Harleigh Walker, an Alabama ninth grader, was among the guests at the White House last month when the Biden administration recognized Transgender Day of Visibility. But officials at Auburn Junior High School didn’t think meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris was a valid reason to miss school. “They wanted more evidence that she had gone,”...

Sign up here for LA School Report’s newsletter Kurt Russell, a Black history teacher and high school basketball coach from Oberlin High School in Ohio, has been known to give up his planning periods to sit with one of his players in class — just to make sure the student is meeting academic expectations. A...

Sign up here for LA School Report’s newsletter Almost 600,000 U.S. fourth- and eighth-graders are currently taking national reading and math tests for the first time since the pandemic began. The prospect makes the federal official in charge of measuring student progress a bit anxious. “The likelihood that the scores would be anything but down...

April 19 Update: The Council of Chief State School Officers named Kurt Russell the 2022 National Teacher of the Year. About 40 students at Oberlin Senior High School won’t be taking courses on Black history, race and gender oppression this fall — not because they’ve been canceled due to conservative opposition, but because Kurt Russell...

Sign up here for LA School Report’s newsletter As a member of PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Lab at Venice High School, near Los Angeles, Zoe Woodrick often stays at school past 5 p.m. recording podcasts and videos. When her interviews run late in the winter months, the sun is already setting over the Pacific, less...

With President Joe Biden’s major education spending proposals for high-poverty schools and students with disabilities left out of this year’s federal budget, some advocates are already shifting their attention to next year’s cycle. But with even Biden concerned that Republicans could take control of the House — and Congress increasingly unable to pass an annual budget on time...

The grade point averages of high school students hit an all-time high in 2019, and students earned more credits toward graduation than ever before. But those gains are belied by signs that students didn’t demonstrate greater achievement in tests of math and science, according to new national data released Wednesday. The High School Transcript Study,...

Sign up here for LA School Report’s newsletter. As the nation’s school superintendents gathered last month for their first in-person meeting since the pandemic began, Dan Domenech, the organization’s leader, pressed U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona about an urgent issue facing his members. At Music City Center in Nashville, he reminded the secretary that districts...

Sign up here for LA School Report’s newsletter. President Joe Biden made history when he nominated federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, however, she’ll likely face pressure to sit out one of the most important cases involving race and education in...

700 days. That’s about how long it’s been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era. On March 16, 2020, Los Angles Unified and other districts across 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Within nine days, the nation’s remaining districts followed suit. Since...