While debates rage over who should win admission to selective high schools, public education leaves millions of talented young people, many of them students of color and from low-income backgrounds, without access to advanced learning. Vanderbilt University researchers have found that high-achieving students from the wealthiest 20% of U.S. families are six times more likely...

This essay originally appeared on the FutureEd blog. When schools were shuttered around the country three months ago, the pandemic did what nearly a decade of activist parents and testing skeptics could not do — put a systemwide pause on statewide standardized testing. It wasn’t because the tests were too long or poorly aligned to classroom...