Over the last decade, educators and administrators have often encountered lofty promises of technology revolutionizing learning, only to experience disappointment when reality failed to meet expectations. It’s understandable, then, that educators might view the current excitement around artificial intelligence with a measure of caution: Is this another overhyped fad, or are we on the cusp...

Most of the programs school districts have implemented to address COVID learning loss are doomed to fail. Despite well-intended and rapid responses, solutions such as tutoring or summer school will miss their goals. Existing policies have failed to consider the unique needs of the students these services seek to help, and thus are destined to...

Los Angeles teachers have much to cheer about. Less than a month after the district’s school support workers received a contract with 30% salary increases, United Teachers Los Angeles came away with a mammoth deal of its own. On April 13, the district made what it called a “historic offer” of 19% in pay hikes...

When President Ronald Reagan proclaimed the first National Math Awareness Week in April 1986, one of the problems he cited was that too few students were devoted to the study of math. “Despite the increasing importance of mathematics to the progress of our economy and society, enrollment in mathematics programs has been declining at all levels of...

April 3 and 4 marked the last two of four “acceleration days” for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The optional extra tutoring was designed to help make up for instruction lost during COVID school closures. Of course, things didn’t work out as planned. United Teachers Los Angeles voted to boycott the extra...

If you’ve ever read a science fiction story, you know the dangers of time travel. Someone returns to the past and alters something that completely remakes the present and the future, usually with disastrous effect. So it went last month with Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. Carvalho was forced to shutter schools...

Imagine a classroom of curious elementary students grasping clipboards, eager to conduct an experiment to see if the small car they built can protect their egg “passenger” in a head-on collision. It’s a lesson that not only reinforces their understanding of engineering design, but also offers practical examples of physics in action. And it’s fun....