Sharon Lurye
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sharonlurye.bsky.social
Sharon Lurye
@sharonlurye.bsky.social
2.8K followers 2.5K following 210 posts
Education data reporter for the Associated Press, occasional gardener, former math teacher, proud member of the AP News Guild. Send tips/comments/dog pics to slurye@ap.org.
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sharonlurye.bsky.social
These graphics are pretty shocking -- you can see how much student homelessness spiked after Helene, and even for those students who did still have homes, they lost months of schooling. Snowstorms later in the year led to even more learning time lost.
Column graphs for eight school districts in Western North Carolina show number of students identified as homeless from the 2020-21 school year to 2024-25. The number of homeless students spiked after Hurricane Helene and accounted for almost all homeless students in Avery County and Yancey County schools. A stacked bar chart showing the number of instructional days missed in North Carolina school districts due to Hurricane Helene and Snow Days in the 2024-25 school year. The top districts were Yancey County with 45 days, Mitchell County with 40 days and Avery County with 38 days.
September 24, 2025 at 1:03 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
You've got to admire ChatGPT's 100% confidence.
Wrong on Massachusetts. I ask how sure it is on a scale of 0 to 100. It is 100% confident. I ask it to spell Massachusetts. It spells it correctly. Then I asked it to give me a list of states with the letter R...and it was wrong again.
August 8, 2025 at 7:55 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
Has anyone tested if GPT-5 knows how many states have an R in them? GPT-4 was confidently, comedically wrong.
I ask ChatGPT (model 4) how many states have R in the name. It confidently includes Connecticut and Massachusetts on the list. I ask it to double check. It now knows Connecticut does not have an R. It is still wrong about Massachusetts. I ask it are you really sure? It checks a third time.
August 8, 2025 at 7:55 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
I absolutely love this anecdote from a column about humanities professors adapting their classes to AI:
Excerpt from New York Times column about humanities professors adopting their classes to AI: “So many of my colleagues are discouraged and bitter. I cannot live my life that way, and I refuse to do so,” said Chris Weigel, a professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University, which is a large public institution in Orem that integrates community college and a four-year program. Nearly 40 percent of U.V.U. students are first-generation college attendees. Weigel teaches courses in ethics, including a class on the ethics of A.I. She told me about a partnership she had developed with the director at a local short-term residential treatment facility for teenagers in crisis. At a community fair held by U.V.U., the treatment director heard about the subjects Weigel taught and felt that the teenagers in his care would be passionate about debating big ideas. The final project for students in Weigel’s general ethics class involved teaching the concepts they had learned to the teenagers at this facility and leading ethical debates among these kids. Editors’ Picks 15 Ways to Break Free of Your Phone How Do You Measure a Life? In Caffeinated 5-Hour Bursts An Anonymous Chef’s Memoir Is Steamy, Spicy and Utterly Delectable “I almost had to force myself not to cry tears of joy because it was just so beautiful and inspiring what my students were doing with these kids,” Weigel told me. “And the kids at the facility were so interested and they just felt so valued and validated.” She felt her students studied far more for this final than they would have for a traditional test or paper, because they did not want to let these teenagers down.
August 7, 2025 at 2:07 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
MIT is definitely an outlier. It also reported lower-than-normal revenue from non-federal sources that year (2022/23), so the % coming from federal funding was quite higher than it had been in previous years. Audit report shows quite a lot coming from defense research. app.fac.gov/disseminatio...
Screenshot of an audit of federal expenditures for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for fiscal year 2023 showing over 1.7 billion dollars spent on federally-funded research and development.
March 28, 2025 at 6:14 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
These are the top colleges that got the most federal money, out of 96 colleges under investigation from the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights for DEI/antisemitism-related issues. Overall, these schools got over $33 billion in 22/23-- and that's not even counting federal student loans.
A graphic showing the top five public and top five private schools that collected the highest amount of federal revenue in 2022-23, out of a group of 96 schools under investigation, as well as the percent of total revenue from federal sources. Top five private schools: Johns Hopkins, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Duke. Top five public: University of Washington Seattle, Michigan-Ann Arbor, UC San Diego, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
March 28, 2025 at 2:04 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
Statement from AP Executive Editor Julie Pace on a reporter being blocked from a White House event due to our editorial standards on place names: www.ap.org/the-definiti...
Statement from Julie Pace: "As a global news organization, The Associated Press informs billions of people around the world every day with factual, nonpartisan journalism. Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing. It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment."
February 11, 2025 at 9:32 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
Abruptly ending research raises the risk of creating drug-resistant strains of HIV:
Screenshot of a paragraph from the article: "Another H.I.V. trial, called CATALYST, has thousands of volunteers in five countries testing an injectable drug called long-acting cabotegravir. Participants were receiving bimonthly injections to maintain a sufficient level of the drug in their bodies to prevent H.I.V. infection. Without regular injections, or a carefully-managed end to use of the drug, the participants will not have enough cabotegravir to stop a new infection, but there will be enough in their systems that, if they were to contract the virus, it could easily mutate to become drug-resistant, said Dr. Kenneth Ngure, president-elect of the International AIDS Society."
February 6, 2025 at 10:42 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
There's going to be a lot of spin from all sides about the cause of these test score declines. It's important to see the full context: skills in math and reading have been slipping since the 2010's. For context, "basic" skills in 4th grade include identifying main ideas & understanding number lines.
A line graph showing the percent of students who scored at least "basic" on the Nation's Report Card, a standardized federal test, from 2003 to 2024. There are lines for 4th-grade math, 8th-grade math, 4th-grade reading and 8th-grade reading. Those lines have mostly gone down since the twenty-teens. The percent of students struggling with basic skills has been rising. Only 60% of students reached 'basic' for 4th-grade reading.
January 29, 2025 at 3:04 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
Went to a blood drive in New Orleans today held to support victims of the New Year's attack -- the CEO of The Blood Center said it was the biggest turnout had had seen since 9/11. Around 60 people in line when I was there at 11:30.
A man in a red had embraces a woman with a black backpack as they wait to donate blood in New Orleans, Louisiana on Thursday, January 2.
January 3, 2025 at 12:26 AM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
Literacy scores went down a similar amount among people who reported excellent, good or poor health, which makes it seem like Long COVID is not the culprit.
Charts showing the average literacy and numeracy scores for U.S. adults ages 16 to 65, comparing people who self report as being in excellent, good or poor health, from 2012/14 to 2023. Literacy scores went down similarly regardless of self-reported health.
December 10, 2024 at 8:43 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
In almost every state which tracks this data, chronic absenteeism rates for Native students are higher than their peers. The one exception? Oklahoma.
A range plot chart which shows the different in chronic absenteeism rates for all students versus Native American students in seven states which high Native American populations, for the 2022-23 school year. Oklahoma was the only state where the absenteeism rate for Native American students was lower than the state average. For North Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota and Alaska, it was much higher -- 60% for Native students in Alaska, compared to 45% for the state as a whole.
December 3, 2024 at 3:15 PM
sharonlurye.bsky.social
Particularly love this detail:
Paragraph excerpted from Minnesota Star Tribune article: "But most worth celebrating, staff members say, is the number of books finding their way into the hands of young readers across the city. Circulation is way up in many schools — it’s doubled since last year at Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary on the North Side and also at Transitions Plus, a program for 18- to 21-year-old students with learning disabilities. Stadium View, the district’s juvenile detention program, now has a functional library that has loaned out more than 400 books."
November 22, 2024 at 7:36 PM