Seventy years after the Supreme Court outlawed separating public school children by race, a new report breathes life into an old question: how the most coveted public schools are able to legally exclude all but the most privileged families. In the first of its kind state-by-state breakdown by nonprofits Available to All and Bellwether Education,...

A proposed bill to increase child literacy rates in California has died in the legislature this year after objections from the state teachers union and English learner groups. A December 2023 policy brief by EdVoice, Decoding Dyslexia CA and Families In Schools found that 60% of California students aren’t reading at grade level skills by...

Racial segregation in classrooms edged upward over the past three decades, according to the work of two prominent sociologists. Across America’s largest school districts, the expansion of school choice and the winding down of court-mandated desegregation decrees have resulted in white students being more racially isolated from their non-white peers, the authors find. Timed to...

A new report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that about 40% of high school graduates who enrolled in college or a certification program in 2013 hadn’t received a degree or credential eight years later. The study followed 23,000 students starting with their freshman year of high school in 2009. Though 74% enrolled...

A growing New York nonprofit is using a newly released report to cement data around the axiom that social capital — or who you know — is key for first-generation college graduates searching for their first job. The report by Basta, an organization that connects first-generation college graduates with careers, tracks the experiences of young...

The California Charter Schools Association last month filed a lawsuit against LA Unified over its controversial new policy barring charters from using classrooms in certain district school buildings.  It’s unclear if the CCSA will prevail in court, but the suit is already making an impact on the nation’s second-largest district.  LAUSD’s new colocation rules were...

Pursuing her passion for a career in medicine, California high schooler Ella Mayor found fulfillment working as a part-time pharmacy technician — tapping into skills she could never practice in school. Mayor, a 12th grade student at Santa Susana High School in Simi Valley, said she is often just going through the motions in her...

Los Angeles Unified is pushing ahead with district-wide lesson plans based on the science of reading even after state lawmakers rejected legislation requiring the curriculum. About half of the 434 elementary schools in the nation’s second-largest school system have already adopted lessons aligned to the phonics-based science of reading, according to Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. The...

When elementary school teacher Kimberly Papa gave birth to her daughter, Margot, a little over a year ago, she wasn’t expecting much in the way of paid maternity leave. She knew that the majority of Americans don’t have access to it and certainly not those in her state of Ohio. While she could take 12...

The turbulent rollout of a new federal financial aid application could mean thousands of low-income students miss out on college this fall. But one person feels especially perturbed by the botched implementation of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. Lamar Alexander — former governor of Tennessee, U.S. education secretary and Republican...