This story about intelligence testing in schools was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Even before her son started kindergarten, Ashley Meier Barlow realized that she might have to fight for his education. Her son has Down syndrome; when he was in prekindergarten, school officials in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, told Barlow that he wouldn't be going to the neighborhood school, with some special education accommodations, as she had assumed. Instead, the educators told Barlow that they wanted her son to attend a classroom across town meant for children who are profoundly impacted by their disabilities. Barlow immediately resisted because she knew the curriculum would likely focus on life skills, and her son might never be taught much reading beyond learning the shape of common, functional words like stop and exit.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A hot air balloon pilot died this week after he became trapped underneath the balloon's basket and fell to his death, the Vermont State Police said. Longtime pilot Brian Boland, 72, had left Post Mills Airport in Vermont with four passengers when the balloon started to descend rapidly and touched down in a field. The basket tipped and one of the passengers fell out but wasn't hurt, police said.

Self-driving car services could be on the streets of London within three years under a partnership between the private hire firm Addison Lee and the British driverless car pioneers Oxbotica. The companies have signed a deal to develop and deploy autonomous vehicles in the city by 2021. Oxbotica will start mapping more than 250,000 miles of public roads in and around London from next month, using its technology to create a comprehensive map of every traffic feature. While the link-up could eventually allow Addison Lee's fleet of black Mercedes and Prius cabs to be driven autonomously, the 5,000 drivers in London will remain employed, the firm says. However, it could also offer a cheaper, autonomous ride-sharing version of its hire service.

Would you trust a taxi with no driver? Taxi firm Addison Lee is betting its customers will be ready to, in London at least, in just three years' time. It has joined forces with self-driving software specialist Oxbotica, and says the tie-up means it will offer self-driving taxis in the capital by 2021. The move will pit it against rival ride-hailing app Uber, which is also planning to roll out driverless cars on its network in the future, pending regulatory permission. Addison Lee says it will now work with Oxbotica on digitally mapping public roads in and around the capital.

This week we speak to Stan Boland, founder and chief executive of UK driverless car company Five AI. As firms around the world race to develop self-driving cars, Stan Boland is betting that British brain power can beat American and Chinese cash. A veteran technology entrepreneur, the 58-year-old launched Five AI in 2016. Since then it has been moving as quickly as possible to design a driverless car that - the hope is - will at some point in the future gain regulatory approval to take to the roads without someone being behind the wheel as a human failsafe. The problem is that, compared with US giants Google, Uber and Tesla, Five AI is a tiny start-up company with only a fraction of the funding that its rivals' driverless car projects are receiving.

An driverless car firm based in Cambridge has raised £14 million ($16.4 million) in funding - Europe's largest investment in an autonomous car start-up. It hopes to develop a driverless car system tailor-made for the continent's ancient network of roads. Starting in London in 2019, the company believes it can compete with rival Silicon Valley firms, whose sights are more firmly set on the modern roads of the US. An AI firm based in Cambridge has raised £14 million ($16.4 million). It hopes to develop a driverless car system tailor-made for the continent's ancient network of roads.

From forecourt to scrapyard, a new car in the UK lasts an average of 13.9 years, which is why if you got one today, it might very well be the last car you buy. Over the next decade, accelerating autonomous driving technology, including advances in artificial intelligence, sensors, cameras, radar and data analytics, are set to transform not only how we drive (or, indeed, are driven), but the notion of car ownership itself. "Autonomous driving has become the next major battlefield for the car industry," says Luca Mentuccia, automotive global MD at Accenture. The six levels of automation, defined under international standards by the Society of Automotive Engineers, range from "no automation" to "full automation", explains Sven Raeymaekers, of tech investment banker GP Bullhound. "If you look at the most recent predictions, the majority of car manufacturers estimate the first highly to fully automated vehicles [AVs] will hit the market between 2020-2025," he says.

One of the UK's most congested highways, connecting the busy container port at Felixstowe to Birmingham, is to become Britain's first internet-connected road in a pilot project that could pave the way for everything from tolls to self-driving cars. A network of sensors will be placed along a 50-mile stretch of the A14 in a collaboration between BT, the Department for Transport and the Cambridge start-up Neul, creating a smart road which can monitor traffic by sending signals to and from mobile phones in moving vehicles. The technology, which sends signals over the white spaces between television channels instead of mobile phone networks, could even pave the way for government systems to automatically control car speeds. The telecoms watchdog Ofcom, which on Wednesday approved the project as part of its new blueprint for how Britain will use spectrum, is already forecasting what high technology traffic systems will look like. "Sensors in cars and on the roads monitor the build-up of congestions and wirelessly send this information to a central traffic control system, which automatically imposes variable speed limits that smooth the flow of traffic," Ofcom said.

From forecourt to scrapyard, a new car in the UK lasts an average of 13.9 years, which is why if you got one today, it might very well be the last car you buy. Over the next decade, accelerating autonomous driving technology, including advances in artificial intelligence, sensors, cameras, radar and data analytics, are set to transform not only how we drive (or, indeed, are driven), but the notion of car ownership itself. "Autonomous driving has become the next major battlefield for the car industry," says Luca Mentuccia, automotive global MD at Accenture. The six levels of automation, defined under international standards by the Society of Automotive Engineers, range from "no automation" to "full automation", explains Sven Raeymaekers, of tech investment banker GP Bullhound. "If you look at the most recent predictions, the majority of car manufacturers estimate the first highly to fully automated vehicles [AVs] will hit the market between 2020-2025," he says.

One of the latest trends in the world of commercial vehicle design and engineering is'machine learning', a term that's used across the wider automotive world and is rapidly transforming the way in which certain vehicle systems are engineered and built. Vehicle manufacturers are keen to get hold of people with machine learning experience and bring them on board for the betterment of future products. It's also being touted as fundamental to the development of driverless vehicles. But what is machine learning? Essentially, it's a type of computerised artificial intelligence (AI) that allows the interpretation of large amounts of data, on a scale far in advance of anything humans could do.