Five years after pandemic disruptions, student academic achievement remains below pre-2020 levels nationally, with uneven recovery across grades and demographics. The persistent impact includes heightened absenteeism and mental health challenges. Educational initiatives spotlight social-emotional learning as essential for democratic engagement, complementing academic instruction. Innovative approaches leveraging artificial intelligence are being explored to enable mastery-based personalized learning beyond traditional semester structures, aiming to improve comprehension and retention. Further, strategies for enhancing student comprehension of complex texts and prototyping instructional designs seek to mitigate learning gaps rooted in cognitive overload and expert blind spots.