A new NBER working paper from researchers at Harvard and the Norwegian School of Economics surveyed over 9,000 workers and found that time spent in meetings was the strongest predictor of wage growth among all workplace activities studied. Meetings consume about 12% of work hours on average, and the study found firms with more meetings tend to be more successful overall, while employees attending more meetings saw greater pay and career progress.
Oak Park High School students Aayush Bathija and Prince Rohatgi, working with UCLA postdoctoral researcher Daniel Soskin, published a 75-page arXiv paper resolving an open question about coefficient ratio bounds in Lorentzian polynomials, a theory associated with Fields Medalist June Huh. The work generalizes earlier results on quadratic polynomials to arbitrary degree, pinning down which coefficient ratios have universal upper bounds and what those optimal bounds are. The students used AI tools, including Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, for exploration and drafting, while independently verifying every calculation and proof step.
Developers behind the proposed Frederick Digital Campus have pitched a $110 million package to Frederick County, Maryland residents to secure approval for the site, which would house tenants including Amazon and Aligned Data Centers. The package includes a $30 million elementary school, $40 million in recreational facilities, a $14.5 million workforce training center, $10.5 million for agricultural preservation, and up to $100 million toward a water reclamation system that would cut potable water use by 80%.
In her new book, New York Times reporter Natasha Singer documents how Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies embedded themselves in K-12 education over the past 15 years, supplying free coding curricula and tools like Swift and Minecraft to promote computer science as a path to jobs. She argues AI companies are now pitching schools with a nearly identical playbook, offering free resources while cultivating future customers and workers.
A multi-country trial found that weekly 20-minute phone calls from teachers, combined with text messages, significantly boosted children's math progress when schools were closed. Text messages alone, without calls, also produced measurable learning gains compared with children who received no outreach at all.
Microsoft and the American Federation of Teachers signed a legally enforceable agreement barring the company from using student or teacher data to train its AI models, except in narrow safety and security cases. The deal also prohibits tracking students, requires human oversight for any AI decisions affecting schools, and mandates transparency with parents and educators about how the tools function. Protections take effect for school districts starting November 1.
Microsoft has signed an agreement with the American Federation of Teachers and its New York affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, laying out ten enforceable privacy and safety commitments for AI use in schools. The rules bar Microsoft from training models on student or teacher data, limit data collection, ban AI companions, and require human oversight for high-stakes decisions. Districts can add these terms to contracts starting in November without renegotiating existing agreements.
A 2025 OECD PISA study of over 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries found that, after controlling for socioeconomic status, students who never use AI generally outperformed AI users in science. The performance gap was largest for those using AI to summarize texts or draft assignments, and for those using it either rarely or daily, while moderate, intentional use—especially paired with training to critically evaluate AI outputs—showed smaller drops or even slight gains over non-users.
A new study examined whether phone tutoring could offset learning losses when schools close, finding that students who received such tutoring showed measurable gains in math performance compared to peers without access to it. The research points to remote, low-tech tutoring as a viable stopgap during disruptions to in-person schooling.
A study spanning randomized trials in India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda found that 20-minute weekly tutoring calls to primary-school children produced substantial learning gains during COVID-19-related school closures. The approach paired widely available mobile phones with tutoring tailored to each child's current skill level, costing about $11 per child, and worked whether delivered by government teachers or NGO staff.
A study led by Oxford researcher Noam Angrist tested a low-cost intervention combining text-message nudges and a weekly 20-minute phone call from a teacher to support children's learning when schools shut down. The randomized trials, involving more than 16,000 households across India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda during COVID-19 closures, followed an earlier pilot in Botswana and were published in Nature.
A new Nature study by Angrist and colleagues examined how remote phone-based tutoring affected children's learning during periods when schools were shut, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research found strong evidence that this low-tech approach helped students keep learning despite the disruption, offering a rare data-backed solution to an otherwise poorly understood problem.
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