A surprising age gap has emerged: 9-year-olds' test scores are growing in math and reading, while 13-year-olds are stagnating. Their reading scores are basically at the same level now that they were in 1971 when the NAEP Long-Term Test started.

AP added the name of journalist Mariam Dagga to its wall of honor last month. My son had just been born when she was killed in an Israeli airstrike of a Gaza hospital. It was so painful for me to think about the son that Mariam left behind. Keep her memory alive.

An ironic correction to an article about the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Burger King is "piloting an AI assistant, called “Patty,” that lives inside employees’ headsets" and "listens to employees to evaluate them for friendliness. That means tracking whether they say “welcome to Burger King,” “please,” and “thank you.”"

fuckin crazy story. some Ukrainian kid probably saved his whole family from being killed by a Russian drone murder squad by spotting and cutting the fiber optic connection www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...

600+ people in a PA school district have signed a petition supporting parents' rights to opt their children out of school devices. They're not anti-tech -- they just don't want tech to dominate. “Teaching how to use technology is not the same thing as using technology to teach everything else."

NEW: America's literacy crisis is growing. Only five states, plus D.C., have made any meaningful improvement in reading scores since 2022. What those states all had in common: science of reading reforms. But it's not a silver bullet.

Really like how they built "Size of Canada / Size of Alaska" into the y-axis!

Disappointing to see people on this website unaware of the greatest piece of investigative journalism of our generation.

If anyone happens to know someone who won 4th place in an Olympic event and/or has been divorced more than three times -- hit me up.

The federal government has always been incredibly slow to update education data but now we'll likely be waiting even longer. All this data is still out there but siloed across states and districts, making it a laborious task to collect and harmonize.

Fellow data journos! Does anyone know an example of a newsroom AI guidance/ethics document specifically made for data journalism teams? I have found plenty of examples for newsrooms as a whole, but not data journalism-specific.

Black students were told they have a "powerful" "personal story," Hispanic students were told to use "proper" English and girls were told "I love your confidence!" -- fascinating writeup by @jillbarshay.bsky.social about how AI grades student essays hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

1/3 “News doesn’t reveal itself from a distance. It has to be witnessed.” AP Executive Editor Julie Pace affirmed the importance of “eyewitness journalism,” while AP is offering buyouts to more than 120 U.S. guild covered employees across multiple formats. How can AP be on the ground without us?

1/8

School districts across the Twin Cities area saw absenteeism spike during the ICE crackdown. In St. Paul, over 9,000 students were absent in mid-January; Minneapolis had over 8,000 students stay home in one day; Fridley saw attendance drop by nearly a third.

When you see Drs. Abbot, Shen or Ellis show up on the Pitt

Do yourself a favor today and check out the STUNNING photos and videos in this AP story on Indonesia's coral reefs: apnews.com/article/clim...

"The failures are the curriculum. The error messages are the syllabus. Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head that will eventually let you do original work. There is no shortcut through that process that doesn't leave you diminished..."

This is so, so well-articulated.

Genuinely one of the best parts of my job is that I get to wander around the Terminal. For instance I was testing out the mapping function and in the process learned that the Waffle House location with the highest revenue in the country is the one near Arizona State's campus

I went looking for one Japanese chart book and ended up with 19 prewar volumes, a new collecting method, and a stronger conviction that graphic history is far from fully known. www.chartography.net/p/ascending-...

New— The backlash to ed-tech is growing, with some prominent voices making the case that it's at the root of recent learning declines. I took a look at the evidence. www.chalkbeat.org/2026/03/17/j...

🚨New working paper alert! 🚨 The US spends huge $ on special education services for students with disabilities. Is that spending effective? Today we released a working paper suggesting it is. "Special Education Substantially Improves Learning: Evidence from Three States" Let me explain...

I was using ChatGPT to help write some code, but when I pointed out an error, it bugged out and starting writing to me in Japanese. That’s what you call…the Ghost in the Shell.

