Harvard University researcher Tom Kane stood before a captive audience at Washington’s Omni Shoreham hotel last Wednesday, just hours after dropping the report everyone was talking about.  Offering the best look yet at students’ recovery from pandemic learning loss, the report showed that students actually made impressive academic gains last school year. But achievement gaps grew wider...

The rate of students chronically missing school got so bad during the pandemic that it will likely be 2030 before classrooms return to pre-COVID norms, a new report says. But even that prediction rests on optimistic assumptions about continued improvement in the coming years. For some states, it could take longer. In Louisiana, Oregon and...

Palm Desert, California Jon and Sam Bastianelli looked on patiently as their oldest son, the “history buff,” examined the axes, shovels and old farming tools displayed in a blacksmith shop at the Coachella Valley History Museum. His younger siblings crushed pumpkin seeds with a mortar and pestle in an exhibit honoring the Cahuilla tribe, the...

The Biden administration received high marks for elevating key strategies to help students rebound from pandemic learning loss — addressing chronic absenteeism, offering high-impact tutoring and extending learning afterschool and during the summer. “These three strategies have one central goal — giving students more time and more support to succeed,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona...

Last week, as leading education experts gathered — again —to ponder the nation’s sluggish recovery from pandemic learning loss, one speaker put the issue in stark relief.  “This is the biggest problem facing America,” Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor, said flatly. Nonetheless, he told those assembled at the Washington, D.C., event sponsored by...

A new report finds that a parent-led tutoring effort in Oakland produced similar gains in reading for young students as instruction from classroom teachers — a nod that could fuel similar efforts in other districts.  “The more the children know you and trust you, the more they’re willing to engage in what you’re trying to teach them,”...

About 2.9 million high school students took at least one Advanced Placement course in the 2020-21 school year, according to the latest federal data measuring access to educational opportunity. But Black and Latino students were significantly underrepresented in those college-level math and science courses. And schools in which at least 75% of students are Black...

Post-pandemic staffing challenges have eased up slightly this fall, but many school leaders report that they still have crucial vacancies to fill. The latest federal data on the public education workforce, released Tuesday, shows 45% of leaders said they were understaffed as the new school year began. That’s down from just over half last year....

In 2019, Westcliffe Elementary in Greenville, South Carolina, got troubling news: It was one of 265 schools in the state where more than a third of third graders failed to meet literacy standards. Then the pandemic hit and “there were bigger fish to fry,” said Principal Beth Farmer. But the state had a plan. Teachers...

It’s well established that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. But a new analysis of federal data shows the problem may be worse than previously understood. Two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme rates of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year — more than double the rate in 2017-18,...