Second-grade teacher Nelly Cristales says her LAUSD school has developed a unique way to combat chronic absenteeism — competition. At 32nd Street School near University Park in East Los Angeles, a big, bright trophy goes to the class with the least absences and latenesses — and Cristales’ students are eager to win. “My kids are...

In a new Aspen Economic Strategy Group report, Jonathan Guryan and Jens Ludwig argue schools are bungling the rollout of high-dosage tutoring: “When schools are faced with the possibility of change, they tend to do fewer of the hard things that will help students and more of the easier things.” Schools won’t change the schedule, they...

There is not one American public education system; the U.S. is a collection of 50 states, and those states have chosen to deliver public education using very different approaches. These choices manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including how much money states provide for their public schools, how many people work in those schools...

California always seems to be ahead of the curve. Huge numbers of you are reading this column on Apple devices designed in Cupertino — and you got here by clicking a link on one of the social media companies with headquarters just down the road from there in Silicon Valley. The Golden State: it’s where...

About 2.9 million high school students took at least one Advanced Placement course in the 2020-21 school year, according to the latest federal data measuring access to educational opportunity. But Black and Latino students were significantly underrepresented in those college-level math and science courses. And schools in which at least 75% of students are Black...

College promise programs offering “free college” to local students are increasingly adding a new task to their core mission — connecting young people to internships and apprenticeships. The programs, in which students are promised free college tuition if they graduate high school, have long been considered a silver bullet against the soaring tuition and loan debt...

The American education system is stuck in an out-moded design for learning. The change the world is going through is accelerating, and we need to radically redesign how we support children and youth. Whether it’s the infusion of artificial intelligence into our world, or the need to solve the existential problems facing our society, our...

Los Angeles charter school operator Alfredo Rubalcava can’t sleep at night.  Like other educators in Los Angeles, the CEO of Magnolia Public Schools is awaiting the unveiling of a new policy limiting the use of nearly half the city’s school buildings by independently run charter schools. But with LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho on the verge...

Too often, the things that get kids most excited about learning have been stripped out of the school curriculum. No wonder when asked: “how was school”, so many students kids respond “boring.”  It shouldn’t be that way, and wouldn’t be if arts and music education were more widely available. However, over the past few decades,...

Artificial intelligence now has a daily presence in many teachers’ and students’ lives, with chatbots like ChatGPT, Khan Academy’s Khanmigo tutor and AI image generators like Ideogram.ai all freely available. But nearly a year after most of us came face-to-face with the first of these tools, a new survey suggests that few states are offering educators substantial guidance on how to...