• Study: Giving Kids Access to AI Tutors Doesn’t Mean They’ll Use Them

    | The 74

    Ed tech companies routinely pitch AI tutoring platforms as a way to deliver personalized instruction at a scale that no human teacher can match. But when researchers from Stanford University looked at how much students actually used one major AI platform, something startling happened: Students didn’t use it that much at all. 

    In the study, published Wednesday, two unnamed school districts carved out dedicated time for hundreds of elementary school students to work with a well-known AI reading tutor, either during class time or after school. Researchers followed about 350 students across two randomized controlled trials. All of the students were expected to log on for at least two 30-minute sessions a week.

  • Research on AI tutoring ran into a problem: Most students wouldn’t use it

    | Chalkbeat

    A group of Stanford University researchers started with one question: Could a human tutor providing motivation and support get students to spend more time working with an AI literacy tutor?

    The answer turned out be yes — but only between one and four minutes more per week. Many students never logged on at all.

    That left the researchers with a different set of questions.

    “A key finding that we weren’t even meaning to test is that having access to this AI tutor isn’t the same as using it,” said Carly Robinson, the lead author on the study released Wednesday and the director of research for the SCALE Initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

  • Susanna Loeb Appointed the Inaugural Kissick Family Professor

    | Stanford Graduate School of Education

    Susanna Loeb has been appointed the inaugural Kissick Family Professor. 

    Loeb is the faculty director of the SCALE Initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which aims to develop and disseminate evidence-driven learning solutions, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Her research focuses on education policy and its role in improving educational opportunities for students, addressing issues including educator career choices and professional development, school finance and governance, and early childhood systems. She leads the Getting Down to Facts initiatives, which provide nonpartisan research and analysis to inform education policymaking in California.

  • AI is in nearly every classroom

    | Fast Company

    Yet the evidence base remains remarkably thin. A recent Stanford Accelerator for Learning review of more than 800 studies on AI in K-12 found only 20 high-quality causal studies examining learning outcomes. And the studies that do exist point to a complicated picture: Students frequently produce stronger work while using AI, but those gains often disappear—and sometimes reverse—when AI access is removed, as the OECD’s 2026 Digital Education Outlook recently found.

  • The Engine Driving High-Quality Tutoring

    | FutureEd

    What is the most important variable in high-impact tutoring?

    The humans in the school building.

    Not the platform. Not the model. Not the contract.

    The human who makes sure a student gets to their session. The human who notices when the student isn’t progressing and asks why. The human who, on a Wednesday morning when everything else is pulling at them, still notices the quiet grimace of a student who doesn’t understand, and offers another way in.

    Dosage, the amount of high-quality tutoring students receive, doesn’t just happen. Dosage is the outcome of a hundred small human decisions every single week.

  • America’s First A.I. High School Is Great. But Not Because of A.I.

    | New York Times

    There are few high-quality studies on the impact of artificial intelligence on K-12 students and teachers, and the results of the studies that exist are mixed. Stanford’s A.I. Hub for Education recently published a review of over 800 academic papers and found that “A.I. tools may help students complete tasks more successfully in the moment, but those gains do not always persist when students are later asked to perform independently.”

  • NEPC Talks Education: An Interview With Susanna Loeb About the Stanford SCALE Initiative Project

    | NEPC Talks Education

  • Getting down to facts: Education policy at scale

    | Stanford Graduate School of Education

     

    For Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) Professor Susanna Loeb, the work of bringing an incoming governor up to speed on the state’s education system begins with a listening tour.

    “There are a billion different things you could look at in education,” Loeb told School’s In co-hosts GSE Senior Lecturer Denise Pope and GSE Dean Dan Schwartz. “We started by talking to a whole range of policymakers, advocacy groups, families to get a sense of where the interest was. From there, I put together a research agenda to answer some of those questions.”

  • Getting Down to Facts III 2026 Conference

    | Getting Down to Facts III

  • California’s public schools need better oversight and guidance from the state

    | CalMatters

    Finally, 13 years after the Local Control Funding Formula came into being, its shortcomings in accountability have been recognized in a massive study of California’s public school system, titled Getting Down to Facts, issued this month by Stanford University.

    It explored many aspects of the system other than Brown’s handiwork, but it leaves no doubt that subsidiarity hasn’t worked well.

    “California has many accountability tools and data systems, but they are not well connected to one another or to clear guidance and support” for schools and educators, Susanna Loeb, director of the study, says in her summary.