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Children & education
AI in schools, chatbots and minors, companion-app harms and edtech ethics — tracked daily.
Lawsuit: Man used Grok to make 7K sex images of stepdaughter, then shot himself
More young girls sue X over Grok CSAM; X accused of shielding child predators.
Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens
We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens.
Hoosier Childcare Providers Slam Education Requirement Rollback
About two-dozen Hoosier childcare providers and advocates overwhelmingly opposed looser statewide staff educational requirements during a Monday public hearing. “This is a profession. This is not just a babysitting job,” said Hanna Wetzel, the director of the Children’s Learning Center of Posey County. She spoke to representatives of the Family and Social Services Administration, the […]
A Fresh Look at the Houthi Threat to Maritime Shipping
In 2024, Allison Minor wrote, “Solving the Houthi Threat to Freedom of Navigation,” where she argued the international response to Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea has so far been inadequate and proposed a U.N.-led solution. Two years later, with global attention once again focused on maritime shipping activity, we asked Allison to review her arguments. Image: Petty Officer 1st Class Jonathan Word via DVIDSWhen you wrote about the Houthi threat in 2024, the activities in the Red Sea com
Vikas Kumar
Vikas Kumar is Professor of International Business at the University of Sydney Business School. His research focuses on international business, India, emerging markets, AI, geopolitics and capability ...
(De)Valuing Citizenship
Last Tuesday, the US Supreme Court released its final merits opinion of its October 2025 term. In Trump v Barbara, a razor thin 5-4 majority deemed the President’s attempt to deny American citizenship to children born on U.S soil to immigrant parents who are undocumented or present on certain visas unconstitutional. The decision is a rare and important win for immigrants and American constitutional democracy. But Barbara should not be remembered as an example of principled judicial resistance ag
Appeals Court Says Religious Schools Can’t be Exempt From Maine’s Nondiscrimination Laws
Religious schools accepting public funds are required to follow Maine laws that protect against discrimination based on faith, gender identity and sexual orientation, a federal court has ruled. Crosspoint Church, which runs Bangor Christian Schools, and St. Dominic Academy in Auburn filed separate appeals in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit […]
NC High School Students Pitch Local Tech Companies at Annual Teamship Showcase
Local technology companies may have solved some of their biggest problems after hearing from North Carolina high school students during the annual Teamship Showcase in Durham on June 25. Teamship is an internship experience through the College Board where students are paired in groups to solve real-world problems for the businesses they are assigned to. […]
Opinion: The Final Piece of the Ed-Tech Backlash Has Finally Arrived
I have been a high school teacher for almost three decades, spending almost all that time teaching seniors about American civics. My teaching tenure has overlapped with the rise of the very trends now engulfing our educational system: I have watched my students embrace smartphones, social media, online learning and now artificial intelligence. But recently […]
Priority Open Recommendations: Department of Education
What GAO Found In May 2025, GAO identified eight priority recommendations for the Department of Education. Since then, Education has implemented one of those recommendations. In June 2026, GAO identified an additional three priority recommendations, bringing the total to 10. GAO is highlighting the following three areas that warrant timely and focused attention: Improving the federal student aid system, Protecting sensitive information, and Managing financial risks associated with charter school
GenAI Success Metrics: Look Beyond Reduced Workload
Matt Harrison Clough / Ikon Images The Research The authors performed a four-year, fixed-window observational analysis of administrative work inside a large U.S. public higher-education institution. Generative AI tools were introduced to executive leaders, operational leaders, and student-facing professionals throughout the organization in 2026. Staffing levels and work hours remained stable across the period studied. […]
Zewelanji Nalwamba
Zewelanji is a final-year International Relations student at the University of Leicester, currently interning with the UK Nuclear Deterrence Network. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of ...
Helping K–12 educators build practical AI skills
OpenAI Academy and the Walton Family Foundation are bringing hands-on AI Skills Jams to help K–12 educators build practical AI skills for the classroom.
From San José to Geneva: Canvas of the Future winner unveiled
At the AI for Good Global Summit, the Canvas of the Future returned for the third year in a row. The competition invited creators, educators, technologists and artists from all disciplines to submit an original, high-resolution AI-powered or AI-enhanced digital image exploring how artificial intelligence is reshaping education and work. The post From San José to Geneva: Canvas of the Future winner unveiled appeared first on AI for Good .
PaSTO-GNN: prompt-aware spatio-temporal graph neural networks for automatic essay scoring
Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) aims to evaluate the quality of written essays automatically, providing fast, consistent, and objective assessments of students' writing ability. Existing deep learning approaches—including recurrent, convolutional, and transformer-based models—primarily focus on textual semantics, yet they often overlook the spatio-temporal nature of essay composition, where meaning evolves across sentences and paragraphs through discourse progression. To address this gap, this stu
How a Vinyl Record Resurgence Helped Me Understand the Future of AI in Education
Streaming solved the problem of access. Now, we must solve the problem of engagement.
Social Media Bans Alone Won’t Protect Kids, Chinese Report Finds
In recent years, countries around the world have rolled out policies to curb minors’ social media usage. A recent Chinese university report assesses their efficacy.
Cyberviolence against children
The Internet exposes children to a wealth of opportunities, but also risks that may have a detrimental impact on their human rights. Some of these risks include, but are not limited to: Given the ...
Tech Life
The impact screen time is having on younger children.
New coalition puts children’s rights at the centre of the AI age
A new international coalition launched in Geneva on Tuesday is setting out to make sure children's safety and rights are not an afterthought as artificial intelligence reshapes how they learn, play ...
