A BU cognitive neuroscientist just dropped a piece in the Boston Globe that connects two things most people aren't putting together: America's reading crisis and the flood of unproven AI tools entering classrooms.

Here's the number that hit me hardest — only 2% of purpose-built edtech tools meet the strongest federal evidence standard. Two percent. Meanwhile, the average student uses 42 digital tools a year, and reading scores are at their lowest in decades.

Dr. Ozernov-Palchik makes a point that I think applies far beyond K-12: the same pattern that created the literacy crisis — adopting ideas that sounded good without testing them — is now repeating with AI at 10x the speed.

I wrote about what I'm calling the "Evidence-First Reflex" in today's blog. It's the one question that changes how you evaluate any AI tool, whether you're in a classroom, a boardroom, or a parent-teacher conference.

Here's what I want to know from this community: Have you ever asked a vendor or your school district for independent evidence that an AI tool actually works? What happened when you did?

Dive deeper in today's blog post: The One AI Skill That Could Save a Generation of Readers → www.harvestkernel.com/ai-reading-crisis-evidence-gap/