Happy Thursday! Two stories worth making sure you read today:

First, a useful frame from Joy Delizo-Osborne, CEO of Student Achievement Partners, in The Hechinger Report this morning: technopragmatic. It's a useful evolution of an idea Katy Knight at Siegel Family Endowment laid out in ImpactAlpha back in 2024 — techno-pragmatism as the corrective to techno-optimism's "tech can solve anything" reflex. Joy's argument is that the AI-in-education conversation has been dominated by what the technology can do, not nearly enough by what students actually need to develop critical thinking — or by the human relationships that do most of that work. The posture doesn't slow adoption. It insists on the question most procurement decks skip: does this tool align with our goals? The line that stuck with me: AI should enhance how we teach and learn, not replace it.

Second, The New York Times reports today that NYC schools could lose another 153,000 students over the next decade — a projection from the city's School Construction Authority — on top of the more than 123,000 already gone since the pandemic. NYC is not an outlier. Los Angeles County could lose 250,000 students over the same decade. Boston is planning to close 20 schools by 2030. Miami-Dade is now weighing closures of up to nine schools — Axios reported last week that the district has dropped 13,200 students this year alone, a decline officials attribute in part to the state's expanded voucher program. Federal projections show 38 states with smaller K-12 systems in 2030 than in 2020, and roughly 750,000 fewer students nationwide over the next five years. As Boston University economist Joshua Goodman put it in the Times: "a storm of things, many of which were not in the control of schools." Falling birthrates, internal migration, more school choice, sharply reduced immigration — the drivers are demographic and structural, and they're arriving everywhere at once.

–Thomas

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