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...

2020 was the year that U.S. history, and clashing perspectives on it from left and right, became a campaign issue. First, President Trump and his fellow Republicans attacked the New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project, accusing its authors of dishonestly tearing down American ideals in a history curriculum that has been adopted in thousands of...

Thousands of English language learners could be headed for American public schools in the coming months due to recent changes in U.S. immigration policy and devastating natural disasters in Central and South America. Their arrival could pose a challenge for local school systems, particularly poor districts that might not have enough teachers or space to...

* One lace loops to make the trunk. A squirrel runs around the tree, jumps into a hole at the bottom, and comes out the other side. Pull it though and… huzzah! * Teaching a child to tie their shoes isn’t always easy. If you’ve embarked on this painstaking task, watching as little fingers fumble...

This article, which originally appeared at The Marshall Project, is being co-published here via the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems. When his father died last year of an overdose, Rodney Watson thought he would miss the funeral and his last chance to say...

When leading assessment providers released data in November on pandemic-related learning loss, the news wasn’t as dreadful as some had predicted. But new attempts to dig deeper into the results from two states now show that many students, particularly those in the elementary grades, have made far less progress than they would have in a...

COVID-19 is changing what students plan to do after high school, with those more affected by the pandemic more likely to have altered their post-graduation expectations, a new student survey reveals. One in four high school seniors said their postsecondary plans had changed since the start of the pandemic, an increase from 18 percent of...

Shortly after the Centers for Disease Control unveiled new federal guidance surrounding reopening schools for in-person learning — guidance that prioritizes masking and social distancing as key strategies and outlines a new color-coded system for measuring surrounding community spread — the union representing more than 35,000 Los Angeles teachers pushed back against the suggestion that...

Students — even those in high school — can return to classrooms full time in communities with low to moderate spread of COVID-19 as long as schools enforce universal mask wearing and 6 feet of distance between students, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday in updated school reopening guidance. The agency also...

Luis Martinez, an 11-year-old fifth grader with autism, rarely missed a day of school before the pandemic. Though non-verbal, he delighted in seeing his friends and teachers, and his mother, who quit her job five years ago to care for him, was thrilled for his small gains in communication. But that all changed during the...