CBS News' Cara Tabachnick reported June 29 on Jessica Culver, a social studies teacher at Ozark High School in rural Arkansas who has taught civic education for more than a decade. As her 11th and 12th graders study the Declaration of Independence during its 250th anniversary year, Culver asks them to imagine the ratification as a modern social media moment. One student wrote, "The DOI has been approved! #newcountry #finallyfree," to capture the excitement in the colonies. Culver also asks students what they would post if they were "making a TikTok about the Boston Tea Party." The exercise, she said, builds a connection to events that "still shape our lives today."
Culver doesn't stop at the writing exercise. Her students listen to celebrities read the Declaration and Constitution aloud, hear from outside speakers, and write letters to their senators to practice what she calls a respectful "civic voice." Then the unit moves into action: students organize a voter registration drive out of the county clerk's office. "That's the Declaration in action in their community," Culver told CBS News. Separately, iCivics, the nonpartisan group founded by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, is offering Civic Star Challenge classroom stipends in all 50 states and a free interactive game, Investigation Declaration, built around the same document.
WUFT's Michael Angee reported May 4 that South Marion High School, opening this August in Ocala, will offer a dedicated Artificial Intelligence Foundations program funded by a $259,635 grant from the Florida Department of Education. Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas awarded the money through the Workforce Development Capitalization Incentive Grant Program, known as Workforce CAP, which distributed $40 million across 49 projects statewide to expand in-demand industry training, AI among them, in secondary schools. Marion County's Career and Technical Education coordinator, Katherine Otte, applied for the grant and said it lets the district stay "ahead of the game" in preparing students for the workforce. The AI track becomes the 36th category in a CTE program that already runs 35, alongside avionics, digital cinema production, entrepreneurship, and agribusiness.
Logan Johnson, Marion County's coordinator of digital technology, told WUFT that AI use among students is already happening whether or not it's authorized for assignments, and that the literacy gap is the more urgent problem: "We're held to big standards in education, so when it comes to sharing personally identifiable information, when it comes to Children's Online Privacy Acts... there's so many things... that very easily can be shared with these assistants if students and teachers are not aware." Nationally, Pew Research has found 64% of high-school-aged students use AI chatbots for some purpose, more than half for schoolwork help. Marion County is choosing to fund AI literacy as workforce preparation rather than treat it purely as an integrity problem. If your district hasn't drawn that same distinction in writing, this is the model to bring to a curriculum meeting.
KMTR/NBC16 reported July 22 on a University of Oregon HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice report drawing on a 2026 meta-analysis by Gena Nelson, of UO's Center on Teaching and Learning, and Peter Boedeker, of Baylor College of Medicine. The pair analyzed 112 studies, roughly half U.S.-based, covering more than 21,000 students from preschool through first grade across 23 countries and published between 2006 and 2025. Students who received early, targeted math interventions improved enough on average to move from the 50th to the 66th percentile in math achievement, with a 96% probability the effect holds in schools similar to those studied. "We know that some students enter school with gaps in early math skills, which can continue to widen over time," Nelson said. "Our meta-analysis findings highlight the positive impact that schools can make with math interventions to address these gaps early on."
The report lands against a bleak backdrop: average eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress fell sharply between 2019 and 2022 and remain below pre-pandemic levels. HEDCO researcher Elizabeth Day and co-authors recommend three things school leaders can act on now: require high-quality Tier 2 and Tier 3 math interventions in early grades, screen early to catch students at risk, and build coordinated, multi-tiered support systems with real progress monitoring. None of this is a high school teacher's direct job. But every student who never got a Tier 2 intervention in first grade is the student sitting in your Algebra I class carrying a gap that's now eight or nine years old. This report is the citation for why your building's elementary intervention budget is not someone else's problem.
The Aspen Institute's Project Play released its State of Play 2025 report finding that 65% of youth ages 6-17 tried a sport at least once in 2024, up from 59% in 2021 and the highest rate the Sports & Fitness Industry Association has tracked since at least 2012. But the gains split sharply by age. Regular, "core" participation for kids 6-12 rose for a third straight year, while core participation among teens 13-17 dropped 3% in 2024. "For the last five years, we were expecting growth and it's nice to finally see it," said SFIA's Alex Kerman, of the younger-kid numbers, a statement that doesn't extend to teenagers. Meanwhile, the income-based access gap in regular sports participation widened to 20.2 percentage points in 2024, up from 13.6 points in 2012, according to SFIA data cited in the report.
The teen decline lands exactly where high school engagement problems tend to show up, and the widening income gap means it isn't falling evenly. Project Play's data shows children from homes earning $100,000 or more are twice as likely to play travel sports than those earning under $50,000, and wealthier families access their sport through more settings, travel teams, private training, school programs, than lower-income families can reach. A team, club, or activity is often the reason a disengaged student still shows up to your building every day. If participation is falling fastest among teens and slowest among your lowest-income students, that's a belonging problem before it's an attendance or behavior problem.