Hey, from Lily and Erica on the national desk. Dive into our big story for strange but true examples of worksheets, classroom posters, and more we found while searching for low-quality AI-generated content on a well-known teacher resource website.

Stick around for the lowdown on a new strategy some New York City schools are using to respond to students who seem like they’re avoiding school, the Trump administration’s new plan to leave Head Start standards up to states, and the lengths a group of college admissions officials will go to fact check student boasts on college applications.

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Teachers Pay Teahcers is geting attacked by AI worksheet sludge with cursed clipart, spelling crimes and lil robot leftovers hiding in the directions 😭📚 TPT says its a small part of the site, but teachers could still accidentally be buying the goo and handing it to actual human children!!!!

… Whoa. Sorry. We put our AI slop story from this week in ChatGPT and asked it to summarize the story in the sloppiest way possible. The bot did a bang-up job, but we’ll take it from here.

Teachers have noticed that some of the content on Teachers Pay Teachers — the vast education resource marketplace that rebranded to TPT a few years ago — looks a lot like it’s been AI-generated. Chalkbeat found suspicious examples pretty quickly, including a printout with an alphabet missing the letter F and a poster touting the connection between a president, an asteroid, and resiliency.

TPT’s value proposition as a platform has always at least partially revolved around efficiency. Teacher in need of a lesson plan, and fast? TPT has thousands. Need classroom decor in a pinch? TPT’s got it. In that way, it makes sense that education resource creators have turned to AI. But that doesn’t mean AI will create quality resources. 

The CEO of TPT’s parent company in a statement wrote that the company is using digital tools to demote stores that look like they’re packed with AI slop products, and that “AI-generated products account for a minuscule fraction of a percent of TPT’s sales.”

The teachers we talked to said they tend to steer away from anything that appears to be AI-generated. But they also worried that newer teachers, who may have a lot fewer classroom resources built up, may accidentally buy and use a low-quality resource, exposing students (or “actual human children!!!!”) to a shoddily done lesson.

AI juggernauts like OpenAI and Anthropic have been spending a lot of time and money making sales pitches to educators. They claim their products can save teachers time and effort that can be better spent on students. But education leaders are also wary about adopting AI without guardrails, or even at all.

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President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department met bipartisan resistance. Last week, moderate Republican senators joined Democratic colleagues on the Senate education committee to support a bill blocking four of the interagency agreements the administration is using to parcel out Education Department work to other agencies. This is the clearest indication yet that Trump doesn’t have the votes to abolish the department, despite his administration’s promises to work with Congress to do so. 

An exclusive Chalkbeat analysis found that many states experienced four to five straight years of elevated teacher turnover in the aftermath of the pandemic. These losses to the teaching profession have compounded for school districts trying to put qualified educators in front of students and for those students themselves. Some states report increases in uncertified or emergency-certified educators, and those teachers are typically concentrated in high-poverty schools.

Facing political resistance to eliminating Head Start, the Trump administration is taking a different approach: deregulation.

The federally funded preschool program for children from low-income households isn’t just daycare. Providers are supposed to use high-quality curriculum, screen children for learning disabilities, connect families with resources, and more. The rule book runs more than 100 pages.

As first reported by The Nation, the Trump administration is proposing rule changes that would remove many of these federal requirements and let states regulate Head Start instead. But many states have much laxer rules. The shift to state control could mean much higher student-teacher ratios, less family engagement, and fewer protections for students with disabilities, among other changes.

The Trump administration has also floated the idea of barring children whose parents are not in the country legally — even if those children are themselves U.S. citizens. It was not clear Wednesday whether that change would be included in the new rules. Last year, the Trump administration moved to bar undocumented children from the program, a change that’s tied up in court.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start, said the new rules would reduce administrative burden and improve flexibility, ultimately strengthening the program.

But Khari Garvin, who ran Head Start under Democratic President Joe Biden, told the Associated Press that the changes would make Head Start unrecognizable.

“We’d have the carcass of Head Start,” Garvin said. “You might have a program that’s called Head Start, but in substance it will not be.”

Critics have long accused Head Start of not improving outcomes enough to justify the money spent on it. Measuring how Head Start changes children’s lives is a complicated matter that requires considering how they would have otherwise spent those years and the quality of schools they enter after preschool. A recent research analysis found overall positive outcomes, but that these depend on a lot of factors, including the quality of the program.

That’s how much federal funding the Education Department let expire in its budget last fiscal year, Education Week reported, with an unprecedented proportion of money left on the table for civil rights enforcement and mental health grants.

That’s Nic Lee, in the admissions department at the California Institute of Technology and on the unofficially named “Fraud Squad” at the university. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the squad verifies eyebrow-raising claims on student applications. For instance: If a student claims they authored a published research paper, the university has software that captures a video of them answering fast-paced questions about the material.