In a small conference room off the main office of a large high school near Tulsa, Oklahoma, eight students gathered with a language arts teacher and a youth development specialist to identify a problem that they could tackle in their school. Students immediately talked about the mental health crisis among their peers. “When hard things...

During a heated Senate confirmation hearing in July 2021, civil rights attorney Catherine Lhamon made clear her goal to confront longstanding, dramatic racial disparities in school discipline at a moment when racial inequities — in policing, education and society more broadly — were at the center of the national discourse. She’d done it before, to fanfare...

Every day, adults are tasked with supporting young people showing behavioral changes or experiencing a mental health crisis. The problem? Many are unprepared to do so. It’s a challenge Deborah Offner came up against so often, as a consulting psychologist for schools in and around Boston, she decided to write a guide. Urgency is only...

Since being named a 2023 California Teacher of the Year, Bridgette Donald-Blue said kindergarteners she has never taught have eagerly approached her in the hallways at Coliseum Street Elementary School. They will say, “Hey Ms. Blue, you’re a teacher leader, I have you as a screensaver on my iPad, we watched your video at home,”...

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...