Hi, it’s Lily and Erica on the national desk. Today’s big story is of course the blue wave Democrats rode last night in governor’s races, state legislatures, and Congress.

Read on for the inside scoop on oral arguments in a consequential U.S. Supreme Court case, some highlights from local elections across the country, and the Pandora’s box of drama Google opened with an AI-in-education announcement this week.

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Education was on the ballot last night — nowhere more than in Texas, where Gina Hinojosa campaigned around some of the trendiest education policy issues, from vouchers to state takeovers to religion in public schools, and where a former middle school teacher, James Talarico, sailed to victory in a closely-watched senate race.

Ultimately, arguments against vouchers and in favor of public schools may have helped propel Hinojosa and other Democrats like Iowa’s Rob Sand to victories amid a larger-than-anticipated blue wave nationwide.

Hinojosa, who unseated long-time GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, made education a campaign priority. At a Tuesday rally before the polls closed, supporters waved signs reading “Save our schools.” She spent valuable minutes in her victory speech reiterating her campaign promise to fire state schools chief Mike Morath “on day one.” Morath has led controversial state takeovers of major school districts, including Houston’s, one of the largest in the country. 

She’s also opposed widespread school closures across the state. In fact, Hinojosa got her start in politics by fighting when her son’s school was under threat of closure.

“The days of treating our public schools like they are for sale are over,” she told her supporters on Tuesday night.

She is also a fierce opponent of Texas’ school voucher program, which was a signature initiative from Abbott and passed by the state legislature in 2025. Abbott ran a fierce pressure campaign — including against members of his own party, some of whom he targeted to unseat in 2024 when they opposed the program — to push vouchers through.

Talarico, a Democratic state representative in 2025, said when lawmakers approved vouchers: “Remember this day next time a school closes in your neighborhood … Remember this day next time a beloved teacher quits because they can’t support their family on their salary.”

Talarico was another big winner in Texas Tuesday night when he won a U.S. Senate seat. He also raised education briefly in his victory speech Tuesday night, saying that teaching middle school was the “best preparation” for politics.

Read the full story here.

The election’s implications for education are nuanced. Democrats in Congress could try to regulate the federal scholarship tax credit. Culture war issues could reach a detente — or accelerate. And there are some signs voters care about student learning. Ideas Editor Matt Barnum has some takeaways.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed sympathetic to Catholic preschools in Colorado that want to take public money but exclude LGBTQ kids and families. The high court heard oral arguments this week in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, which pits the state’s nondiscrimination rules against the preschools’ desire to set admissions policies that align with their religious beliefs. But attorneys for the preschools faced hard questions too about how far religious groups could go in claiming exemptions from law.

Google is embedded in American classrooms, and AI is embedded in Google. And parents, teachers, and policymakers are raising lots of concerns about screen time in general and AI in particular.

So what’s a tech giant to do? Make ’em an offer they can’t refuse. 

Google announced this week that it was making several changes to how AI operates in Google Classroom. The default mode will have the Gemini chatbot turned off, and when administrators turn it on, the default mode will be Guided Learning. This new-ish feature, launched last year, asks questions back, walks students through examples, and generally prods them to think more. 

This change aims to address concerns that Google will just do students’ homework for them, though reviewers say they have been able to get Guided Learning to do more than just “help” with homework.

That’s the carrot. But there’s also a stick. Google says that school districts that ban AI entirely won’t be able to use Google Search going forward. 

Google Search, of course, is pretty hard to avoid. If you want to know more about this or just about any other topic, you’ll probably “google it.” But to groups like Common Sense Media, Google’s AI overviews are one of the most harmful features for students, and are higher risk than purpose-designed chatbots like Gemini K-12. 

In a call with reporters, company executives presented this as a matter of logistics. AI is just part of how search works, they said. It’s also not totally clear what this means in practice. Even school districts that have restricted student AI access have many carve-outs and exceptions. 

This is hardly the first time Google has been assertive about putting its products in front of students. As Education Week recently reported, Google turned on Gemini by default this school year, catching many school districts off guard. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani didn’t take well to Google raising the stakes of the city school system’s AI ban. “Google is trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools,” the mayor said in a social media post. “No corporation should have the power to dictate how we teach our children. Our public schools exist to serve students, not to grow the profit margins of Big Tech.”

Meanwhile, the alternative search engine DuckDuckGo, which promises to protect user data and makes AI features optional, urged school districts to “Fire Google” in a social media post of its own. “Why is Google bullying schools into using AI?” the company wrote. “Because they can. And they don’t think you’ll do anything about it. Prove them wrong.”

That’s how many hours Colorado third graders will spend taking standardized tests next year. That’s down from nearly 10 hours back in 2015 and nearly eight hours this year. The change is meant to calm concerns from parents, teachers, and state lawmakers — who keep introducing bills to scale back testing — that the assessments are too burdensome and take away valuable classtime. 

Studies show that parents put more stock in report cards than standardized tests, even though test scores likely provide a more accurate picture of student learning. That creates a political challenge for policymakers who want to maintain standardized tests. Reducing testing time is one way they’re navigating the backlash.