Cambridge Public Schools placed all eighth graders in Algebra I for the first time this past year, responding to parents who felt faster learners were bored waiting for a separate accelerated track. The Boston Globe's Hechinger Report coverage, published July 6, reports that more than 60% of rising ninth graders will need to retake the course in high school because they did not do well enough this year, according to data the district shared with the school board. Several Cambridge math teachers, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak, said the rollout felt rushed and poorly planned. Superintendent David Murphy called the work of finding "the best possible academic trajectory for all students" ongoing, but in a February interview he had already questioned the district's own approach, asking why schools resist tracking in middle school only to sort students into differently named math classes the moment they reach ninth grade.
Cambridge added supports many districts skip: a second teacher, often a special educator or math interventionist, in every eighth grade Algebra I classroom, plus small-group tutoring for students who needed it. Some students thrived under that model. Others did not, and one eighth grade teacher put the gap in planning bluntly: no one asked what the district was actually trying to achieve, more students in honors math, or something else, and no one invited teachers to reflect on how the year had gone. The lesson for any school weighing an "algebra for all" push isn't that acceleration failed, it's that acceleration without a clearly stated goal and a plan to measure against it produces a retake rate you can't explain to parents.
Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano told IBTimes UK's Bernadette B. Tixon, in a story published July 9, that he uncovered what he believes is evidence of mass AI-assisted cheating in his Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory course after moving his final exam from a take-home format to a supervised, in-person sitting. His course typically enrolls 8 to 30 students; this spring, after he allowed a take-home midterm, enrollment jumped to 86, and 40 students scored a perfect 100. Serrano called the results "extraordinary" given the course had historically averaged 65% to 80% on exams he considered easier. He told the class he suspected the midterm reflected cheating, but offered a test: if the final's grade distribution matched the midterm's, the midterm would stand; if not, he would void it. Twenty-seven students dropped the course once they learned the final would be in person, most of whom had scored 100 on the midterm. Of the 59 who stayed, 19 failed once the midterm was voided, and the average score on one repeated midterm question, which the class had gotten right the first time, fell to 10% under exam conditions.
Serrano's design, not his data, is the transferable piece. He didn't accuse anyone; he built a comparison, take-home versus supervised, on the same material, and let the score gap make the case. That's a design any teacher can run on a smaller scale, a homework set versus a closed-note version of the same problems in class, without needing an AI-detection tool or a disciplinary hearing to start the conversation. Serrano's own framing to students was direct: he told them that outsourcing an exam to a chatbot was "showing me you're totally irrelevant." Brown's Generative AI in Teaching and Learning Committee separately found 56% of undergraduates and 67% of graduate students use generative AI tools daily or weekly, which means the incentive Serrano's course exposed is not unique to one classroom.
Chicago Board of Education members aligned with Mayor Brandon Johnson, joined by the Chicago Teachers Union and Deputy Mayor of Education Khari Humphries, pressed Gov. JB Pritzker on July 8 to call a special legislative session to raise more state education funding, Chalkbeat Chicago's Reema Amin reported the same day. The district is finalizing a roughly $10 billion budget while closing a shortfall exceeding $700 million, first projected last spring. A millionaire's-tax proposal that would have raised additional school funding stalled in the state legislature before lawmakers adjourned in May, and this year's state budget added $350 million statewide, bringing total state K-12 funding to $9.2 billion, still short of what Illinois' own funding formula counts as adequate for districts including CPS. Board member Jitu Brown asked reporters, "Can the state of Illinois say they have not done harm to Illinois children?" CPS is expected to release its full budget plan by mid-July, with a board vote targeted for July 30 and a legal deadline of Aug. 29.
CPS CEO Macquline King told the board "there is a sense of urgency," and the district is also pressing the city for a larger share of tax-increment-financing dollars, which fell from more than $500 million last year to an expected $100 million this year. None of that is unique to Chicago. Districts nationwide close budgets against the same three levers, state formula funding, local property and TIF revenue, and one-time federal or city relief, and a governor declining to call a special session, as Pritzker has so far done, is itself information about which lever is least likely to move before your own district finalizes numbers this summer.
Testing firm KJR, which led the Australian government's 2025 age-assurance trial, ran a new test of the country's under-16 social media ban and published the results July 7. Andrew Hammond, a director at KJR, and his team created 50 test accounts declaring themselves 16 years old and spread them across nine of the ten platforms covered by the law, including Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. None of the nine were asked to verify their age. Only Kick, an Australian live-streaming platform, required proof of age before letting the account register. The law, in effect since December, requires platforms to take "reasonable steps" to keep users under 16 off their services, layering multiple checks so a suspected minor gets pushed toward stronger verification. In the test, that first filter did essentially nothing. Australia's national online safety regulator maintained it remains confident platforms have the technology to comply, arguing a chain of checks done properly leaves no single point of failure.
Australia's law is the most-cited model for the wave of under-16 social media legislation moving through U.S. statehouses, and this test is the first hard data on what "reasonable steps" looks like in practice once a law like this actually takes effect: not much, at least at the account-creation stage. If your state passes similar legislation, and a Pew Research survey released July 1 found 56% of Americans already support a ban for under-16s, expect the enforcement gap to land on schools the same way phone bans did, as a real-world compliance problem your office handles rather than one the platforms solve on their own.