🛝 Two Ways to Waste Money in Education. And One Way to Actually Spend It.

Welcome to Playground Post, a bi-weekly newsletter that keeps education innovators ahead of what's next.

This week's reality check: The California State University system spent $17 million on ChatGPT while eliminating hundreds of faculty positions. Memphis staffed its lowest-performing schools with over 50% unlicensed teachers. But 146 districts that invested in early family outreach cut chronic absenteeism by 27,000 students.

Data Gem

The national student-to-counselor ratio is 372:1. An EAB survey found nearly half of students are already using generic AI tools to navigate college admissions, alarming professionals who note these tools spread misinformation and are vulnerable to manipulation by recruiters.

University System Spent $17M on ChatGPT. Faculty Want It Gone.

In February 2025, the California State University system announced a $17 million contract with OpenAI to give all 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff across 23 campuses access to ChatGPT Edu.

The faculty say nobody asked them.

"In February 2025, we all got an email out of the blue announcing the AI-Empowered CSU initiative that we hadn't heard anything about," said Martha Kenney, a professor at San Francisco State University. "In the middle of the budget crisis, it's best to invest in the humans that make the CSU system great, rather than buy in to Silicon Valley's hype."

The timing was the problem. 

When the deal was announced, CSU was facing a potential $375 million state budget cut. San Francisco State had eliminated 615 lecturer positions over the prior two years and offered buyouts to all tenured faculty.

Now faculty have written a petition asking Chancellor Mildred García not to renew the contract when it expires June 30.

CSU isn't alone. The University of Colorado system signed a $2 million per year OpenAI contract in February covering 100,000+ users. Faculty and students responded with an open letter of dissent.

Bloomberg reports OpenAI has sold more than 700,000 ChatGPT licenses to roughly 35 public universities.

The question is whether anyone can prove the investment works. Martha Lincoln, an associate professor leading the CSU faculty dissent, said the tool hasn't changed much in practice.

"The introduction of a university-sponsored LLM doesn't really change the conversation in the classroom," Lincoln said.

CSU says it surveyed 94,000 users about how they use AI - but the results haven't been released.

The telling counterpoint: Arizona State, the first university to partner with OpenAI, faces no faculty backlash. 

The difference? ASU hasn't cut jobs. 

"We haven't seen any cuts to faculty engagement, salaries or hiring," said Elisa Kawam, ASU Faculty Senate president. "We've been able to hold constant with what we know as professors, while also getting to play with this new technology."

For education innovators, the signal is clear: universities are buying enterprise AI at massive scale, but without governance, ROI measurement, or faculty input. The product gap isn't another AI tool, it's the evaluation layer: campus AI governance platforms, contract performance dashboards, and usage analytics that prove whether a $17 million investment is producing educational value or just providing a chatbot students could access for free.

More Than Half the Teachers at Memphis's Failing Schools Are Unlicensed

Memphis-Shelby County schools that received D or F grades for at least two consecutive years share a common trait.

More than 50% of their teachers are working on emergency or temporary permits.

District officials testified before a three-person committee of the Tennessee State Board of Education, which is holding a week of accountability hearings for 18 districts with chronically underperforming schools.

Fourteen Memphis schools face a recommended "corrective action plan" that could include state monitoring, external needs assessments, and performance targets.

The district is already deploying scripted lesson plans and curriculum guides, specifically because permit teachers need them.

"The scripted lessons are particularly vital for supporting our influx of permit teachers, which are notably higher in these schools," the district said in a strategic planning document submitted to the state board.

State Board chair Bob Eby praised Memphis for at least understanding the problem: "Of all the districts we've interviewed so far, this district has presented its root causes better than any other we've heard."

It's the first year schools have been subject to these hearings under a 2022 law that ties state board accountability to student performance on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.

The link between credentialing and outcomes is direct - the lowest-performing schools have the highest share of unlicensed teachers. The question is what comes next.

For education innovators this sparks a few ideas. Alternative certification platforms that can fast-track emergency-permit teachers toward full licensure while they're already in classrooms. AI-powered coaching and feedback tools that give unlicensed teachers real-time instructional support.

One Strategy Actually Cuts Chronic Absenteeism

Chronic absenteeism nationally peaked at 29% in 2021-22 and has barely budged since, hovering around 23%.

But 146 districts across eight states serving more than 1 million students have been making steady progress.

Their chronic absenteeism rate dropped from 22.4% to about 19% over three school years.

That's 27,000 fewer chronically absent students.

The intervention wasn't expensive or complicated - it was early, frequent, and positive communication with families of at-risk students, starting in the first 60 days of the school year.

"We're seeing that we can tell by a certain point in the school year who's going to be chronically absent," said Kara Stern, director of education for SchoolStatus, which conducted the analysis. "And that if parents get a personal outreach in the first month, they stay more engaged for the entire year."

A message noting a child "missed four days this month" was better received than one referencing district attendance policy. 

Direct offers of help ("Reply if you need support with transportation or health concerns") outperformed lengthy explanations.

Families responded most often when messages arrived around 8 a.m. or between 2 and 4 p.m. on weekdays. During those windows, parents who responded did so within 11 minutes on average. The response rate: 73%.

Students from low-income families improved their attendance nearly twice as fast as higher-income peers. Pre-K and kindergarten saw the biggest improvements.

By Thanksgiving, 200,000 students across the 146 districts had been flagged as at risk based on attendance trends.

For education innovators, this is the rare story where the data clearly shows what works. The product specifications are embedded in the evidence: attendance early-warning systems that flag risk within the first 30 to 60 days, not after the year is lost. 

Multilingual family messaging platforms that send personalized, action-oriented texts at the times families actually respond. And intervention CRMs that connect attendance data to specific barriers (transportation, health, housing) so schools can offer help, not just report a number.

⚡️More Quick Hits

This week in education:

• Teachers say student behavior has made the job almost impossible — A survey of 5,814 educators found 35% say behavior is worse than last year, three-quarters say it's worse than five years ago, and 58% say parents need to instruct children on how to behave in school

• ESSER's $189.5 billion era is officially over, and nobody knows what it accomplished — The last ESSER liquidation deadline passed with nearly $1.5 billion unspent, and districts still lack clean evidence on which interventions delivered lasting academic value

• Texas's $1 billion voucher program draws 74,000 families in first application round — The nation's largest school choice program offers $10,474 per student and up to $30,000 for students with disabilities, but one-third of participating schools charge more than the voucher amount and few offer special education services

• One-third of parents worried food would run out last year, 20% skipped medical care — A Capita/YouGov survey of 1,000 parents found 27% missed work due to child care problems and 43% said work schedules make family routines hard to maintain, revealing the out-of-school barriers behind attendance and engagement

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