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Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results

By Jenny Anderson & Rebecca Winthrop, The New York Times
(from January 2, 2025)
In a polarized nation, one point of agreement deserves more attention: Young adults say they feel woefully unprepared for life in the work force, and employers say they’re right.
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About a quarter of U.S. teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork – double the share in 2023

By Olivia Sidoti, Eugenie Park & Jeffrey Gottfried, Pew Research Center
(from January 15, 2025)
As debates continue over whether chatbots should have a role in the classroom, more teens are turning to ChatGPT to help with schoolwork.
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The Top 3 Tech Concerns Facing Private, Charter and Independent Schools

By Cari Warnock & Gabe Arias, EdTech (from December 18, 2024)
When it comes to modernizing their learning environments, leaders at private, charter and independent schools have many concerns. And any technological changes, no matter how much improvement they might bring, need to be carefully considered and vetted. After all, these schools are often smaller than the average public school, with limited people power, and don’t often benefit from public funding sources.
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5 education innovation trends to watch in 2025

By Julia Freeland Fisher, Christensen Institute (from December 18, 2024)
Clayton Christensen once said, “If we are to develop profound theory to solve the intractable problems in our societally-critical domains… we must learn to crawl into the life of what makes people tick.” I’ve been thinking about that as I contemplate how Generative AI (GenAI) will impact education, the workforce, and beyond in the year ahead.
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How Brown University plans to maintain a diverse student body

By Laura Spitalniak, Higher Ed Dive (from December 4, 2024)
In September, Brown became one of the first institutions to publicly share new student demographics following the Supreme Court’s decision.  Among incoming first-year students, the share of students from historically underrepresented backgrounds fell to 18% — down by 9 percentage points from the previous cohort, according to the university.
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The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2024

By Youki Terada & Stephen Merrill, Edutopia (from December 6, 2024)
It was a big year for tech. Cell phones had their moment in the sun, and then just as suddenly fell from grace and began disappearing from classrooms nationwide. In their stead, a revolutionary new tool powered by large-language models arose in the West—Silicon Valley, to be precise—and began to write in fluid, human-sounding paragraphs.
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10 Warning Signs of Financial Distress at Your School

By Brenda Stonecipher, NetAssets (from September 19, 2024)
The past decade has seen fundamental changes in the economics of the independent school business model. Following transitory increases in enrollment and emergency funding during the pandemic, many schools are now facing rising operational costs, demographic shifts, and ongoing economic pressures threatening their financial sustainability. A quarter of all schools operated with a negative operating margin in recent years, according to NBOA’s “Financial State of the Industry: BIIS Financial and Operational Indicators: 2021-2023.” And both NAIS and researchers at Vanderbilt University found nearly half (44-45%) of small schools operate at a deficit.
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How to Make Others Feel Like They Matter

By Simon Sinek's Optimism Company (from November 19, 2024)
We recently sat down with author and researcher Zach Mercurio, Ph.D., who is something of a Jedi master on the science of leadership. In addition to teaching at Colorado State University—where he’s an honorary fellow in psychology—he regularly rappels into global organizations to train leaders, boost both morale and productivity, and help people make other people feel like they matter. He’s also an Optimist Instructor here at Simon’s The Optimism Company. 
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15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to

By Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing (from December 9, 2024)
There are several types of work where AI can be particularly useful, given the current capabilities and limitations of LLMs. Though this list is based in science, it draws even more from experience. Like any form of wisdom, using AI well requires holding opposing ideas in mind: it can be transformative yet must be approached with skepticism, powerful yet prone to subtle failures, essential for some tasks yet actively harmful for others. I also want to caveat that you shouldn't take this list too seriously except as inspiration - you know your own situation best, and local knowledge matters more than any general principles. With all that out of the way, below are several types of tasks where AI can be especially useful, given current capabilities—and some scenarios where you should remain wary.
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What Happens When 'Play' Is Left Out of the School Curriculum

By Fatema Elbakoury, EdSurge (from December 4, 2024)
Only six weeks had passed since the start of this school year, and I was already feeling exhausted. On a Friday during one of those long, exhausting days, two birds flew into my classroom. It was comical and absurd — for sixty minutes, I watched my high schoolers run around the room, trying to catch these birds. I had to run after my students a couple of times when I saw them doing crazy things like standing on desks and chairs and window sills trying to catch them.
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A Republican and a Democrat Sit Across From Each Other. There’s No Punchline.

