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...

Ever since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957, America has been struggling to recruit and retain STEM teachers in its public middle and high schools. In the 2017-2018 school year, approximately 100,000 teacher jobs in STEM – or science, technology, engineering and mathematics – went unfilled at the high school...

From teacher to congressional candidate, Nick Melvoin has accomplished much in his years of public service. Now he is one of 18 candidates running in the March 4, 2024 primary for U.S. House of Representatives California District 30.  Melvoin started his career as an English teacher at Markham Middle School in Watts. Motivated to see...

Today, the Knowledge Matters Campaign is unveiling a new K-8 English language arts curriculum review tool to advance the understanding of truly high-quality, content-rich literacy instruction. It has felt like a necessary, even urgent, resource at this pivotal moment in time. The last year has witnessed a surge in focus on the importance of background...

Objectively speaking, it’s a weird time to be talking about layoffs in schools. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021 had the fewest layoffs in public education in the last two decades. Last year was just a bit higher, and so far 2023 is tracking about the same. There are still pockets of layoffs due to...

Parents and caregivers have been struggling for pretty much as long as I’ve been in the game. Ten years ago, I had a playground chat with a mother of a toddler who felt like she was failing on all these complicated goals she had for her kid. This deeply unhappy stranger helped me realize something:...