*Updated Oct. 31 The 2018 midterm elections, marked by a slate of tightly contested races and a furious backlash against President Trump, will be the most expensive in history. Both Democratic and Republican aspirants in large media markets like Florida and Illinois have smashed quarterly fundraising records, with outside groups vastly outspending the official campaigns. In California,...

At the Juanita Street campus of San Diego’s Thrive Public Schools, the day begins with a high-five and a warm greeting at the visitors’ gate. The charter elementary school currently occupies a handful of compact, semi-permanent buildings and a blacktop in a hilly stretch of the City Heights neighborhood. Its electronic gate is still pretty...

Two of the oldest questions in Western education, going back to the ancient Greek philosophers, are: What is true? And how do you know? Thousands of years later, as superstition and pseudoscience have been replaced by conspiracy theory and ideological dogma, finding answers to those questions is as thorny as ever. The modern heirs to...

Even with a perpetual media carnival unfolding around the Trump presidency, and ahead of midterm elections that could result in an even more hectic news environment next year, the events of 2018 have been shaped to an extraordinary degree by America’s K-12 schools. After a massacre at a Florida high school in February, the national...

Student performance in civics has improved over the last two decades, even as the gap in civic knowledge has grown along class and racial lines during that period. That’s the conclusion of a new study released today by the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. Its Report on American Education, an annual publication exploring...

Test scores released Tuesday for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) continued a decade-long trend of stasis, with small improvements measured only for performance in eighth-grade reading. While states with disparate academic approaches have made some strides over the past few years — notably Florida and California — national averages have varied only slightly, despite...

Last October, in perhaps the final triumphant moment of his administration, President Obama announced that America’s soaring high school graduation rate had risen, again, to an all-time high of 83 percent. Before he took office, the percentage of students earning diplomas languished for decades in the low to mid-70s; now the news was made still...