By Joseph Bernstein, The New York Times (from September 22, 2024)
Alton Russell is a white, 85-year-old toilet paper salesman from Columbus, Ga., where for years he was the chair of the local Republican Party. Wane Hailes is a Black, 68-year-old newspaper owner from Columbus, where he formerly served as the president of the city’s chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.
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New Research Confirms Adam Grant Is Right: To Be Smarter and More Successful, Think More Like a Scientist

Ask a host of experts how to be smarter, and they'll give you the same counterintuitive answer: acknowledge all the ways you're probably being dumb.  Warren Buffett's right-hand man Charlie Munger recommends "trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent." Jeff Bezos famously looks for people who are willing to admit mistakes and learn from them in job interviews.
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AI Can (Mostly) Outperform Human CEOs

by Hamza Mudassir, Kamal Munir, Shaz Ansari and Amal Zahra, Harvard Business Review (from September 26, 2024)
Generative AI has demonstrated the potential to significantly outperform human CEOs in strategic decision-making by excelling in data-driven tasks like product design and market optimization. In an experiment simulating the automotive industry, AI models outpaced human participants in market share and profitability but faltered in handling unpredictable disruptions, leading to faster dismissals by virtual boards. While AI’s ability to analyze complex data sets and iterate rapidly could revolutionize corporate strategy, it lacks the intuition and foresight required to navigate black swan events. Rather than fully replacing human CEOs, AI is poised to augment leadership by enhancing data analysis and operational efficiency, leaving humans to focus on long-term vision, ethics, and adaptability in dynamic markets. The future of leadership will likely be a hybrid model where AI complements human decision-making.
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In the Rush to COVID Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners?

By Lauren Camera, The 74 (from September 20, 2024)
The country’s youngest elementary school students suffered steep academic setbacks in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – just like students in older grades. But new research shows that they aren’t catching back up to pre-pandemic levels in reading and math the way others are. And when it comes to math, many are falling even further behind.
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The Power of Habit Stacking

By Miriam Plotinsky, ASCD (from September 24, 2024)
“That just about covers it,” Ms. Davis says to her 5th grade class, winding up a long 30 minutes of direct instruction. “Any questions?”  The silence that ensues comes as no surprise. For the past couple of years, Ms. Davis has noticed that kids have gotten so much quieter. Initially, she attributed this to pandemic-related disruptions in learning, but now she wonders if increased student passivity has become the new norm.
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Saving the Idea of the University

By Sian Leah Beilock, The Atlantic (from September 14, 2024)
As students return to college campuses across the country and reunite with friends and classmates, I am struck by the number of my own Ivy League classmates who will not return this fall. Three of my newly minted presidential peers, to be exact: University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Columbia’s Minouche Shafik. These losses have caused me, as president of Dartmouth, to reflect on the very purpose of a university as a home for intellectual inquiry and debate, and on what leaders can do to preserve that purpose.
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History Teachers Are Replacing Textbooks With the Internet

By Dana Goldstein, The New York Times (from September 19, 2024)
As printed textbooks increasingly gather dust in classroom bookshelves, a new and expansive survey published on Thursday finds that social studies teachers are turning to digital sources and primary documents from the nation’s past.
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Cash-Starved Districts Are Turning to Four-Day School Weeks. Will That Harm Students?

By Daniel Mollenkamp, EdSurge (from September 24, 2024)
A school district in Brighton, in the Denver metro area of Colorado, was having a hard time keeping teachers. The salaries in the district, 27J Schools, were low for the region. And in Colorado, voters have to approve higher property taxes to send additional dollars to schools, including for salary bumps, but by 2018 voters had refused six straight times.
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Study: The 7 Competencies Presidents Need

By Josh Moody, Inside Higher Ed (from September 16, 2024)
The college presidency, much like higher education itself, is undergoing a period of upheaval.  Instability and uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, slumping enrollment, state and federal politics, international conflict, and a wave of protests over the Israel-Hamas war have challenged—and ended—a number of high-profile presidencies in recent years.
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It’s Easy to See What Drove Jonathan Holloway to Quit

By Pamela Paul, The New York Times (from September 26, 2024)
Last week Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University, announced he would be stepping down at the end of this academic year — the latest in a series of university president departures.
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OPINION: It’s finally time to put pandemic excuses behind us and hold students to higher standards

By Lesley Muldoon, The Hechinger Report (from September 10, 2024)
The pandemic disrupted education in previously unimaginable ways. It limited testing and pushed schools toward remote learning and easier assignments, along with softer grading and a more relaxed attitude around attendance.
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Can You Teach Free Speech? These Colleges Are Trying.

By Christa Dutton, The Chronicle of Higher Education (from September 3, 2024)
The kinds of questions freshmen have to answer at orientation are typically mundane and uncontroversial: “Where are you from?” or “What do you think you’d like to major in?” or “Have you found the dining hall yet?”
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The Sleep Crisis Among Students: A Wake-Up Call for Well-Being and Academic Performance

By Challenge Success (from July 29, 2024)
In recent years, the trend of inadequate sleep among students has become alarmingly prevalent, impacting nearly all areas of their lives. With competing priorities such as academic performance, extracurricular activities, and preparing for life after graduation: does prioritizing sleep matter?
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This Chatbot Pulls People Away From Conspiracy Theories

By Teddy Rosenbluth, The New York Times (from September 12, 2024)
Shortly after generative artificial intelligence hit the mainstream, researchers warned that chatbots would create a dire problem: As disinformation became easier to create, conspiracy theories would spread rampantly.
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The Junkification of American Life

By David Brooks, The New York Times (from September 5, 2024)
Back in February, the music historian Ted Gioia wrote an essay on the state of American culture. He argued that many creative people want to create art (work that puts demands on people), but all the commercial pressures push them to create entertainment (which gives audiences what they want). As a result, for the past many years, entertainment (superhero movies) has been swallowing up art (literary novels and serious dramas).
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