Education policy and Hollywood rarely intersect.  But when filmmaker Rob Reiner latched onto the science about how young children develop, he not only used his moviemaking platform to convince the public of the importance of kids’ early years, he became a real-life policymaker to champion the cause.  After successfully steering the passage of a 1998...

By the time the morning bell rings at Rosewood STEM Magnet, Urban Planning and Urban Design, Monika Heidi Duque has already been in her classroom for hours — reviewing lesson plans, setting out materials, and greeting students by name.   Duque, who has taught at the award-winning, urban planning-themed LAUSD elementary school in West Hollywood for...

Update, Dec. 8: The Teamsters Union, representing some 1,500 paraprofessionals, office staff and cafeteria workers in the West Contra Costa Unified School District in Richmond, California, reached a tentative agreement Dec. 8 and returned to work. The teachers, represented by United Teachers of Richmond, remained on strike. Some 3,000 teachers, paraprofessionals, office staff and cafeteria workers...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. Until this year, UCLA senior Syed Tamim Ahmad considered staying in the U.S. after graduation to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor. But when the Trump administration revoked thousands of student visas last spring, he spent many sleepless nights supporting his peers...

This article is published in partnership with WIRED. It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice.  The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. Anything. The first drag from a friend’s vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new...

Daily student absences rose 22% among more than 100,000 children living in California’s rural Central Valley in the weeks following January 2025 immigration raids, according to a newly peer reviewed Stanford University study. The findings span the early weeks of the second Trump administration. Since that time, immigration enforcement has escalated dramatically, particularly in Democratic...

Los Angeles schools have lost thousands of immigrant students for years because of the city’s rising prices and falling birth rates — and now that trend has intensified after the “chilling effect” of this year’s federal immigration raids, district officials said. This school year, the Los Angeles school district has lost more than 13,000 immigrant...

When The 74 started looking for schools that were doing a good job teaching kids to read, we began with the data. We crunched the numbers for nearly 42,000 schools across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. and identified 2,158 that were beating the odds by significantly outperforming what would be expected given their student...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. A few months ago, a high school English teacher in Los Angeles Unified noticed something different about his students’ tests. Students who had struggled all semester were suddenly getting A’s. He suspected some were cheating, but he couldn’t figure out how. Until a...

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter Only a few months into Rosie Leyva’s job as a literacy specialist at Butler Academic Center, Alameda County’s juvenile hall school, she learned that success looks different for each student. One student could not write his name. Over three sessions, which turned out to...