Even as information about schools proliferates across the internet, a new set of polls shows that parents and teachers want more meaningful student data, capturing children’s relationships with education that go beyond just their grades or even time in school. Half of parents strongly agree and 43 percent somewhat agree that they support teachers’ using student...

Quick — without looking it up on Google, can you define “edge-aversion”? Here’s a hint: It’s a decision-theory term describing what’s also known as middle bias. That is, a test-taker’s tendency to pick anything but the top or bottom option on a multiple-choice question. To a psychometrician, it’s a tell that the answer was a...

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. Rosalie Reyes has always been proud of her Latin origin. Her parents are from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but...

What happens to traditional school districts when charter schools come to town? Do they offer families new, high-quality educational options and help spread better teaching techniques? Or do they represent unwanted competition, swiping students and funding from districts until academic performance begins to suffer? It’s a debate that divides much of the education community and...

In 2013, attorneys at the California Innocence Project, weighed down by a backlog of casework, turned for help to an unusual group: humanities students at High Tech High Chula Vista, a nearby charter school. The students, all juniors, trained on a past case handled by the San Diego nonprofit, which reviews pleas from prisoners who...

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. Diego López has been part of the Los Angeles Unified School District since he began his education in a Head Start...

A majority of Americans hold a positive view of K-12 public school principals, who are typically seen as caring and trustworthy. How about tech executives, journalists and members of Congress? Not so much. A Pew Research Center survey released Thursday found that Americans hold mixed views about the job performance of people in positions of power,...

In early 2011, when Maryland and other states were adopting the Common Core State Standards, teachers in the Baltimore City Public Schools were starting to grumble. “The materials in a lot of districts fell woefully short of the new standards,” said Sonja Santelises, now Baltimore’s superintendent. “[I was] hearing classroom teachers rightly point out that...

An obvious educational rule of thumb is that in order for students to learn at school, they first have to show up. But with millions of children counted “chronically absent” each year, a new report argues that educators can improve attendance by first making their schools more welcoming places to attend. The report, released Tuesday...

Updated and corrected, Sept. 20 As California this month expanded a statewide ban on suspending younger students for defiant behavior, lessons on how this increasingly sweeping school discipline reform may play out can be found in Los Angeles, which barred such suspensions on an even broader scale six years ago. Previously in California, “willful defiance”...