Despite a boost from federal stimulus funds, drops in state funding for education during the Great Recession effectively ended a 50-year upward trend in national reading and math scores, according to a paper appearing Tuesday in the journal Education Next. A $1,000 cut in per-pupil spending also led to a decline in the college enrollment...

Timari Ray, who recently finished her first year at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, says she probably wouldn’t be able to afford higher education without the Tennessee Promise, which in 2014 made community college free for most students in the state. Thanks to the Promise, she’s planning to transfer to the University of...

Preschool participation has fallen by half during the pandemic, according to new data from the National Institute for Early Education Research. And even with early educators’ efforts to connect with students remotely, few families have remained consistently involved. This “massive reduction in preschool attendance,” the report shows, affected all families regardless of race or ethnicity, parents’ educational...

Georgianna Kelman’s phone doesn’t stop ringing nowadays. A special education attorney in Los Angeles, Kelman currently represents 60 families in southern California with complaints that their children didn’t receive services they were entitled to when schools closed in the spring. “I can only imagine the bottleneck of litigation that is coming,” Kelman said. “I have...

In May 2018, first-graders at George Peabody Elementary School in San Francisco sat cross-legged around the perimeter of a rectangular rug, each slightly swaying and bouncing like an electron held in place by a nucleus’s positive force. It’s hard to say what the main attraction was: Kristine Keane, the school social worker whose eyes narrow...

The nation’s K-12 schools reacted to the disruption of COVID-19 in broadly similar ways regardless of whether they were district, charter or private, according to new research released Monday. In general, traditional public schools did not lag behind charters or private schools, except for a few days near the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis when...

As summer approached, Ruthie Seroussi of Los Angeles began to worry about how to occupy her young sons. Even remote learning offered a structure to the day, but with summer camps cancelled, she dreaded battles over the TV and Xbox. She and her husband are both attorneys, but he works in an office while she...

Uncertainty surrounds the start of the 2020-21 school year. Districts around the country must prepare for three types of learning environments: the in-person style they’ve known for decades, the distance learning most were tossed into during the pandemic, and the most likely of scenarios — a hybrid environment, mixing both remote and in-classroom education. This...

The following statement was released Monday morning by both the Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified School Districts:  On March 13, four months ago today, we made the difficult decision to close our schools to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Much has changed since that time: New research is available, additional information on...

Over the next several weeks, The 74 will be publishing stories reported and written before the coronavirus pandemic. Their publication was sidelined when schools across the country abruptly closed, but we are sharing them now because the information and innovations they highlight remain relevant to our understanding of education. Riverhead, New York  Under oath in...