• 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.

  • Landmark research dissects California’s public education system

    | EdSource

    Called “Getting Down to Facts,” the research project comes at what Stanford education professor and project director Susanna Loeb calls “an inflection point” for California education.  In a 40-page summary of 55 technical reports and 22 research briefs, Loeb writes that the findings arrive amid major shifts:  the election of a new governor and state superintendent of instruction, the retreat of the federal government’s oversight and education-funding responsibilities, and the emergence of new technologies and their impact on the classroom and the workplace. Together, she said, these changes require the schools to respond to new conditions.  

    Getting Down to Facts is “designed to help Californians understand the condition of the state’s education system and the policy choices needed to improve it.

  • Toward a Stronger Next Generation of California Education

    | Getting Down to Facts III

    California is at an inflection point in education. Over the past two decades, the state has built stronger foundations through more equitable school funding, stronger standards and assessments, expanded early childhood education, improved data systems, and investments in community schools, early literacy, and the educator workforce. Yet California now faces a different question: whether those stronger foundations can support a public education system prepared for a very different future. Work is changing quickly, student engagement and well-being remain fragile after the pandemic, and federal commitments to civil rights, student welfare, and accountability have become less certain. California’s role has become more consequential as states carry greater responsibility for protecting educational opportunity and advancing equity. California’s central challenge is whether it can connect its ambitions, policies, supports, and institutions into a system that delivers strong learning opportunities consistently for students across the state.
  • Some students get tutoring but end up as ‘intervention lifers.’ This common sense tactic could help

    | Chalkbeat

    Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator’s review of tutoring research notes that alignment seems like it would be good practice but doesn’t have a strong research base. Jackson, research manager at the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, said she wanted to address that gap with a randomized controlled trial.