Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new charter school law intended to settle a longstanding feud between charter operators and those calling for tighter restrictions on their growth. Known as Assembly Bill 1505, the compromise between charters and the teachers union gave local districts the authority to consider whether the opening of a...

A new study continues to build the case that the risks of in-person learning for elementary and middle school students may be lower than many officials originally feared, but comes just as surging coronavirus cases nationwide are prompting multiple districts to delay reopening. The paper, published in the journal Nature Immunology, examined 47 youth and 32...

More than 200 students in one California district received turkeys, groceries and their required school immunizations at a drive-thru clinic last week. With Thanksgiving looming, the event for West Contra Costa Unified School District families in Richmond, California, on Thursday attempted to solve two problems at once — many families in the district are vulnerable to...

Despite the availability of new COVID-19 tests that are faster and more cost-effective, significant barriers to universal testing in schools remain. To date, the absence of quality COVID-19 tests has forced superintendents and principals to rely on a combination of masking, screening for symptoms, social distancing and good hygiene practices. Although testing has always been...

Since COVID-19 upended American life, story after story has highlighted students with disabilities falling behind and families bringing lawsuits to force schools to serve students with special needs. Schools struggle to consistently engage students with disabilities in distance learning, and attendance is often lower for these students than for any others. Virtual learning, by and large, is not working for students...

New Jersey this year missed out on prom, college tours, and the usual pomp and circumstance of graduation because of the pandemic. But thanks to a devoted local middle school teacher, these 12th-graders retained one rite of passage very unique to their suburban town: reading a letter from their sixth-grade selves that took them back...

President-elect Joe Biden might have won the White House, but his expansive education plan will soon hit a Congress that has far fewer Democrats than envisioned under the “Blue Wave” forecast prior to the election. Democrats’ hopes for flipping the Senate now largely depend on capturing two seats in Georgia that won’t be decided until...

Californians have long complained that the state doesn’t adequately fund education. But last week, they still opted not to amend a 40-year-old property tax formula that could have added roughly $4 billion a year to the state’s education budget. Proposition 15 divided the state in half, with official results released Wednesday showing it fell 51.8...

Under California’s Local Control Funding Formula, the San Diego Unified School District’s highest-needs schools generated $1,468 more per student in 2016-17 than the average amount generated across all district schools. Yet, according to our new study, once that money passed through the district, those same neediest schools wound up receiving $127 less per student than the...

This essay originally appeared on the FutureEd blog. As schools grapple with longstanding racial inequities brought into sharp focus by recent cases of police brutality and the coronavirus pandemic, one problem stands out: Black girls often face both racial and gender bias in the nation’s classrooms. An analysis of national U.S. Department of Education 2015-16 civil rights data...