Hi! It’s Lily and Erica on the national desk. The new school year has waltzed back through the door. It brings the promise of a fresh start, but the old problems haven’t been fixed. Our big story this week looks at some of the big issues setting the stage in education this year. Read on for a tribute to Dolly Parton’s contributions to early literacy and a new survey revealing how many teachers in one state are thinking about exiting the profession.

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Football reporters have the NFL season. Politics reporters have election season. Education reporters — in our eyes — have the best season: back-to-school.

It’s the end of August, and that means students are returning to classrooms across the U.S. (unless you’re in New York City, where school starts Sept. 10). This year, district budget uncertainty and policy shifts are looming over the beginning of the school year.

In Philadelphia, for example, students returned Monday to classrooms that will likely be empty next school year, because the district is moving forward with a plan to close 17 schools over the next decade. Leaders have defended the plan, arguing the closures will enable the district to create better opportunities for students.

Philadelphia isn’t alone in planning closures. Major U.S. school districts are contending with difficult budgets this year, and closures are on the menu in districts including Detroit, Broward County Public Schools in Florida, and Los Angeles Unified. Students, families, and educators have said closures risk destabilizing young people’s educational trajectories.

Still, the principal of one Philly school slated to close next school year after 120 years in operation told Chalkbeat Philadelphia that it will be business as usual this year.

“The focus needs to be instruction,” Principal Kenneth Glover said. “The kids should not have to worry about this school being saved.”

Monday also marked the beginning of a new school year in Chicago, where parents are wary of potential midyear budget cuts. The district is also under investigation by the Trump administration for its ongoing Black Student Success Plan, a sweeping initiative that includes hiring more Black educators and reducing punitive discipline for Black students in the district. 

The U.S. Department of Education says programs like Chicago’s favor students on the basis of race.

Denver Public Schools is also at the center of a few investigations by the Trump administration.

But students and parents in Denver might be more focused on the district’s new bell-to-bell cellphone ban. One school board member said she’d received a few messages from parents upset about the ban. Yet high school senior Angel was taking it in stride.

“I don’t have my phone in my pocket,” he said. “Nothing is going to distract me.”

Read our back-to-school coverage in Philadelphia…

And Detroit…

And Chicago… 

And Denver.

New research underscores — again — that a big problem with AI tutors is that students don’t use them as intended. This study examined how students interact with Khanmigo’s digital math learning tools. Students who took advantage of the platform did better than students in a control group — a notable finding in an era of ed tech backlash. But many students instead tried every which way to get the tool to just give them the answer, while others tried to engage it in off-topic side quests. 

Dolly Parton — singer, songwriter, American saint — has left this world at the age of 80. She gave us “Coat of Many Colors,” “9 to 5,” and “Jolene,” among more than 3,000 songs she wrote.

But her greatest legacy may turn out to be the more than 300 million books she gave to children through the Imagination Library. Founded in 1995 to honor her father, who never learned to read or write, the Imagination Library began by giving books to children in her native Sevier County, Tennessee, and expanded nationwide in 2000. It now operates in five countries. 

The science of reading movement has emphasized that exposure to books alone is not enough for children to learn to read, but the Imagination Library reminds us that exposure provides a profoundly important foundation. Children in low-income households have far fewer books at home than those from better-off families, and some arrive at kindergarten not knowing how to hold a book or turn its pages. 

The Imagination Library sends each enrolled child a new book every month from birth until age 5. The books are labeled with the child’s name, theirs to own forever. At the end of the program, the child receives a graduation letter from Dolly Parton welcoming them to kindergarten and urging them to keep reading, learning, and dreaming.

A volunteer committee of early education experts ensures the books are high-quality and age appropriate for each stage of early childhood, and the book lists are updated annually. They also come with suggestions for parents on how to help their children engage with what they’re reading.  

"Maybe it's been a long day and I can't really think of the right questions to ask, and they have these really great prompts at the back of every book," one parent told NPR in 2018, when the Imagination Library donated its 100 millionth book to the Library of Congress. 

Parton said her father thought the Imagination Library was the most important work she ever did. Parton’s family requested that mourners, in lieu of flowers, make a donation to the Imagination Library.

That’s how much Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has agreed to pay under a landmark legal settlement over claims that its platforms harmed young users. The settlement comes partway through a federal trial that could have left Meta on the hook for more than $1 trillion in damages.

The company also agreed to new default settings for teen users, including shutting the apps down at night and limiting notifications during the school day. But there’s a catch, Wired reports: Some $4 billion will only be paid out if other “core industry members” — such as Snap, TikTok, and YouTube — adopt similar protections for young users.

That’s a statement from Peanuts Worldwide, the company that manages the copyright and distribution of Charlie Brown and other Peanuts characters, responding to the U.S. Department of Education’s use of Peanuts imagery on its social media accounts. 

The Peanuts post, which depicts characters reading around Snoopy’s doghouse, is one of the more innocuous examples in the Education Department’s social media feeds, which are chock-full of beloved, copyrighted children’s characters such as Franklin the Turtle and the clownfish Nemo supporting efforts to return education authority to the states or promote parents’ rights. The 74 talked to copyright experts who said many of the highly political posts would not qualify as fair use.