Now THAT's a headline. "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents" fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

US Government Deploys Elon Musk’s Grok as Nutrition Bot, Where It Immediately Gives Advice for Rectal Use of Vegetables ok, that's enough 2026 for today futurism.com/artificial-i...

VERSION 2.0 of the Segregation Tracking Project is here! New data on racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and schools over the last 30+ years for every school district, metro area, state, county, congressional district (new!), and more! edopportunity.org/segregation/

If you feed a mess of notes into a machine, and you don't know what you want to say, you will produce confused garbage. If you know what you want to say, craft your notes in an organized fashion so that the machine produces a coherent article...that's writing. You've only saved yourself some typing.

Wingspan, but make it data viz!

new most bizarre moment of the Olympics just dropped Norwegian biathlete wins bronze medal, then, totally unprompted, reveal he cheated on his GF, she left him, and he wants to apologize publicly hoping she takes him back www.vg.no/sport/i/vr5g...

"More than half of all multilingual students in South Portland, and nearly half in Portland, were absent on some of the most affected days. Between Jan. 20 and 28, Black and Hispanic students in Portland missed school at a rate 30 percentage points higher than their white peers."

It is really worth your time to stop what you're doing and read this INCREDIBLY reporting from Minneapolis by my talented colleague Bianca.

Look at this: @inquirer.com has digitally preserved the interpretative signage removed by NPS, and used annotations to explain what specifically was flagged before removal. This keeps the content publicly accessible (for now) while doing newsworthy reporting www.inquirer.com/news/philade...

I talked to the principal at my kids' middle school yesterday, and he said about 30% of kids have not been showing up. Hard to fathom the academic and mental health impact this is having on kids, parents and teachers.

This is such a cool illustration of how the Mercator map distorts the size of Greenland, which looks as big as the whole continent of Africa on that map but is actually the size of Mexico.

"A Minneapolis couple said that ICE agents deployed tear gas... around them and their six children — the youngest only 6 months old — as they tried to maneuver their car out of a tense protest on Wednesday night." They were driving home from a son’s basketball game. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Sure. AI companies have ALWAYS been training their models on Wikipedia content, which under the free and open access model is available to anyone — including AI companies. Agreements like these require AI companies to limit and offset the strain they place on Wikimedia infrastructure.

"The emu was returned to its owners unharmed. No charges were filed."

Happening Now: Students have walked out of school and are protesting against ICE in Saint Paul, Minnesota

I'm back into journalism after four months of maternity leave! What did I miss?

A very sobering and important post. Even though sometimes AI can be very helpful for translating complex medical information into plain English, seeing my own family members rely on the AI summary from Google for health information makes me worried.

Personalized software *prevents* you from resonating with community; it blinds you to the many interpretations of media; it lets you stew in bad ideas and never encounter challenges. Community commuting requires you to encounter & parse & build with others, and sometimes compromise. That's good!

Former BLS commissioner Bill Beach says the agency has lost 25% of its staff since January. 40% of leadership positions are vacant. And DOL leadership “does not seem to support the Bureau.” #ASSA2026 #EconSky

Other than the clear top-of-alphabet favoritism in this list (9 out of 20 have names that start between A and C? Typical biased media) this is a great list. Subscribe to The Onion, too, obviously, but this is a very good way to spend your money on good people.

A 6-year-old boy is missing after ICE arrested him and his dad in NYC last week and shipped them off to separate facilities. www.thecity.nyc/2025/12/02/i... @thecity.nyc @gwynnefitz.bsky.social

not sure if this means that LLMs prove that "evil is real", so much that it proves that LLMs can understand what bad behavior is in the cultural context in which they were trained, even without being explicitly told

Logging into Bluesky after Shabbat, what did I miss folks?

The opposite of the Moms for Liberty wave should get more attention

this is what scientific progress is all about www.404media.co/breathing-th...