-school closure plan, and Miami-Dade weighing nine. The math doesn't get less stark.

A pair of pieces tonight push back on the flattening of the screens-in-schools debate. EdWeek's read of AI training for teachers shows real movement — from 40% with some training in October 2024 to 58% this past winter — but most of it still sits at the "efficiency" level (lesson planning, parent emails) rather than pedagogy, and 37% of teachers say they're "not at all" or "slightly" eager to learn more. Jeremy Roschelle at Digital Promise, writing in Communications of the ACM, argues the debate keeps collapsing meaningfully different things — a TikTok feed, an AI tutor, an eye-gaze speech device — into a single policy lever. Both pieces are pointing at the same gap between policy and practice.

Let me know what you're reading.

— Thomas

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