A year ago, Miriam Calderón was leading the U.S. Department of Education’s work in early-childhood, a time when $400 billion in new federal funding for programs serving young children still seemed within reach. Now she’s working on the outside, hoping Congress passes a bill with a small fraction of that amount. While the Senate once...

Originally published by The 19th What students learn in sex ed has taken on new urgency following the Supreme Court’s decision in June to reverse Roe v. Wade, leaving abortion access up to the states. And as the Texas Republican Party takes aim at what kids learn in school, that dynamic is front and center...

Faced with a crisis of chronically absent students last academic year, Los Angeles County education officials have spent the summer training workers to connect with families so children return to class next month.     Teachers and social workers have been learning to spot mental health issues; and help parents find resources such as daycare so older...

Free therapy and professional coaching. $20,000 stipends.  These are some of the incentives and supports aimed at preventing an exodus of principals and school administrators taking on pandemic stressors and the nation’s divisive climate.  Focused on problem solving, self-care and leadership skills, a handful of nonprofits run by experienced educators have launched support and training...

The nation’s students showed small signs of academic recovery during the 2021-22 school year, but high absenteeism, quarantines and short-term closures “thwarted hopes of a strong comeback,” new data shows. Overall, the findings — from 8.3 million students in 25,000 schools — “point to a long road to recovery still ahead,” wrote researchers from nonprofit...

CK-12, a nonprofit focused on pairing educational content with the latest technologies, has fully embraced artificial intelligence, giving students and teachers using its free learning system access to an AI-powered tutor dubbed Flexi.  Employing artificial intelligence, CK-12 engineers programmed Flexi to act as a tutor, responding to math and science questions, testing students’ knowledge, helping...

Jennifer Kottke has worked with LAUSD homeless and foster care youth for more than 20 years — but she has never seen chronic absenteeism among these students become the crisis it did  during the pandemic.  While nearly half of all LAUSD students were chronically absent during most of the the 2021-22 school year, the numbers...

A $50 million partnership between LAUSD and AT&T California to provide thousands of students with high speed internet access is drawing concern from advocates. When Los Angeles district schools went remote at the start of the pandemic, the school system’s digital divide was thrown into sharp relief — making clear many low income students lacked...

Despite a dramatic decline in suspensions as students moved to remote learning during the pandemic, Black children and those in special education were disciplined far more often than white students and those in general education, according to a recent New York University study. The report also indicates students’ behavior may have worsened this past academic...

Katie Boody Adorno taught middle school math for five years, both in the Kansas City Public Schools and as a founding teacher at Alta Vista Charter Middle School. It was there she realized that ed tech solutions weren’t all she had dreamed of and weren’t always ideal for her students. She wanted more say in...