As the Los Angeles Unified School District prepares to reopen elementary schools for the first time in 13 months, recently released court documents show that while the district pushed for more instructional time for students earlier this year, the union successfully bargained for a reduced teacher workday — and a lot more of what it wanted. On...

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona will travel to local communities over the next few weeks in a continued push to get more schools to reopen before the Biden Administration’s self-imposed 100-day deadline. “My job, I can do it better if I’m listening to what is happening in the field,” Cardona told viewers during a summit...

Nearly two-thirds of parents say their child has recently experienced mental or emotional challenges such as anxiety, depression and even suicidal thoughts, according to a new national survey on student well-being during the pandemic. Yet amid growing concern that the pandemic and its widespread disruptions to schools could have a devastating, long-lasting toll on students’...

As a more contagious strain of COVID-19 sweeps across the United States, infectious disease experts say schools should brace for a challenging spring. First identified in Britain, the variant has been doubling its total U.S. cases every 10 days and has already become the dominant strain in Florida, according to reports. Dr. Michael Osterholm, director...

New research from California shows a sizable decline in applications for university financial aid during the first phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. The trend among first-year college students has not reversed itself, the data show, and declines are particularly acute in low-income neighborhoods and those with higher minority populations. Financial aid applications are a useful...

A year after mayors and governors announced the first school closures related to COVID-19, many have turned to personalized tutoring to cope with disruptions to learning. Families that could afford to hire private instructors began doing so even before the 2020-21 school year began, while governments in Europe launched full-fledged programs to work with thousands...

The House is soon expected to pass what President Joe Biden calls an “urgently needed” funding package that sends $126 billion to K-12 schools — almost twice as much provided in COVID-19 relief last year and significantly more than they received to recover from the Great Recession. The vote, expected by Wednesday, sets the stage for Biden...

Twenty percent fewer kindergartners are on track to learn how to read than their peers were at this time last year, and most haven’t made much progress since the fall, according to new assessment data released in February. Thirty-seven percent of this year’s kindergartners are on-track in early reading skills, compared to 55 percent during the 2019-20...

On any given school day, just one or two students show up in-person for Houston teacher Trevor Toteve’s lectures. With the bulk of his class opting to learn remotely during the pandemic, several beam themselves into the classroom via webcam. But most students appear as static, black boxes. Toteve urges the high schoolers in his...

After nearly a year of disastrous COVID news, it emerged in mid-February like a light at the end of the tunnel. Infections began dramatically falling and “herd immunity,” some experts began to say, could spell the end of the pandemic in the not-so-distant future. At some point this year — estimates range from mid-summer to...