The closing months of 2020 have brought little certainty to the question of when the COVID-19 pandemic will end. Through the beginning of a new school year, the drawn-out climax of a disputed election, and even the development of three separate vaccines, coronavirus infections and deaths have surged in a frightening second wave that has...

Never before has the American education system been put under a microscope — sometimes literally — the way it was in 2020. That’s because COVID-19 illustrated just how much about schools we take for granted. Education research examines all kinds of things that take place inside the walls of schools, from science lessons and gym...

Landra Fair, a high school science teacher at Unified School District No. 232 in Kansas, was thrilled for the chance to participate in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine trial this past summer, eager to further scientific research in this area. It’s not the first time a member of her family has done so: Her mother was part...

While many school leaders focus on bringing students back into in-person classrooms as they were, a majority of parents want them to develop new and better ways of teaching, prioritize high-quality distance learning now and continue to offer virtual instruction even after COVID-19 recedes, a new poll finds. The survey, commissioned by the National Parents...

When the Tennessee Department of Education released school report cards in June, it included per-student spending data for every school in the state — a federal requirement intended to demystify complex budget data that has long been out of reach for parents. Done well, experts predicted, the change had the potential to draw more parents...

Educators might be excited to have one of their own in the White House next month, but there’s another constituency that future first lady Jill Biden is planning to highlight as part of her work in the administration. “You are going to have a military family back in the White House,” she told families of...

Eleven districts in California are seeing an 89 percent surge in chronic absenteeism among students in elementary grades compared to last year at this time, according to new data presented to the California Department of Education. That means nearly one in five students has missed 10 percent of school so far this year. But the...

Like many districts, Massachusetts’s Framingham Public Schools is trying to determine how to safely bring back students for in-person instruction. Unlike most, this suburban district just outside Boston has a specific re-entry plan that runs 67 pages and includes a detailed survey of the ventilation system in each of its 14 schools. Framingham is paying...

Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new charter school law intended to settle a longstanding feud between charter operators and those calling for tighter restrictions on their growth. Known as Assembly Bill 1505, the compromise between charters and the teachers union gave local districts the authority to consider whether the opening of a...

A new study continues to build the case that the risks of in-person learning for elementary and middle school students may be lower than many officials originally feared, but comes just as surging coronavirus cases nationwide are prompting multiple districts to delay reopening. The paper, published in the journal Nature Immunology, examined 47 youth and 32...