The many ways we've tried to identify gifted 4-year-olds, and how they've failed. When I was a kindergartner in the 1980s, the "gifted" programming for my class could be found inside of a chest. I don't know what toys and learning materials lived there, since I wasn't one of the handful of presumably more academically advanced kiddos that my kindergarten teacher invited to open the chest. My distinct impression at the time was that my teacher didn't think I was worthy of the enrichment because I frequently spilled my chocolate milk at lunch and I had also once forgotten to hang a sheet of paper on the class easel--instead painting an elaborate and detailed picture on the stand itself. The withering look on my teacher's face after seeing the easel assured me that gifted I was not.

Large Language Models (LLMs) currently struggle to sequentially add new memories and integrate new knowledge. These limitations contrast with the human ability to continuously learn from new experiences and acquire knowledge throughout life. Most existing approaches add memories either through large context windows or external memory buffers (e.g., Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and studies on knowledge injection rarely test scenarios resembling everyday life events. In this work, we introduce a continual learning framework, Memory Embedded in Gated LLMs (MEGa), which injects event memories directly into the weights of LLMs. Each memory is stored in a dedicated set of gated low-rank weights. During inference, a gating mechanism activates relevant memory weights by matching query embeddings to stored memory embeddings. This enables the model to both recall entire memories and answer related questions. On two datasets - fictional characters and Wikipedia events - MEGa outperforms baseline approaches in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our model draws inspiration from the complementary memory system of the human brain.

Diverse schools can help address implicit biases and increase empathy, mutual respect, and reflective thought by fostering connections between students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and other backgrounds. Unfortunately, demographic segregation remains rampant in US public schools, despite over 70 years since the passing of federal legislation formally outlawing segregation by race. However, changing how students are assigned to schools can help foster more integrated learning environments. In this paper, we explore "school mergers" as one such under-explored, yet promising, student assignment policy change. School mergers involve merging the school attendance boundaries, or catchment areas, of schools and subsequently changing the grades each school offers. We develop an algorithm to simulate elementary school mergers across 200 large school districts serving 4.5 million elementary school students and find that pairing or tripling schools in this way could reduce racial/ethnic segregation by a median relative 20% -- and as much as nearly 60% in some districts -- while increasing driving times to schools by an average of a few minutes each way. Districts with many interfaces between racially/ethnically-disparate neighborhoods tend to be prime candidates for mergers. We also compare the expected results of school mergers to other typical integration policies, like redistricting, and find that different policies may be more or less suitable in different places. Finally, we make our results available through a public dashboard for policymakers and community members to explore further (https://mergers.schooldiversity.org). Together, our study offers new findings and tools to support integration policy-making across US public school districts.

Signal Processing (SP) and Machine Learning (ML) rely on good math and coding knowledge, in particular, linear algebra, probability, and complex numbers. A good grasp of these relies on scalar algebra learned in middle school. The ability to understand and use scalar algebra well, in turn, relies on a good foundation in basic arithmetic. Because of various systemic barriers, many students are not able to build a strong foundation in arithmetic in elementary school. This leads them to struggle with algebra and everything after that. Since math learning is cumulative, the gap between those without a strong early foundation and everyone else keeps increasing over the school years and becomes difficult to fill in college. In this article we discuss how SP faculty and graduate students can play an important role in starting, and participating in, university-run (or other) out-of-school math support programs to supplement students' learning. Two example programs run by the authors (CyMath at ISU and Ab7G at Purdue) are briefly described. The second goal of this article is to use our perspective as SP, and engineering, educators who have seen the long-term impact of elementary school math teaching policies, to provide some simple almost zero cost suggestions that elementary schools could adopt to improve math learning: (i) more math practice in school, (ii) send small amounts of homework (individual work is critical in math), and (iii) parent awareness (math resources, need for early math foundation, clear in-school test information and sharing of feedback from the tests). In summary, good early math support (in school and through out-of-school programs) can help make SP and ML more accessible.

