Week in Edtech 8/12/26: Educator AI Adoption Hits 80%, Varsity Tutors Exits Schools, Higher Ed Rethinks Grading, Open vs. Closed AI, and More! Feat. Reg Leichty of Foresight Law + Policy & Mike Wales and Madison McCormick of CodePath

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One of the themes that we've really been hitting on all summer is changing in higher ed grading, and it's not a clear direction where you have a group that are going with no grades, so MIT with no freshman grades, the idea being to reduce pressure, competition around grades. Whereas Harvard famously has rolled out a forced grading curve where only twenty percent of grades can be As. We're also seeing AI use being prohibited versus AI use being embraced. Some schools, they're turning to oral defenses with an AI agent. You can do all your assignments with AI. They're kind of like, "That's the way the world's gonna work. We just need you to defend your knowledge through an oral defense." [upbeat music]

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Hope you enjoy today's pod. [upbeat music]

EdTech Insider listeners, we're back with another week in EdTech. It's Ben and Alex here, coming to you from our favorite co-working spaces from around the world. Alex, so glad to have you here today. What's going on in the pod? What's new in the-- in pod land?

Yeah, we got some really fun conversations coming up. We just published one with Bottle, with Edna Martinson from Bottle Learning, who is-- was amazing. We talked to Student Achievement Partners, Betsy and Tony from EdSurge. I think soon we're-- the-- coming up in just a couple weeks is Anish Sahoni, I may be mispronouncing that, who's the CEO of Teach For America, which is gonna be amazing. We also just announced, Ben, right, that we are going to be on stage at the Teach For America thirty-fifth anniversary. You wanna, you wanna break the news here?

Uh, no, you go for it.

[laughs] That's really exciting. I-- You made this happen. We are going to be on stage in front of somewhere in the neighborhood of seven to ten thousand teachers at the TFA thirty-fifth anniversary in Las Vegas in just a couple months, interviewing Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is a-- an ex-teacher, an ex-substitute teacher, somebody who has been in education on and off for quite a long time, has all sorts of thoughts about education and creative education. It's gonna be a thrill.

We're not gonna throw away our shot, that's for sure.

[laughs] Yeah. It's gonna be a blast. He's gonna be a s- a real headliner. I think