Friday News Roundup

Here’s your final Friday News Roundup for 2025:

Texas Universities Deploy AI Tools to Review and Rewrite How Some Courses Discuss Race and Gender (The Texas Tribune)

Colleges are now using AI to search course descriptions to make sure race and gender are presented correctly, but what “correctly” means is up for debate.

“A senior Texas A&M University System official testing a new artificial intelligence tool this fall asked it to find how many courses discuss feminism at one of its regional universities. Each time she asked in a slightly different way, she got a different number.”

“It was September 25 and Kory Castillo was trying to deliver on a promise Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents had already made: to audit courses across all of the system’s 12 universities after conservative outrage over a gender-identity lesson at the flagship campus intensified earlier that month, leading to the professor’s firing and the university president’s resignation.”

It seems artificial intelligence and academic freedom might be on a collision course.

Rob Reiner Spent a Decade Fighting For California Kids (The 74)

In addition to playing the role of “Meathead” on the 1970’s sitcom All in the Family and then becoming one of Hollywood’s top directors (This is Spinal Tap, A Few Good Men, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally), Rob Reiner was a committed early childhood activist.

“’There are plenty of Hollywood actors, directors and leaders who engage in politics, write reasonably sized checks and do their best to make a difference. That was not Rob,’ said Ben Austin, a former Clinton White House staff who handled communications for the California Children and Families Commission and quickly rebranded it as First 5. Twenty-seven years later, the work continues. ‘This was not a side hustle.’”

Reiner and his wife were tragically murdered earlier this week. His impact on early childhood learning will be missed.

No Student Goes Unfed in Des Moines Area Schools. But Who Pays the Bill? (Des Moines Register)

“Des Moines metro and Iowa school leaders say they’re racking up millions of dollars in unpaid school meal debts as more and more families struggle to meet household needs.”

“Those education leaders have promised students won’t go hungry at school, regardless of whether they can pay for their meals. But the rising debt has left them reaching for alternative funds to make up the difference.”

The bill is around $2.2 million over the state and districts continue to struggle figuring out how to make up the deficit.

It’s hard to realize this story appeared in 2025. It’s more like a story one would have read in this country during the 1930’s during the Great Depression.

Kids going hungry at school? Iowa should be ashamed.

Remembering Rod Paige

Rod Paige passed away this week. He was 92. Paige served as U.S. Secretary of Education during the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency. Before that, Paige was superintendent of schools in the Houston Independent School District.

I was his first principal hire as superintendent, and I’ll never forget what he told me after he toured Westside High School, a new high school I opened as its founding principal back in 2000:

“We didn’t spend $50 million on this school so that adults make all the decisions. We built this for kids.”

I never forgot that advice.

Paige was never convinced integrating schools in this country was the right thing to do for black kids. Once, during lunch time with Paige and me, he told me he always felt his K-12 education in Mississippi was better before desegregation. Paige believed his teachers, his coaches, and his administrators took care of him and his classmates when they attended all-black schools. If black schools would have received equal funding, Paige thought they could have continued to do good things for the kids they served. But that equal funding never occurred, so integration became the order.

A friend of Paige’s shared this story with me:

Once Paige called the national teacher’s unions “terrorists” organizations. It caused quite a stir. Paige received huge pushback and bad media for the comment. Colin Powell, Secretary of State at the time, called Paige during the controversy. Powell advised, “Rod, maybe you ought to leave terrorist organizations to me.”

The Texas Tribune offered this Paige quote as the end of their remembrance to the educator:

“’Not everything Houston tries will work, of course, and missteps and backlash are inevitable. But in education, the greater risk is not trying something drastically different,’ Paige wrote in 2024.”

ABPTL will be back January 5^th. Til then. Happy Holidays. SVB