August 2, 2026

Students create AI policy at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston. High school student Leena Jain of Louisiana addresses her fellow senators moments before the final vote.Kieran Kesner for NPR

Should students be allowed to use AI on assignments? What about on tests? Is it the job of schools to teach the nation's children what AI is and how to use it? There is no national policy for AI use in schools, meaning states and school districts have had to scramble to craft their own.

NPR Ed’s Cory Turner spent a weekend with middle and high school students representing all 50 states who were trying to fill this policy vacuum. The proposal they came up with offers guidance, they hope, to the roughly 10,000 districts that are members of AASA, The School Superintendents Association, which was one of the groups that organized the July event in Boston. It incorporates what happens when students are in crisis and communicate with a chatbot, when and how they can use AI on school work and what their teachers should do if they suspect students have leaned on AI when they shouldn’t have for help on assignments.

"The adults themselves haven't been able to come to consensus on this, right? And so now it falls to the kids. Let them lead the way," said Jeffrey Riley, the executive director of Day of AI and former education commissioner of Massachusetts. Day of AI was another organizer of the event.

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Speaking of AI, NPR Ed’s Kadin Mills recently visited a student in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., who is building a robot that uses a form of non-generative AI to speak his Indigenous language. They were invented by Danielle Boyer, and they’re called SkoBots.

"There are toys that teach us in English, but there aren't toys that teach us Anishinaabemowin. And I wanted that to be different," Boyer told Kadin. Anishinaabemowin includes the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe languages, and fewer than 10,000 people in the U.S. speak it. That’s why she invented the SkoBot. It's a customizable toy robot designed to get Indigenous children excited to learn their tribes’ languages.

"I can say 'Hey SkoBot, what is bear?' And it will say, 'Bear is makwa, makwa,' and it'll repeat it, right? So I can say, 'What is crane?' It'll say, 'Crane is ajijaak, ajijaak.'"
Through a nonprofit she started when she was 18, Boyer, now 25, has mentored hundreds of Native American children across the country, teaching them to build SkoBots of their own. One of them is 12-year-old Holden Hoy in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

"I was already a big fan of robotics and how they work, how you can bring inanimate objects to life," Hoy said. "And I'm Ojibwe, and so I've always wanted to save the Ojibwe language."

He told Kadin, “The language is the culture.”

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One last note on AI: A school district in a rural corner of upstate New York is hitting pause on plans to deploy an AI-powered, humanoid robot in the classroom after state education officials, teachers and local residents raised concerns, including the maker's ties to a company that produces hyper realistic sex bots.

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Good reads and listens...

Their student loans are being erased: A class-action lawsuit filed against the first Trump administration by student loan borrowers is finally coming to an end. This group of borrowers asked to have their loans forgiven after their schools lied to them about things like their job prospects or likely salary after graduation. It’s a protectione known as borrower defense, but the process moved at a snail’s pace. After a recent court ruling, more than 450,000 borrowers are expected to have gotten relief through this lawsuit, NPR Ed’s Cory Turner reports.

ADHD looks different in women and girls: For decades, ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, was considered a childhood disease that mostly affected boys — and boys were the focus of most research, NPR’s Maria Godoy reports. But ADHD often manifests differently in girls.

Pediatricians and health officials sidestep Trump's CDC on vaccine advice: This rupture of scientific trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has put many pediatricians like John Snyder, who practices in Western Massachusetts, in a bind, as they no longer turn to the United States' preeminent public health agency and instead search for ways to fill the information gap. Some doctors, reports Karen Brown, of New England Public Media, are launching their own vaccine education efforts.

Rural California school district creates space where kids can learn to swim: Not everyone has access to a public pool — and that access is shrinking, Alice Daniel of NPR member station KVPR reports. But the Cutler-Orosi Joint Unified School District south of Fresno pooled together grants to build an aquatics center at an area high school. Now it offers low-cost swim lessons to its students. That’s after one district student drowned two years ago.

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When playing hooky isn't all it's cracked up to be...

If you've ever taken a day off school as a kid because you were sick, you may remember how it usually goes. At first, you're thinking, yes, I get to watch TV.

But then it starts to sink in that the house is quiet, a little too quiet. And that is when your mind starts to really wander, right? You start wondering what everyone else is doing without you.

In a new picture book called A Day Off School, Oliver Jeffers and illustrator Kevin Waldron tell the story of Herbie, how his case of the sniffles spirals into fears that he may be missing pirate invasions, monster attacks and … who knows what else?

They spoke to NPR’s Ailsa Chang.

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