While politicians continue to cast immigrants as a threat to local communities with rhetoric so hateful it’s shut down schools, RAND researchers note a positive development following the arrival of young newcomers: They boost other students’ academic performance. A Delaware-based study found that a substantive increase in young immigrants leads to sizable academic gains for...

Whether a prospective student speaks Spanish, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Arabic or Mam — a Mayan language used in parts of Guatemala and Mexico — Oakland Unified School District’s enrollment office has a staffer who can help. If a newcomer communicates using a less common tongue like Dari and Pashto — spoken in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran...

Oakland, California They come to the enrollment office at 18, 19, or 20, often without transcripts, identification or immunizations. Some have massive gaps in their education and many speak little English. Any one of these would be reason enough for districts across the country to deny admission, but not here. With ample enrollment staff speaking...

More than 40 education advocacy organizations have teamed up to fight longstanding residency requirements that tie children to their local public schools — rather than letting them transfer to places that might serve them better.  The No More Lines Coalition aims to end what it calls “discriminatory public school district boundary lines” in all 50 states by...

When the prestigious California Institute of Technology announced in August it would drop calculus as an admissions requirement — students must prove mastery of the subject but don’t have to take it in high school — observers of an ongoing education equity debate might have thought it was the last holdout. According to a recent...

High-achieving Black, Hispanic and low-income students who pass algebra in the 8th grade — a feat that can set children up for success in college and beyond — still end up taking far fewer advanced high school math courses than their white, Asian and more affluent peers, new research shows. Outcomes are starkly different for those who...

A new study reveals vastly improved college enrollment and completion rates for students who attended both KIPP middle and high schools as compared to a similar group of children who applied for enrollment but were not selected in the network’s lottery system. KIPP middle and high school students were 31 percentage points more likely to...

School districts around the country, reeling from dramatic drops in fourth- and eighth-grade math scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, hope to recoup at least some of what’s been lost through summer programs. Flush with federal dollars, new and robust offerings have been open to a wide swath of students starting in...

It’s been nearly 11 months since Anastasiia Puzhalina and her family arrived in Tacoma, Washington, after a white-knuckled journey out of Ukraine. With no home, no income and no idea of how their children would adjust to a new school, they were consumed with worry. But, a year after Russia invaded its neighbor, upending the...

Gifted programming, already uneven across the country and prone to racial discrimination, has yet another blind spot: twice exceptional students.  These advanced learners, who may also receive special education services, can languish academically, their skills overlooked. The same holds true for low-income children, students of color and those learning to speak English.  Experts say most teachers have only limited...