Two stories worth pulling forward from today's clips:

Lewis Ferebee is stepping down as D.C. Public Schools chancellor next month to lead EdReports. He leaves on an extraordinary note — DCPS posted the highest math and reading growth in the country on the latest Education Recovery Scorecard, and Ferebee's seven-year run is the longest tenure of any DCPS chancellor. His pitch for the next chapter, in his own words, is that high-quality instructional materials are how districts turn the kind of growth DCPS just posted into something repeatable at scale. It's a thesis worth watching: Ferebee has used EdReports as a system leader in both D.C. and Indianapolis, which gives him a practitioner's read on how those reviews actually land in district decision-making.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a new Surgeon General's advisory today urging schools to invest in physical textbooks, prioritize paper-and-pencil assignments, and adopt bell-to-bell phone bans. The advisory cites 37 states and D.C. that already restrict cellphones during the school day, 28 of them bell-to-bell. The school-facing recommendations are mostly aimed at consumer tech and classroom distraction, though, and that's a narrower frame than the one districts are actually working through. Richard Culatta made the point last month in The 74: the wave of legislation treating TikTok and a math tutoring app, or Instagram and a text-to-speech tool for a student with dyslexia, as the same category of "screen time" is the central mistake. The question for districts isn't quantity — it's quality, with digital citizenship and balanced tech instruction as part of the curriculum, not just less of software and hardware.

That tension shows up elsewhere in today's roundup, too. Harvard's faculty voted to cap A grades as selective colleges push back on grade inflation that accelerated after ChatGPT arrived. Graduates continued to boo AI keynote speakers at commencements across the country this week. And students and community organizations sued Massachusetts over what they describe as segregation by race and class.

— Thomas

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