Hi! Or, high? You’ll understand when you read the big story.

It’s Lily and Erica over on Chalkbeat’s national desk. Dive in for a breakdown of the problems legalized marijuana creates in schools. Stick around for lessons learned around chronic absenteeism, big questions surrounding federal civil rights in education, and an eye-popping GPA.

And make sure to RSVP to our teacher turnover event on July 30, hosted by Ideas Editor Matt Barnum. You’ll get an overview of new data on teacher attrition and a classroom-level view on how to bolster the profession. When you register, let us know what you want to know, and we’ll do our best to ask those questions.

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Two dozen states and the District of Columbia have greenlit recreational marijuana — creating some unintended consequences for public schools.

Legalized marijuana may feel like an established policy. Colorado and Washington first legalized it in 2012. But in many places, it’s still pretty recent. And it’s created growing pains for schools in New York, Michigan, and elsewhere.

Legal marijuana in all its different and more potent forms, from edibles to vapes, has created far more elaborate problems than a handful of high school seniors smoking behind the bleachers now and then.

In New York City, school district staff members also say more students are experimenting, and they’re experimenting at younger ages, in some cases as young as middle school. 

Schools across the city have responded with piecemeal strategies. One sends students caught getting high during their school day to peer-led restorative circles. Another simply suspends students. 

But educators have still said they don’t feel equipped to handle the kind of problems they’re seeing, thanks to students having increased access to so many different forms of marijuana.

Now five years after New York legalized recreational cannabis, the state is trying to tackle the problem by launching a new education program, Cannabis Honestly. It’s the product of 23 listening sessions with 450 young people, who overwhelmingly said mental health challenges led their peers to use marijuana.

Michigan is also grappling with more cases of children exposed to weed and hospitalized because of it. In Detroit’s school district, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said widespread marijuana usage routinely disrupts classes and hospitalizes students. Vitti wants stricter limits on packaging and detection systems mandated in schools.

You might think states with new laws could look to states like California for guidance. But the proliferation of more potent and new forms of weed is generating problems there, too.

Read the full story here.

A new AI juggernaut just joined the race to capture teachers’ attention. Anthropic, the company behind the popular Claude AI assistant, launched Claude for Teachers this week, which the company is offering free to all verified K-12 teachers. But AI remains a new frontier in education — one not everyone wants to explore. And states are still catching up in devising rules around its use in education, though Illinois state officials last week issued a new framework for teachers to use the technology responsibly in school.

If politicians don’t seem to care about education, it might be because voters don’t care either. Back in the year 2000, voters named education as America’s top problem in some polls. But today, just 2% of Americans think education is the country’s most pressing challenge. This probably has something to do with why learning loss and academic recovery haven’t emerged as a political priority for either party.

What does a new partnership between the Department of Education and the Department of Justice mean for civil rights enforcement in schools? It’s a bit murky.

Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kim Richey told Chalkbeat that the Office for Civil Rights remains laser focused on resolving complaints while noting that many details are still being worked out. But Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told a conservative talk show host that “99%” of school-related civil rights work will now be handled at the Justice Department. 

Kenneth Marcus, who held Richey’s job in the first Trump administration, said a bigger role for Justice likely means a more prosecutorial approach, rather than one focused on mediation and voluntary agreements. 

“What can make this new system work well is if it facilitates quicker, smoother, and more effective litigation against recalcitrant institutions, Marcus said. “What would make the process fail is if the departments are less able to address the broad range of cases involving well-meaning institutions that probably shouldn’t go to court.”

Some school districts may appear recalcitrant because they interpret federal law differently than the Trump administration. For example, Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools “respectfully disagrees” with a recent finding that its policies on parental notification and student gender transitions violate federal law. The Justice and Education departments recently announced enforcement action against this district as a model for its new partnership. 

Dhillon said policies that make it harder for parents to know about their child’s gender identity will be a target of “maximum enforcement” now that Justice is playing a larger role. 

Meanwhile, the Office for Civil Rights remains in charge of data collection — and that data is seriously delayed. Researchers, advocates, and civil rights attorneys say the data provides a critical national picture around pressing education issues as well as consistent state-by-state and district-by-district insights. 

The Education Department has the data and has reviewed it — officials cited the data in announcing investigations into districts that have not done enough to protect students from teachers accused of sexual misconduct. When will the public get a look? “Later this summer,” Richey said.

That’s the proportion of offers out of roughly 4,000 that went to Black students to New York City’s eight specialized high schools, which require the Specialized High School Admissions Test. Citywide, 19.3% of New York’s students are Black. These disparities aren’t new. But they represent an ongoing dilemma for the city and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who said on the campaign trail he would keep the admissions exam in place.

That’s Vaibhav Bhaskar, a high school valedictorian who may have earned the highest GPA in Florida history at 11.99. Bhaskar managed to reach such a mind-boggling number by loading up on courses, giving up lunch, and taking online courses over summer breaks. The number seemed high to school district leaders in Hillsborough County, where Bhaskar goes to school. The district has capped credit loads for future students.

Reflecting on his time in high school during his valedictorian speech, Bhaskar told fellow graduates, “Don’t just chase something because it looks good, take a second to ask yourself, ‘why?’”