The Inside the Box Edition
Edition 41 | October 17, 2026
Our students are quitting computer science because they think the machine took the job. They have it exactly backwards.
Three thousand Connecticut children have quit computer science, and the reason they give is the one that should worry us most. State figures out this week show the third straight year of decline, tracking almost exactly to the month ChatGPT went public. Nationally, four-year colleges counted fifty-three thousand fewer computer science students this spring.
They are not dropping it because it is hard. They are dropping it because they have decided the machine already took that job, so why learn it. Which is backwards, and expensively so. The class they are walking away from is the one that teaches them to run the machine instead of being replaced by it.
The part I cannot stop thinking about is where the decline is steepest. It is not the struggling districts. Lower-funded districts in Connecticut barely moved. The drop is in the higher-funded, higher-income districts, three and a half points against two. The children with the most access, the most devices and the most college pressure are the ones quietly deciding this is not worth their time.
John Tusch, who leads the computer science teachers in that state, said the thing I want to hand to every teacher reading this: it is better to crawl inside the box and make it work than to have it decide how you are going to work. I teach fifth grade. I get these children years before a high school counselor does, and so do most of you. That sentence is the whole curriculum.
The rest of the week was adults arguing about who decides what technology a classroom gets. A California board, a Pennsylvania mandate, a Nebraska contract, a power flicker that took three days of lessons. Worth reading all of it. But the students decided something on their own this week, and nobody asked them. Ten stories.
Here is the record behind the numbers at the top of this issue. Connecticut State Department of Education figures reported Thursday show roughly three thousand fewer students in computer science courses than in 2022-23, a decline of about one and a half percentage points and the third consecutive annual decrease. Nationally, four-year colleges counted fifty-three thousand fewer computer science students in spring 2026.
Broken out, the pattern inverts what you would expect. Measured from 2023-24 to 2025-26, higher-funded districts fell 2.3 percentage points, about 550 students, while lower-funded districts showed virtually no change. By income the gap is wider still: higher-income districts down 3.5 points, lower-income districts down 2.2. John Tusch, president of the state's Computer Science Teachers Association, said the opportunities are drying up and that we are fumbling the ball.
Why it matters: The correction starts in elementary school, and it is a sentence, not a unit. When you teach a prompt, say out loud that somebody built the thing you are prompting. When you teach a spreadsheet formula, say that this is the same skill. When a parent asks whether coding is still worth it, tell them the children who do well will be the ones who know what is inside the box, not the ones who only know how to ask it for things. And if your school counsels eighth graders into high school courses, ask who is telling them computer science is a dead end. Somebody is, and the enrollment numbers say the children are listening.
Source: Government Technology
Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation and the Mattering Institute surveyed 1,952 K-12 educators between July 28 and August 14 and published the results on Wednesday. Fifty-nine percent said they used AI tools for work during the 2025-26 school year. Of those who did, sixty-four percent said it freed up time for the parts of teaching that matter most, thirteen percent saying a lot more time and fifty-one percent somewhat more. Twenty-nine percent said it made no difference, and seven percent said it cost them time. The uses they named were preparing lessons, building materials and assessments, grading, giving feedback, and paperwork.
Two other findings belong beside that one. Only thirty-five percent of educators said they feel they matter a great deal at their school, while eighty-five percent said helping a student through something difficult is what makes them feel valued. And back in May, the same partnership found that just eighteen percent of teachers had received any formal guidance on how to use AI in their work, with more than sixty percent saying they had none at all for things like spotting patterns in student learning or one-to-one tutoring.
Why it matters: Two thirds of the teachers who tried it got time back, and that is the honest headline. What makes teachers feel valued is helping a child through something hard, and what AI gave back is the hour that was going to paperwork. That is the right trade, and it is the argument to make to a reluctant colleague. Nobody is asking you to let a machine teach. They are asking whether you want your Sunday back. The harder number is the eighteen percent. Most of us are doing this with no written guidance, which is how a good teacher ends up accused of something and an honest mistake becomes a personnel matter.
Source: Gallup
PennLive reported on Monday that Pennsylvania districts cutting screen time have collided with the state's own mandate. Governor Josh Shapiro required that the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment be given online beginning in spring 2026, on the argument that it saves about thirty minutes per test. Fifty-five percent of Pennsylvania schools were already testing online. The rest now have to be.
