A draft study titled "Generative AI Can Harm Teaching," released online in June, followed 193 teachers and more than 2,800 middle and high school students in a private school chain in Turkey during spring 2025. Teachers were randomly assigned either a ChatGPT-based teaching assistant customized to Turkey's national curriculum or no new tool at all, and over 10 weeks the AI group used it mainly to generate lecture notes, assignments, and exams. Lead author Alp Sungu, an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted the trial with fellow Penn researchers including educational psychologist Angela Duckworth. "Teachers, just like students or coders, might be using AI as a crutch," Sungu told The Hechinger Report's Jill Barshay. "Instead of doing the actual work, they're using AI to delegate the task, and that lowers the quality of their teaching."

Students whose teachers had AI access rated their classes as less enjoyable, less interesting, and less important, and average academic achievement held steady overall. But among teachers who were already weaker instructors, measured by student performance before the trial, both achievement and confidence declined on externally administered standardized exams. Sungu's read: stronger teachers treat AI output as a first draft and revise it into their own material, while weaker teachers are more likely to use it as-is, losing the personal voice that made their teaching distinct in the first place.

House Education and the Workforce Committee Republicans, led by Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., released a 10-bill "Less Bureaucracy, Better Education" package that could reach a floor vote as soon as Wednesday. The bills would permanently transfer specific Education Department programs and their statutory authority elsewhere: H.R. 9610 moves Title I, migrant education, teacher-quality grants, and federal assessment programs to the Department of Labor; H.R. 9608 shifts school-safety and family-engagement programs to Health and Human Services; H.R. 9609 moves federal student-loan administration to Treasury; and five smaller bills send tribal education, foreign medical accreditation, child care, and international programs to Interior and State. "Education policy should be focused on helping students succeed, not preserving a federal bureaucracy for its own sake," Walberg said in a statement.

H.R. 9610 is the bill to watch if your school touches Title I, migrant education, or federal assessment funding, since it would move the office that administers those programs out of the Education Department entirely. Heritage Foundation policy fellow Jonathan Butcher told the Daily Signal these transfers are meant as "a model for future proposals to shift full authority" out of the department, while Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the committee's top Democrat, called the package an attempt to "dismantle" the department "piece by piece." Whichever side is right, the debate is unfolding against a backdrop the bill's supporters cite directly: 32% of high school seniors can't read proficiently and nearly half can't do basic math, according to the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress, even as the department has cost roughly $154 billion a year.

Thirty-three states have sued Meta over allegations it built addictive design features into Instagram and Facebook to hook young users and collected data from children without parental consent. Four of those states, California, New Jersey, Colorado, and Kentucky, are seeking $1.4 trillion in damages, a figure that sits just below Meta's roughly $1.5 trillion market capitalization, according to a court filing reported by Reuters on July 7. Meta recently lost its bid to have the addiction claims dismissed and argues the number is unprecedented: "Meta has not found any case, under any cause of action, where one defendant was ordered to pay over one trillion dollars," the company's attorneys wrote. The case heads to trial in August, and more than 3,000 similar cases remain pending in California state court.

This case sits downstream of a March verdict that already broke new ground: a judge found Meta and Google liable for $6 million in damages to a young plaintiff over addictive design, the first time a platform lost the Section 230 shield that had protected operators from this kind of claim. If a jury or judge validates a fraction of the $1.4 trillion figure in August, it resets what "addictive design" liability looks like for every platform your students use daily. For a digital-citizenship or media-literacy unit, the case gives students a concrete, ongoing example of the gap between what a platform says about protecting young users and what a court record says about how it was actually built.