At a Fresno County elementary school, a masked man with a fake gun carried out an active-shooter drill without most of the teachers and parents being informed ahead of time. At San Marino High School, police officers planned to fire blanks to mimic the sound of gunfire, but the drill was ultimately canceled over concerns of traumatizing students. More recently, a principal at a San Gabriel elementary school was placed on a leave of absence after allegedly using her fingers to mime holding a gun and pretending to shoot kids, telling them, "Boom. The rise in active-shooter drills at American schools has coincided with the growing phenomenon of mass shootings in the U.S., as well as media coverage focused on school massacres including Columbine, Sandy Hook and Uvalde. These drills have taken place at 95% of U.S. public schools as of the 2015-16 school year, according to the Education Department's National Center for Education statistics.

It was a weekday afternoon in the spring when my son's kindergarten teacher got in touch about the ghost teen. During a social-studies unit about families, the teacher reported, my son had regaled his classmates with tales of his eighteen-year-old brother, who picks him up every afternoon at dismissal. I laughed out loud when I received this note, which was sent via ClassDojo, the messaging app used by our public elementary school in Brooklyn. My son has no brother of any age, and yet I could picture this brother immediately--I imagined him, for some reason, as one of the seniors from "Dazed and Confused," leaning against his scuzzy, old Pontiac parked just outside the school gate, a Marlboro Red hanging from his lips, Foghat wafting from the tape deck. But the teacher did not seem amused.

Most US school districts draw "attendance boundaries" to define catchment areas that assign students to schools near their homes, often recapitulating neighborhood demographic segregation in schools. Focusing on elementary schools, we ask: how much might we reduce school segregation by redrawing attendance boundaries? Combining parent preference data with methods from combinatorial optimization, we simulate alternative boundaries for 98 US school districts serving over 3 million elementary-aged students, minimizing White/non-White segregation while mitigating changes to travel times and school sizes. Across districts, we observe a median 14% relative decrease in segregation, which we estimate would require approximately 20\% of students to switch schools and, surprisingly, a slight reduction in travel times. We release a public dashboard depicting these alternative boundaries (https://www.schooldiversity.org/) and invite both school boards and their constituents to evaluate their viability. Our results show the possibility of greater integration without significant disruptions for families.

After the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, an all-too-familiar question emerged: how do we prevent such horror from happening again? A handful of companies have said they have tech solutions that could help. They included Drone firm Axon, which promoted a remotely-operated Taser device to be deployed in schools. EdTech companies, including Impero Software, said their student surveillance services could flag warning signs and help prevent the next attack. The companies are part of a thriving school security industry, one that has grown to $3.1bn in 2021 from just $2.7m in 2017, according to market research firm Omdia.

Only a few months ago, there was a brief window of time when many New Yorkers, among others, watched as the numbers of the vaccinated climbed and dared to hope that the year-long pandemic was finally coming to an end. Vacations were booked, weddings were scheduled, and parents began looking forward to getting their children out of the living room and back to attending school in person. But, as Barry Blitt captures in his new cover, the pandemic has not gone away, and, for students and their parents, the usual anxieties around returning to the classroom have been compounded by an increasing incidence of coronavirus infections in children, many of whom are too young to be vaccinated, and other related uncertainties. We recently spoke to Blitt about back-to-school blues and presenting his work at elementary schools. Were you a good student?

On his first day as Los Angeles schools superintendent, Austin Beutner visited 11 campuses in 12 hours, boarding a school bus before dawn and later slinging aside his suit jacket to take afternoon batting practice. In his last weeks, he hopscotched around the reopened district, talking up summer school in South L.A. and showcasing robotics at Roosevelt High on the Eastside. A former Wall Street executive with no experience in education management, Beutner wanted to see schools and be seen at schools; those visits, he said, energized him. Yet his tenure would be defined by events outside the classroom, in ways no one imagined when he was appointed chief of the nation's second-largest school district in 2018. At the time, he was seen as a controversial choice who, for better or worse, was going to shake things up. Instead, the coronavirus pandemic threw the district into unprecedented turmoil.