As a little girl growing up in El Salvador, Aracely Valdes loved school and dreamed of becoming a teacher. Yet, when she enrolled in the Fort Worth, Texas, public schools at age 15, a new immigrant who spoke no English, the path to fulfilling her dream was far from clear.  Then, in her final year...

The past year has seen several prominent Black celebrities making anti-semitic remarks. Rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) proclaimed in an interview with Alex Jones, “I like Hitler … I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.” Brooklyn Nets star point guard Kyrie Irving promoted on social media a film that included elements of Holocaust denial. Whoopi Goldberg stated...

Just before the winter holidays, the National Center for Education Statistics released new data on school staffing in the 2021-22 academic year. The data are provisional, but they represent the best look yet at how school staffing levels have changed over the course of the pandemic.  As I forecast in September, the new data show that schools have been...

As schools face rising behavioral challenges, debates rage on about restorative justice, which rejects traditional, punitive discipline in favor of relationship-based work to address underlying causes of conflict. Studies show widely disparate results — for example, on school violence and academic performance. Many advocates explain these discrepancies by noting that neutral-to-negative results come about when schools cherry-pick restorative practices —...

Did you, like me, take time over the break to play with one of the new artificial intelligence bots? I asked ChatGPT to write a blog in the style of Robin Lake on the topic of helping students recover from the impacts of COVID-19 and related school closures. Here’s what it offered: As the director of the...

The pandemic taught us many things, particularly in the world of education. Many families realized that the structure of a classroom was essential for their child’s learning — and that without access to that structure, kids struggled both academically and socially. On the other hand, many families saw their children thrive in a more flexible...

After years of targeting and extorting high-value corporate targets, ransomware attackers have turned to more vulnerable prey — school districts. With less funding, less-than-mature cybersecurity defenses and limited (or even nonexistent) controls over an abundance of sensitive data, educational institutions are prime targets for cybercriminals. As a number of recent notable attacks against school systems...

Generation A, the children currently attending K-12 schools, has endured political instability, a traumatizing pandemic, an interrupted education and now an economic crisis afflicting families as costs continue to rise for everyday items. The expanded Child Tax Credit, a pandemic-era program that provided qualifying families with $250 a month for children under 6 and $300...

School districts are facing the greatest educational challenge of the last 100 years — reversing pandemic-induced learning loss among tens of millions of students. It is a moment that demands innovative programs that will be sustained over time and lead to rapid and lasting improvements. But experience teaches that in the face of great need,...

Let me get this hard sell on the table right up front: You should listen to “Sold a Story,” a podcast about reading instruction in U.S. schools. After all, you can be concerned that 1 in 3 American fourth graders read below a basic level and still not want a deep dive into how literacy...