This story was co-published with Mother Jones.  Updated March 27, 2026: In response to this story, YouTube terminated six channels for violating the platform’s terms of service and one channel for violating its spam policy. In a video that has been played almost 50,000 times since it was posted five months ago, two cartoon children sing...

All 8th graders in the San Francisco Unified School District will soon be able to enroll in Algebra I now that board members voted earlier this week to fully restore the course at the middle school level. The 50,000-student system made headlines in 2014 when it eliminated the curriculum for eighth graders in an effort to...

The first time a mother in our study heard her daughter say “Mami,” it wasn’t through speech. It came through a communication tablet at school. Sofía, a 6 year old with autism, pressed a button, and a digital voice spoke the word her mother had waited years to hear. That moment carried more than joy....

Community members packed a high school auditorium in Chelsea, Massachusetts, last month to oppose the school board’s plan to cut 70 positions, including reading coaches, special education staff and counselors.  “These support systems are what students really rely on,” one girl told the board. “As someone who struggles a lot with being overwhelmed and anxious,...

We adults are perennially susceptible to panicking about the health and safety of “kids today.” From the alleged perils of mass access to film in the early 1900s to early 1990s nerves over hip hop to today’s anxieties about smartphones and social media, we’re pretty much always finding reasons to collectively worry about American youth. ...

California’s schools are facing a dual challenge: closing persistent academic gaps while rebuilding an educator workforce stretched thin. Unacceptably high numbers of students are testing below state standards, 50% in reading and more than 60% in math, according to state assessment data from the California Department of Education. Chronic absenteeism, while improving from pandemic peaks,...

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter. Following allegations of rape and sexual abuse by the late California labor leader Cesar Chavez, more than 30 school districts across the state face questions about renaming elementary, middle and high schools, while at least one California State University reckons with its memorialization of...

Imagine a restaurant that is losing customers. Instead of cutting back, the owner hires more servers. As revenues decline, the waiters demand higher pay and more busboys to help them serve fewer customers.  That might sound like the premise of an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. But something very similar is happening right now...

This story was originally published by EdSource Thousands of California school employees have received preliminary pink slips in recent weeks as districts scrabble to close budget gaps caused by falling enrollment and rising costs. Most went to school administrators and classified school staff, such as clerks, administrative assistants and paraeducators. Districts were complying with a state...

Lauren McNally recalls when the checks began showing up at her house in 2021. As part of the expanded, refundable child tax credit, McNally and her husband were among 36 million families who received monthly checks from the federal government to offset the costs of raising their children. “It helped us pay off some credit...