New Jersey's State Board of Education adopted revisions to its K-12 science standards on June 3, sharpening how climate change gets taught across every grade band, according to the New Jersey School Boards Association. A committee of classroom educators and higher education faculty spent six weeks reviewing all 208 performance expectations in the state's science standards. They recommended changes to four. The committee's rule was strict: revise only when the evidence is clear and compelling. Districts have to fold the changes into local curricula by the start of the 2026-27 school year.
That ratio, four changes out of 208, is the actual lesson for your classroom. New Jersey did not rewrite its science standards to chase a trend or react to a headline. It built a review process that defaulted to keeping what worked and changing only what the evidence demanded. That is the same discipline you're asking of students when you teach them to evaluate a claim: change your position when the evidence earns it, not before.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools presented a district report on July 15 to a School Board committee, quantifying how much time K-12 students spend on digital learning tools, WLRN's Natalie La Roche Pietri reported July 20. The district's target: no more than 90 minutes a week on digital tools like i-Ready Reading and Math for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, with pre-K capped at 15 minutes a week. School board member Roberto Alonso requested the analysis in May, after what the report describes as a wave of national backlash against "EdTech" in classrooms this year. Assistant Superintendent Daniel Mateo said the district treats these platforms as "supplemental tools or enrichment tools," not replacements for teacher-led instruction, and that usage data gets compared to student performance only as a correlation, never as proof.
An EdWeek Research Center survey cited in the report found 61% of educators nationwide say most parents and caregivers believe there's too much technology in schools. Miami-Dade's response wasn't to defend its tech stack. It was to measure it and publish the number. If your building can't tell a parent how many minutes a week a given platform actually gets used, you're defending EdTech spending with a feeling, not a fact. The districts that survive the current backlash will be the ones that can show their work, the way Miami-Dade just did.
New York's Board of Regents introduced proposed regulations last week that would require teacher preparation programs, including those for early childhood, bilingual, special, and literacy education, to align their coursework with the science of reading, Chalkbeat's Alex Zimmerman reported July 20. The push follows a June 9 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality finding that roughly half of New York's teacher prep programs fail to adequately teach evidence-based reading instruction, a rate worse than the national average. The proposed rules would also mandate explicit dyslexia training and require prospective teachers to spend part of their student teaching on evidence-based literacy work. If adopted, programs would have until September 2028 to comply.
More than 40% of New York fourth graders scored at the lowest level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, roughly 10 points worse than in 2013. That gap traces back to how the teachers standing in front of those students were trained, not just what curriculum a district bought. If you were trained in a program that never covered phonics, phonological awareness, or dyslexia identification systematically, you are not the exception. You are half the state.
At least six states enacted new laws this year targeting chronic absenteeism, ranging from Utah's threat of a misdemeanor charge for parents after five documented truancies in grades 1-6, to Vermont's $1,000 parental fine for unresolved truancy cases, Stateline's Robbie Sequeira reported July 13. Oregon now requires every district to publish attendance data. Mississippi will fund one attendance officer for every 4,000 students. FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank, counted more than 70 chronic absenteeism bills filed across 24 states this legislative session. Of the 44 states and Washington, D.C. that have released 2024-25 attendance data, most improved, but Colorado, Oklahoma, Mississippi, New Mexico, and D.C. got worse. No state has returned to pre-pandemic attendance levels.
The national chronic absenteeism rate fell from roughly 31% in 2021-22 to 28% in 2022-23, real progress that still leaves more than a quarter of students missing 18 or more days a year. The new laws mostly attack the symptom, tracking absences and penalizing families, rather than the reasons students stop showing up. If your building's chronic absenteeism rate hasn't moved, a new state law requiring you to report the number more often won't move it either.