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Hi! It’s Lily and Erica on the national desk. It’s Artificial Intelligence Week at Chalkbeat! It feels like it is, anyway. We’ll dive into the biggest AI and education stories of the week. Stick around for more on the debate around test-optional admissions, how teachers are supporting vulnerable students, and a tale of heroism from a school principal in Nepal.
And whether you like that today’s newsletter is packed with tech or it fills you with existential dread, come to our Oct. 1 event, where we’ll talk about how the two big tech debates have collided: the rush to embrace AI in education and the push to eliminate screentime in the classroom. Chalkbeat New York reporter Alex Zimmerman will join us for the conversation. Sign up here.
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The Big Story
It feels like everyone wants to talk about AI lately. The national team — Erica, Matt, and Lily — received a grand total of 46 press releases about AI last week. But not everyone wants to talk about the elephant in the room: the cheating enabled by AI.
If you’re a student, it’s really easy to resort to ChatGPT or another AI tool to generate an essay or spit out answers to math questions. Heard of Quillbot? It has a “humanize” feature, to make AI-generated writing sound more like it came from a human.
In response, teachers are opting for paper assignments, changing up their teaching strategies, and scrutinizing students’ Google Doc version histories. But the cheating continues as educators worry students are using AI to “offload” thinking.
About three-quarters of states have created documents or webpages meant to address and guide districts around AI. They use a lot of buzzword phrases like “human-centered education” and streamlining tasks. But what they often lack are concrete strategies to combat cheating or plagiarism, one of the biggest concerns teachers have about AI.
Maybe that’s because it’s not clear what to do about it. AI detection tools have documented problems, leading to false accusations of cheating. In fact, more state policies discourage the use of detection tools than give teachers real strategies for combatting cheating.
At the same time, AI skeptics argue teens aren’t mature enough to stop themselves from going overboard on AI use, given how tempting it is to have a program at your fingertips that has all the answers to your homework questions.
Meanwhile, roughly half of this year’s candidates for Chicago’s school board have signed a pledge to adopt a three-year ban on AI use by both students and teachers.
New York City this week decided to ban student-facing AI tools for younger students up to eighth grade, after months of debate about the best strategy for AI use.
More National News
More students are going online to get an education. About 1 in 80 public school students attended fully virtual schools in the 2024-25 school year, a twofold increase since before the pandemic. While research has raised questions about the quality of virtual education, students and parents have said a variety of difficult circumstances drove them to learn online. The data shows that a surge of enrollment prompted by the pandemic wasn’t just a one-year blip.
Universities are preparing for the growing threat of measles exposure. Higher education institutions are urging faculty and staff to gather proof of immunity to measles before an on-campus exposure happens. The push for proactive documentation across education isn’t just to protect from sickness, but to help students and staff avoid the disruptions even one case of measles can cause.
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Local Stories to Watch
New Jersey teachers and others gather outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility on Aug. 23, 2026, in Newark to protest ongoing immigration enforcement efforts. (Jessie Gómez / Chalkbeat)
New Jersey teachers are preparing to support immigrant students in the new school year as arrests and deportations rise. Teachers said they’re having honest conversations with students, weaving in lessons about migration, and trying to keep classroom routines consistent for students facing upheaval in their lives outside of school. While teachers are already balancing a lot, some advocates say schools should offer more support to students affected by heightened immigration enforcement activities.
Students may have had fewer barriers to enrolling in college thanks to a law that made tests optional in college admissions at Colorado universities. A new report shows the test-optional policy first approved by lawmakers in 2020 may have helped increase applications and student admissions in Colorado. Freshman acceptance rates have increased since 2021 across racial groups, but the statistics aren’t likely to quiet a national debate brewing about test-optional policies.
Indianapolis schools will once again give students zeroes when they make no effort to complete assignments. The district had adopted a no-zeroes policy back in 2020, part of a larger trend in grading policy to prevent students from ending up in holes they couldn’t climb out of. Teachers said the policy wasn’t working and made it harder to identify kids who needed help. But even under the new policy, students who try will earn at least a 50%.
Did You Know?
1,700
That’s how many students Minnesota schools lost following Operation Metro Surge, when thousands of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents came to the state to arrest and detain people they suspected of being undocumented immigrants, according to a data analysis by Sahan Journal.
Quote of the Week
“I have no words. I got education from that school. And I gave education at that school.”
Principal Rajendra Dawadi was in the classroom when flash floods started to tear through his region of Nepal, destroying homes and villages. Dawadi quickly ordered students and staff to higher ground, a decision that saved at least 900 students from the flooding.
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