The education culture wars on issues like critical race theory and how to teach history create a false narrative and collective illusion on K-12 issues among Americans. The stubborn fact is that voters’ opinions and governors’ statements show broad agreement on a collection of practical education issues that offers a common-sense K-12 governing agenda, according...

It was the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that brought Shannon Watts to action. From her Indiana home, the former communications executive and stay-at-home mother of five created a Facebook group for women who supported heightened gun laws. What began as a modest community on the social media platform quickly grew into the political...

When President Ronald Reagan proclaimed the first National Math Awareness Week in April 1986, one of the problems he cited was that too few students were devoted to the study of math. “Despite the increasing importance of mathematics to the progress of our economy and society, enrollment in mathematics programs has been declining at all levels of...

For years, LA Unified has struggled to increase its college enrollment rate for high school graduates, which has hovered around 60%. Now, three organizations are working with students in LAUSD high schools to increase the district’s college enrollment, with strategies such as helping students write college essays, hear from professionals, and be mentored through high...

April 3 and 4 marked the last two of four “acceleration days” for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The optional extra tutoring was designed to help make up for instruction lost during COVID school closures. Of course, things didn’t work out as planned. United Teachers Los Angeles voted to boycott the extra...

In the fall of 2011, having hurriedly finished The Bee Eater, a book about Michelle Rhee’s tumultuous turn at the helm of D.C. Public Schools (hurriedly because Rhee got the ax when her protector-mayor got voted out of office) I was looking for a really, really fresh approach to public education, especially schools that serve poor...

The latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are devastating: Nearly 60% of teenage girls report feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness. Thirty percent said they seriously considered suicide. Among LGBQ+ youth, that number rises to almost 50%. A critical aspect of addressing this youth mental health crisis is ensuring that young...

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho says attendance at district schools has improved this school year – but one local board district has had a dramatically higher rate of chronically absent students.    In the 2021-2022 school year, 55.4% of students in Board District 2 (BD2) were chronically absent, according to the LAUSD Open Data portal. It was...

If you’ve ever read a science fiction story, you know the dangers of time travel. Someone returns to the past and alters something that completely remakes the present and the future, usually with disastrous effect. So it went last month with Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. Carvalho was forced to shutter schools...

They might not want to hear it, but it’s true: Students assigned to teachers with tougher grading policies are better off in the long run, research suggests. According to a paper released last fall through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, eighth- and ninth-graders who learned from math teachers with relatively higher performance standards earned better...