Yurts founder and CEO Ben Van Roo breaks down concerns over DeepSeek on'The Will Cain Show.' Artificial intelligence may be the new frontier for childhood schooling, but the idea of teacherless classrooms has received mixed reviews from state education officials. Unbound Academy, a Texas-based institution billing itself as the nation's first virtual, tuition-free charter school for grades 4 through 8, reportedly employs AI to teach students in a way that can be geared toward the individual student without "frustration[s]" sometimes present in traditional schooling. While such schools have seen success in being approved to educate students in Arizona, Unbound was formally rejected by the Pennsylvania Department of Education in a letter obtained by Fox News Digital. In a letter to an Unbound Academy official with a Lancaster office address, Secretary Angela Fitterer said her office has found "deficiencies" in all five criteria needed for approval to teach Keystone State students. Pennsylvania's Charter School law denotes a school must demonstrate sustainable support for the cyber charter school plan from teachers, parents and students.

An Austin-based national charter school network offers K-12 students an AI-guided education. Operating under a model called "2 Hour Learning," a company of the same name advertises accelerated pace, app-based classes designed to teach students at "2X" the speed of a traditional classroom, whatever that means. Parents are promised that the system works for 80-90 percent of children, and that students consistently rank in the NWEA's 90th percentile. Apart from generating top-ranking national standardized test takers, however, one of 2 Hour Learning's other explicit goals is the removal of teachers from classrooms. "Imagine starting a school and declaring, 'We won't have any academic teachers.' We did exactly that!" reads a portion of the company's white paper.

Welcome to Essential Education, our daily look at education in California and beyond. L.A. Unified school board member Ref Rodriguez pled not guilty to campaign finance money laundering charges Tuesday. Rodriguez's pro-charter school allies on the board asked him to step down, but he said no. L.A. Unified school board member Ref Rodriguez pled not guilty to campaign finance money laundering charges Tuesday. Rodriguez's pro-charter school allies on the board asked him to step down, but he said no. Rodriguez won't budge, Michelle King's long leave, Caltech's new drone lab: What's new in education Ref Rodriguez's allies on the L.A. school board asked him to step down. He said no, shortly after pleading not guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges.

The advocates of machine learning are known to be a fiercely contentious lot, each asserting that its own approach is superior to all others, and that any evidence adduced to the contrary is propaganda, fake news of the worst sort, stemming from jealous advocates of inferior approaches. The closest approximation to the internecine warfare of the machine learning field is the human learning field, in which advocates of public, government-run and union-staffed schools exchange harsh words with advocates of charter schools, with a level of invective and passion that indicates that someone is strongly in favor of hopelessly uneducated machines and/or humans.