Justin Solomon, associate professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), has been appointed associate dean of engineering education in the MIT School of Engineering, effective July 1. In this new role, Solomon will focus on advancing innovation in engineering education across the school. He will help shape new pedagogical approaches in the context of an AI-enabled world and will explore experiential, hands-on, and other modes of learning. Working closely with academic departments, Solomon will serve as a thought partner in integrating AI into curricula and will help facilitate interdisciplinary and shared teaching opportunities across departments and other schools. He will also play a key role in helping the school implement relevant recommendations from the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training. Solomon will explore opportunities to build industry collaborations, including new models for internships and industry-engaged learning on campus. Collaborating with department heads and the School of Engineering leadership team, he will also support faculty in designing new courses and evolving existing programs to meet emerging opportunities in engineering....

Instructure is the latest corporate giant hacked by the ShinyHunters gang. The cybercriminals have targeted universities and cloud database companies in recent months, in efforts to steal vast amounts of people's personal information and threaten to post the data online if the companies do not pay the hackers' ransom. A member of ShinyHunters shared a sample of the stolen data with TechCrunch, which included data from two schools in the United States, one in Massachusetts and one in Tennessee. In the case of the one in Massachusetts, the data included messages, which contain names, email addresses, and some phone numbers. As for the school in Tennessee, the sample included students' full names and email addresses. TechCrunch is not naming the schools as they are not confirmed victims. Based on information that appears on their websites, both schools appear to use Instructure's platform Canvas, which allows customers to manage coursework and assignments, and communicate with students. ShinyHunters also shared a list of about 8,800 schools allegedly affected by the breach. TechCrunch could not confirm whether all the listed institutions were affected, nor whether they are Instructure customers. On its official site, Instructure says it has more than 8,000 institutions as customers....

New York City's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will soon confront an ordeal that might finally knock that trademark smile off his face: balancing the budget. The city is projected to have a $5 billion deficit this year and is required by law to make up for that shortfall by raising revenue, cutting spending, or both. Mamdani has proposed large tax increases paired with modest cuts to city programs. But getting to $5 billion won't be easy, in part because the biggest portion of the city's budget is considered untouchable. I refer not to the police department or the transit system, but to the department of education. It costs about $40 billion a year, making up a third of the city's gargantuan budget. New York City spends more money per pupil'north of $40,000, according to one recent estimate'than any of the other 100 largest public-school districts in the country, and more than twice as much as the median district. Meanwhile, it generates educational outcomes that are average at best. According to federal data, its per-pupil spending is nearly 50 percent higher than Los Angeles's and Chicago's (the second- and fourth-largest districts), and 150 percent higher than Miami's (the third-largest). Per pupil is the key phrase here. New York City's public-school system is the largest in the country, but that's not the problem. The problem, actually, is that the student body is small relative to the resources devoted to it, and shrinking fast'but the city and state governments won't cut education spending accordingly. As long as that's the case, the city's financial situation will grow only harder to manage....

Some 15 years after the No Child Left Behind Act promised to close the racial achievement gap, it looked as if charter schools were making real progress toward that goal. Using data from 2015 to 2019, Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes reported that more than 200 charter networks were closing or even reversing racial disparities in reading, math, or both. Their Black and Latino students were equaling or outpacing white students in the same states. 'More critically,' the report's authors wrote, 'there is strong evidence that these gap-busting schools can be scaled.' Then, just as the charter sector was posting striking results, many school networks strayed from their commitment to academic excellence. Staff-led demands for social justice convulsed the schools. 'Anti-racism' and 'equity' displaced effective instruction as their top priority. Indeed, I experienced the period's fervor firsthand in Ascend, the charter network I founded in Brooklyn. In a 2019 blog post, I expressed concern that training teachers to recognize 'worship of the written word' as 'white supremacy culture,' as many equity trainers urged, could alienate students of color from school. A firestorm followed, and I was asked to stay home. I was never to return. At many networks that served students of color from low-income families, academic performance plummeted'and has scarcely recovered....