LA Unified senior Kamryn Williams is studying for finals this week — in the Chrysler sedan where she lives with her mother and their dog.  Kamryn, 18, who graduates next month from Hamilton High School in Culver City and will attend college in the fall, is one of about 15,000 homeless students enrolled in Los...

Question: How does a school district go broke with $1.1 billion in revenues?  Answer: When it spends $1.3 billion. This macabre joke is all-too real for San Francisco Unified, where this spring a state oversight panel took control of all budget decisions until the district balances its spending. After reviewing the district’s budget, the oversight...

A recent report has revealed only 16 percent of community college transfers earn a four-year degree with Black, Latino and low-income students taking the brunt of the completion outcomes. The data, released by the Community College Research Center and the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program, found about one-third of community college students transfer to a...

Seventy years ago this month, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board that racial segregation of children in America’s public schools was unconstitutional. Today, we’re commemorating the anniversary by relaunching our special Untold Stories of Brown v. Board microsite, dedicated to sharing the stories of the lesser-known students, parents and plaintiffs who joined...

Sometimes when I take a Lyft to LAX, the driver will ask what I do. If I tell the truth and say I’m a professor of education, I almost always regret it, because I’ll immediately get a variety of (usually) uninformed and inaccurate ideas about what’s wrong with schools and how to solve the nation’s...

When Tami Morrison, a teacher and mom from outside Youngstown, Ohio, discovered Superkids, she thought she’d found the perfect way to help young children learn to read. Kids like her daughter Clara, a second grader, glommed on to its rich characters; she’s especially fond of Lily, who wears her black hair in a short bob...

Seventy years after the Supreme Court outlawed separating public school children by race, a new report breathes life into an old question: how the most coveted public schools are able to legally exclude all but the most privileged families. In the first of its kind state-by-state breakdown by nonprofits Available to All and Bellwether Education,...

New York City districts with above-average reading scores have asked for flexibility from Chancellor David Banks’s new literacy curriculum mandates. This raises an important question for school leaders nationwide: What’s the right goal for student achievement? Is 50% of students reading and writing proficiently good enough? Is 63%? What is the right number? Edwin Locke...

A proposed bill to increase child literacy rates in California has died in the legislature this year after objections from the state teachers union and English learner groups. A December 2023 policy brief by EdVoice, Decoding Dyslexia CA and Families In Schools found that 60% of California students aren’t reading at grade level skills by...

Racial segregation in classrooms edged upward over the past three decades, according to the work of two prominent sociologists. Across America’s largest school districts, the expansion of school choice and the winding down of court-mandated desegregation decrees have resulted in white students being more racially isolated from their non-white peers, the authors find. Timed to...