From Coding Robots to Speed Networking on a UFO: Day One at AI for Good’s Summit
GENEVA, 7 July 2026 — The Youth Zone at the AI for Good Global Summit 2026 commences its program today with a robotics competition, a series of hands-on artificial intelligence seminars, and a policy discussion on the skills that classrooms should prioritise as AI becomes more ingrained in daily life. A continuum approach to AI literacy, rather than a single fixed curriculum, is reflected in the participation of children as young as six and young adults. The post From Coding Robots to Speed Netw
Europe Can Protect Children Online Without Surveillance or Age Bans
K–12 Education: How States and the U.S. Holocaust Museum Support Holocaust Education
What GAO Found To support Holocaust education in K–12 public schools, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum—the main federal provider of Holocaust education resources—provides professional development for teachers through its annual conference, fellowships, online videos, and webinars. The Museum offers educational materials, such as lesson plans and online lessons, based on its collection of artifacts. It also partners with state and local organizations and researches effective education strategie
Level Up with the Nonprofit Leadership Executive Certificate
The Nonprofit Leadership Certificate at Harvard Kennedy School will help you get to the next level as a leader in your organization. This certificate is designed for professionals working in nonprofit ...
D2PO: Optimizing Diffusion Samplers via Dynamic Preference
We propose D2PO (Dynamic Direct Preference Optimization), a principled framework for optimizing diffusion sampling policies with respect to timestep schedules and classifier-free guidance (CFG) weights. Our work is motivated by a fundamental limitation of existing student-teacher regression frameworks; low-NFE student samplers are trained to mimic high-NFEteachers, often sacrificing high-frequency texture fidelity while preserving coarse global structures, thereby misaligning the sampler with pe
TurnOPD: Making On-Policy Distillation Turn-Aware for Efficient Long-Horizon Agent Training
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student policy by matching a stronger teacher on the student's own trajectories, offering a promising framework for language agent training. However, its application to long-horizon agentic tasks remains insufficiently explored. We identify two key inefficiencies in vanilla agent OPD: (1) full-horizon rollouts often waste wall-clock resources on tail turns that provide weak and noisy KL supervision, and (2) trajectory-level KL objectives concentrate most of
‘Disturbing incident’: Police investigating after Lake Zurich High School students distribute AI-generated nude images of classmates
A police investigation is underway after students at Lake Zurich High School were reported to have used AI to generate sexually explicit images of female classmates, with school officials calling it "disturbing." Lake Zurich Community Unit ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1574#7494)
New Study Cites Growing “Crisis” of Healthcare Costs on School District Budgets
Will rising healthcare costs affect teacher hiring?
Toward a future that preserves benefits of neurotechnology for all
PhD student Rachel Sava, winner of the Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize, explores transformative improvements and dystopian risks of neural technology.
Press Release: The People Lab, focused on public sector research, joins the Taubman Center for State and Local Government
Today, The People Lab announced that it is joining the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, a research center at Harvard Kennedy School, focused on current and future public-sector leaders ...
Policies supporting responsible and systematic GenAI adoption in higher education
How to apply effective governance to harness the benefits of A.I. and mitigate its risks ...
Podcast: Is generative AI a gamechanger for education?
Standards and guidelines for development co-operation with concrete examples of their implementation ...
Should Have Known Is the Wrong Standard for Kids’ Safety Laws
Congress is closer than ever to rewriting the rules for young people online. Just last week, the House of Representatives passed the KIDS Act, which includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) 2.0. Most of the public debate has centered on what these […] The post Should Have Known Is the Wrong Standard for Kids’ Safety Laws appeared first on Center for Democracy and Technology .
Ethics journal retracts paper by high school student for AI, peer review manipulation
The Journal of Medical Ethics has retracted a paper on the use of AI in the pharmaceutical industry for containing references that don’t exist. The article’s sole author: a high school student. The paper, which argues biased algorithms can exacerbate inequities in health care, was published in September. The author, Irfan Biswas, listed his affiliation … Continue reading Ethics journal retracts paper by high school student for AI, peer review manipulation
These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled.
The post These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled. appeared first on ProPublica .
Covert Trait Propagation Is Representation Alignment: Mechanistic Evidence from Hidden-Channel Distillation
A student model trained on pure uniform noise can still inherit its teacher's digit-classification ability, provided the two share initialization. Previous work proves this transfer is guaranteed when the teacher's learning rate is small enough, but does not explain where in the network the channel lives or what sets its capacity. Working in an MLP distillation setting on MNIST, we show these channels are not purely informational: geometric alignment gates access to the information the channel c
Widening Participation in Archives and Records Management Summer School
Ever wondered who gets to shape the historical record? Curious about questions of power, truth, and accountability? Want to know what a career in archives, records management, or information ...
Child Language Symposium 2026
Oral Presentations: A 15-minute presentation followed by 5 minutes of discussion. Suitable for completed studies or well-developed work in progress. Poster Presentations: Posters will be displayed on ...
Metsola heads for clash with her own Parliament over child abuse bill
Parliament president and EU countries are playing procedural politics to pass a law to scan internet services for child abuse material.
Explainable AI for Screening Abuse-Related Trauma in Bangladeshi Children: A Training-Free Multimodal Framework Evaluated on Noise-Aware Synthetic Data
Bangladesh has an estimated 1.17 mental-health professionals per 100,000 population and only six child psychiatrists nationwide. No Bengali-language, culturally adapted tool exists for early screening of abuse-related psychological trauma in children. We present ShishuRaksha AI, a decision-support (not diagnostic) framework that fuses four screening modalities: validated questionnaires (SDQ, CPSS), Bengali narrative text, House-Tree-Person (HTP) drawing features, and facial affect. The fusion is