Apple announced the iPhone Duo this afternoon, its first foldable iPhone. The original is 19 now, older than nearly every high school student in the country. A new Fordham Institute survey of 2,024 students and recent graduates offers a look at the school experience for a generation that grew up alongside it.

The answers are blunt. Seventy-six percent report some form of daily technology misuse during school hours; 50 percent report daily social media use. Sixty-two percent say they spend more than half their class time on school-issued devices. And high grades don't always align with test performance: 57 percent report all or mostly A's, including a third of respondents who scored between 16 and 19 on the ACT. Twenty-nine percent say they receive partial credit for assignments never turned in.

Fordham's recommendations run toward the analog: fewer hours on devices, more supervised paper-and-pencil and oral exams, and district-wide bans on routine retakes and on no-penalty late-work policies. Those are Fordham's positions, and the grading recommendations in particular will draw disagreement. But the students in the survey were asked what would make them work harder, and one recent graduate answered: "We need to bring back in person/on paper proctored exams."

I wrote about the PISA results yesterday, but one finding in the AP's coverage belongs next to Fordham's survey. Students reported declining family involvement in their education in almost every country surveyed. Those whose families asked about their school day at least weekly scored roughly 35 points higher in science, even after accounting for socioeconomic differences. "Parents see themselves more as a client of the school," the OECD's Andreas Schleicher said, "not as someone who takes personal interest." Fordham raises questions about the expectations students encounter at school. PISA adds a question about the interest adults show at home.

Greg Toppo's piece in The 74 today gets at what's underneath both. The teachers and researchers he interviewed argue that AI exposed a motivation problem that had been there for years. His anchor is Alex Campbell, a sociology teacher in Elizabethton, Tennessee, who in 2017 handed his students a set of unsolved murders that had stumped investigators for three decades. He warned them how difficult the work would be, and they eagerly dug in. The project eventually became a podcast and an Amazon series.

Campbell's explanation for why it works is the line I keep coming back to. "Kids can spot a fake in about two seconds," he said. "So whenever you say, 'Oh, this is an important problem,' they're like, 'No, it's not, because the answer's in the back of the book.'"

On to today's list.

— Thomas

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