Compton Unified and LAUSD schools are among the high flyers for progress in latest state test scores, but pandemic setbacks linger statewide. Gov. Gavin Newsom signs literacy bill to implement science of reading.

Community engagement processes in representative political contexts, like school districts, generate massive volumes of feedback that overwhelm traditional synthesis methods, creating barriers to shared understanding not only between civic leaders and constituents but also among community members. To address these barriers, we developed StoryBuilder, a human-AI collaborative pipeline that transforms community input into accessible first-person narratives. Using 2,480 community responses from an ongoing school rezoning process, we generated 124 composite stories and deployed them through a mobile-friendly StorySharer interface. Our mixed-methods evaluation combined a four-month field deployment, user studies with 21 community members, and a controlled experiment examining how narrative composition affects participant reactions. Field results demonstrate that narratives helped community members relate across diverse perspectives. In the experiment, experience-grounded narratives generated greater respect and trust than opinion-heavy narratives. We contribute a human-AI narrative synthesis system and insights on its varied acceptance and effectiveness in a real-world civic context.

Rising seniors are the last class of students who remember high school before ChatGPT. But only just barely: OpenAI's chatbot was released months into their freshman year. Ever since then, writing essays hasn't required, well, writing. By the time these students graduate next spring, they will have completed almost four full years of AI high school. Gone already are the days when using AI to write an essay meant copying and pasting its response verbatim.

Two high school graduates who say they can't read or write are suing their respective public school systems, arguing they were not given the free public education to which they are entitled. Cornell Law School Professor William A. Jacobson, director of the Securities Law Clinic, told Fox News Digital the lawsuits signify a "much deeper problem" with the American public school system. "I think these cases reflect a deeper problem in education. For each of these cases, there are probably tens of thousands of students who never got a proper education -- they get pushed along the system," Jacobson said. "Unfortunately … we've created incentives, particularly for public school systems, to just push students along and not to hold them accountable."

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.

California lawmakers passed roughly 1,200 bills last year, including some that resulted in unforeseeable wins by Republicans, promising protections for consumers and small strides for those in the entertainment industry. In the end, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed about 84% of the bills he received. Many of those laws take effect today, Jan. 1, as California rings in a new year. Cannabis cafes are legal: You can now hang out at dispensaries like you would a restaurant or cafe, thanks to AB 1775. The new law brings an Amsterdam-style approach to marijuana use, by allowing cannabis retailers to make and sell food and nonalcoholic beverages at what will be known as cannabis cafes or lounges.

UPenn Wharton School Associate Professor Ethan Mollick weighs in on the Biden White House's new guidelines for artificial intelligence in the workplace on'Fox News Live.' The parents of a Massachusetts high school senior who used artificial intelligence (AI) for a social studies project have filed a lawsuit against his teachers and the school after their son received detention and a "D" grade. "He's been accused of cheating, and it wasn't cheating, there was no rule in the handbook against AI," Jennifer Harris, who along with her husband, Dale, are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in Massachusetts' Plymouth County District Court last month against the Hingham High School administration and the school district, told Boston 25 News. The lawsuit alleges that their son will "suffer irreparable harm that is imminent" over the grade that his parents say kept him out of the National Honor Society, which they claim is threatening his standing with top tier colleges. "So, our argument to the school was could you fail him with a 59 instead of a 53 so he can have a B minus? He's applying to top tier schools," Harris told the news station.

A viral video shows a high school principal engaging in a seemingly risqué dance with the school's mascot during the back-to-school rally. A high school principal in central California has been placed on administrative leave as an investigation is underway into a video showing him dancing in what some have called an inappropriate manner with the school's mascot during a back-to-school rally. The Merced Union High School District shared a statement with Fox News Digital that said Robert Nunes, principal of Buhach Colony High School in Atwater, was on administrative leave effective Aug. 19. The district said this action is in response to an incident at the back-to-school rally on Aug. 16. "The District is conducting a comprehensive review of the situation. While the investigation is ongoing, Mr. Nunes will not be participating in any school-related responsibilities or activities," Viviana Fuentes, director of communications for the school district, said in the statement.

Can AI be used ethically for school work? It depends upon who you ask -- quite literally. That's because less than two years after ChatGPT was originally released in November 2022, the attitudes towards AI in the classroom still vary widely. High schools have viewed AI as a crutch at best, and at worst as a tool for cheating. But several universities leave generative AI use entirely up to the discretion of the person teaching the course.

Alberto Carvalho, who remains determined to bring artificial intelligence into district classrooms despite the collapse of the technology company leading the effort, will appoint a task force to examine what went wrong and how to move forward. The schools chief announced the task force in an interview with The Times in advance of Tuesday's annual address to administrators, which is akin to a state-of-the-schools speech. In his public address, Carvalho is expected to highlight academic progress and L.A. Unified School District initiatives. In a recent appearance, he said he was hopeful that standardized test scores would rise at all grade levels in math and English. Although school districts throughout the state have received results -- and can make them public if they wish -- the state has not yet released local or statewide scores.