Canon-McMillan School District in southwestern Pennsylvania had just removed screens entirely from kindergarten through second grade and stopped using online apps in elementary instruction. Superintendent Greg Taranto put the conflict plainly: I was not going to put kids on a Chromebook just so they have higher test scores. His third grade reading proficiency went from sixty-nine percent in 2025 to sixty-two percent in 2026. At Pittston Area School District, assistant superintendent John Haas said his students did better on paper: our students performed better taking the paper-and-pencil rather than computer-generated.
Why it matters: This is the trap every screen-time policy walks into, and it is worth seeing before your board votes. A district controls what devices do in instruction and does not control the device requirement in assessment, so children who never touch a Chromebook in class meet one on the highest-stakes day of the year. If your district is reducing screens, the plan has to include deliberate practice on the testing platform itself, or the policy shows up later as a score drop that gets blamed on the reading curriculum. Ask for testing-platform minutes in writing, counted separately from instructional screen time, so the two numbers never have to fight.
Petaluma City Schools trustees directed staff last weekend to draft a recommendation replacing one-to-one devices with shared carts for kindergarten and first grade, and phasing out the policy that lets high school students bring their own laptops. The recommendation returns for a vote at a later meeting. Trustee Ellen Webster said she would rather move to share carts than provide one-to-one tablets, so that the devices sit in the carts and children are not looking at them until they are instructed to. Trustee Caitlin Quinn supported sharing the devices as a way to cut down screen time while keeping the access students need to succeed.
Why it matters: Watch the mechanism, not the politics. A cart changes the default. The device is off and away until a teacher brings it out for something, instead of open on the desk all day. That is a smaller and more defensible decision than a ban, it survives a parent meeting, and it is reversible. It is also the version of this fight most districts will land on. If your K-2 teachers are already quietly keeping the Chromebooks in the closet, a cart policy just makes their practice official.
Source: Government Technology
Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska moved on Thursday to buy a three-year subscription to LightSpeed Systems for $600,300, replacing a twelve-year-old Hapara installation. The software lets a teacher see student browsing during class and block or unblock sites for the period, with the blocks resetting at the bell. Chief technology officer Kirk Langer told the board the case stands on its own merits: there are really good reasons irrespective of the fiscal implications, he said, but the fiscal implications are big. The district expects to save more than a hundred thousand dollars a year against the old system, though anticipated Google licensing increases will absorb most of it. Langer also framed it as visibility the district has lacked, saying it can now provide transparency around the use of ed tech in ways it has not been able to before.
Why it matters: Notice what the teacher actually gets, because it is the part to ask your own district about. Not a surveillance feed, a temporary override. The teacher unblocks the site this lesson needs and it closes again at the bell. That is the difference between monitoring software that helps and monitoring software that turns you into a hall monitor. When your district shops for one, ask who holds the unblock button. If the answer is a help desk ticket, the tool will be worked around by November.
Source: Government Technology
A power fluctuation on Wednesday morning knocked out the cooling for Allentown School District's main data center in Pennsylvania, and the systems shut themselves down automatically to keep the hardware from overheating. By Friday the district was in its third day of restoring service. The outage took down email, student logins, network shares, copiers and the staff intranet. With the student-facing platforms offline, teachers lost access to their digital resources and their assessment programs. Email came back Friday, and the remaining services were scheduled to be restored through the weekend.
Why it matters: No hacker, no vendor, no policy debate. A power flicker and a cooling fan, and three days of teaching without logins, copiers or assessments. Every teacher reading this should answer one question before Monday: if the network is down for three days, what am I teaching? Keep a paper unit you could run tomorrow, know where the physical copies live, and make sure the copier is not the only one that works. Technology that fails occasionally is normal. Having no plan for the morning it does is the part we control.
Source: Government Technology
Methuen Public Schools in Massachusetts told its staff this week that more than sixteen hundred of its employees had personal information exposed in the breach at Frontline Education, the vendor that handles hiring, absences and employee records for thousands of districts. Addresses, emails and Social Security numbers are involved. Frontline found the unauthorized access on August 14, traced it to a flaw in a third-party application it has not named, and began notifying superintendents, business managers and technology staff on October 1. Methuen accepted Frontline's offer on October 5 to contact affected employees directly. Adults are offered two years of credit monitoring through TransUnion and minors are offered cyber monitoring. Frontline still has not published how many districts or how many people are affected. One district has reported 1,210 employees, another more than 1,600.
Why it matters: Two weeks in, the count is still climbing and the vendor has not given a number. If you work in a district that uses Frontline, do not wait for a letter. Freeze your credit at all three bureaus this weekend. It is free and takes about fifteen minutes. For the business office, this is the argument for a notification clause with a deadline measured in hours rather than a vague promise of prompt notice. The breach was found August 14. Employees heard in October.
