When I was in high school I worked part time at a dry cleaners. One day, a regular customer came in and asked to speak with me privately. He was, he told me, about to undergo a process to change his gender that involved some physical changes and was concerned that because the legalities would...

A version of this essay first appeared on The Kresge Foundation. Making community college tuition-free should be a national priority. It would help counter recent enrollment declines at our nation’s community colleges. It would help produce the trained employees businesses say they are lacking. Most importantly, it would bring low-income students and students of color into higher education,...

After more than a year in which the majority of students attended school fully or partially remotely, districts nationwide are contemplating how to meet children’s present academic and social needs and prepare them for the 2021-22 academic year. A slew of policies and practices are on the table for the summer and coming year, bolstered...

Last month, the U.S. Department of Education announced that K-12 schools will receive $122 billion under the American Rescue Plan’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. State and local educational agencies are now busy working out how best to spend the money, with the Biden administration encouraging schools to use the funds to not only support...

Here, in the wrenching 13th — or perhaps 14th, depending on how you mark the tragedies — month of the pandemic, so many American families are frayed. Even with vaccines bringing us nearer to something like its end, the strains of the long lockdown are weighing on pretty much every parent, caregiver and kid. And...

The hypocrisy in education policy can be astounding. Legislators in Sacramento are pushing legislation that supposedly “benefits all of California’s public school children” — AB 1316, a whopping 88-page bill that covers 45 sections of law, is packaged as a charter school reform bill. But what it really does is discriminate against more than 200,000...

We often want to see schools as a warm and welcoming place. And they are for some families. For others, however, schools are a major contributor to the over-punishment of children because of decades of zero-tolerance policies, harsh punishments, and policing in schools, and evidence tells us that these practices have actually made the problem worse....

Teaching to the middle has historically been the approach taken by many schools nationwide, where a one-size-fits-all model is the norm and students must figure out how to fit in or fail. When COVID-19 hit and schools quickly pivoted to distance learning, challenges and disparities — many already present but ignored — were revealed for...

As a Black educator and the mother of Black children, I can tell you that the last year of disrupted schooling has had a profound effect on all of the country’s children, and Black children in particular. It has disrupted the learning of my students, my daughters and my son — children who don’t have access...

Tackling learning loss that has resulted from the pandemic is today’s most pressing education policy concern. Critical remedies like intensive tutoring, added instructional time and early warning indicators have gotten a lot of attention. But there is another solution that is ripe for action, one that undergirds all other efforts to address learning loss: upgrading school buildings....