Source: Government Technology
The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education opened a grant program on Wednesday, part of a two million dollar online safety investment, offering 25 to 30 grants of up to $60,000 each to public school districts, charter schools and educational collaboratives. The instruction it funds covers online safety, cyberbullying, data privacy, and recognizing false information including AI-generated content. Governor Maura Healey tied it to what schools are seeing, saying social media is having a profound impact on children's mental health and well-being and their ability to succeed in school. Peabody superintendent Josh Vadala said his district has seen the effect on adolescent mental health and cyberbullying first-hand. Applications are due November 9 at five o'clock through the department's website.
Why it matters: A state is paying districts to teach children to tell what is real, which is the most useful AI skill a school can hand a student this year, and it is a sixty thousand dollar line for the district that writes the application. If you are in Massachusetts, forward this to whoever writes your grants today, because three weeks is a short runway. If you are not, the grant language is a free curriculum outline: online safety, cyberbullying, data privacy, spotting AI-generated material. That is a scope and sequence, already written by a state.
Source: Government Technology
TED and Google opened a call on October 5, reported Monday, for educators with something to say about AI in teaching and learning. The path is a free self-paced one-hour online workshop, three lessons on finding a topic, drawing on your own professional experience and organizing a talk, followed by a proposal submitted through the same platform. Five educators will be chosen across elementary, secondary and postsecondary levels. They get coaching on the talk, a slot at a TED2027 community-stage session in San Diego next March, publication on TED's platform, access to TED's public speaking course, and Google's AI Educator Series resources. Proposals close November 15.
Why it matters: The talks about AI in schools are overwhelmingly given by people who do not teach. This is one hour of your time for a real chance to change that, and the hour is worth it even if you are not selected, because it makes you write down what you actually believe. If you have been the teacher in your building explaining AI to everyone else, you already have the talk. Submit it.
Source: Government Technology
Two things happened in the same week that are worth reading together. On Wednesday Anthropic told investors at its San Francisco investor day that third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, up forty-five percent from $11.6 billion in the second quarter, and that it is profitable on an adjusted basis. Investors noticed that the previous quarter had nearly doubled, and discussion of the November share sale moved to around $1.5 trillion, down from the roughly $2 trillion previously floated. That is still an enormous number, and it is the first time this year the direction changed.
On Thursday the White House Super Intelligence task force adopted its charter, starting a 120-day clock to deliver a report on managing frontier AI. Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton chairs it with National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, and the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology will assess risk in three areas: cybersecurity and critical infrastructure, biosecurity and dual-use applications, and model control and accountability. Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael will draft protocols for AI labs to report breaches and cyber incidents. The models kept coming regardless. Meta shipped its first frontier models on Monday, and Google opened Gemini 4 Argon to paying users worldwide on Tuesday.
Why it matters: Districts are signing multi-year contracts with companies whose own investors just marked them down, and the federal rules that will govern those companies are 120 days from being drafted. Neither fact says do not buy. Both say do not sign anything this year you cannot get out of. Ask for a one-year term with a renewal you have to actively approve, a price lock, and an exit if the product materially changes. A vendor will agree to all three right now, in a market where the money suddenly got careful.
Source: FinanceFeeds
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The thread this week was not screens, and it was not AI. It was who gets to decide.
A California board decided a kindergartner does not need a tablet on the desk all day. A Pennsylvania superintendent decided he would not put children on Chromebooks for a test score, and the state decided otherwise. A Nebraska district decided to hand the unblock button to the teacher instead of the help desk. A power flicker in Allentown decided three days of lessons for everybody. And eighty-two percent of us are using this with no written guidance, which means we are each deciding alone, in a hallway, without cover.
I printed three rosters on Monday night because I know which four incidents happened in my room, and no system does. That is not an argument against the tools. It is an argument about who should be holding them. When your district writes its next policy, the question to ask out loud is simple. Who decides, and do they know the children?
Until next time,
Dr. Janette Camacho
CEO, iTeachAI Academy
P.S. One thing before Monday, and it costs an hour. If your classroom has no written AI rule, write one page: what AI may be used for in here, what it may not, and what you will do when you are not sure. Give it to your students and send it home. Eighteen percent of teachers have been given any formal guidance. Do not wait to be in the other eighty-two. And if you are the teacher in your building who explains all of this to everyone else, the TED and Google proposal above closes November 15.
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