For the hundreds of schools, thousands of students and millions of fans left dismayed by the cancellation last year of the NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament, the return of March Madness is cause for much celebration and, of course, much caution. The Big Dance comes at a time when vaccinations are leading the nation...

This essay is adapted from posts that originally appeared on the New York School Talk blog.  Every adult in a school building gets a union. In New York City, most are members of the United Federation of Teachers, and together they are incredibly powerful and effective. They negotiate all the rules. They can influence hiring and firing...

New research from California shows a sizable decline in applications for university financial aid during the first phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. The trend among first-year college students has not reversed itself, the data show, and declines are particularly acute in low-income neighborhoods and those with higher minority populations. Financial aid applications are a useful...

How are school district budgets faring this year? That depends. Many districts are struggling financially. They have spent large sums of money dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic — buying technology, purchasing cleaning supplies, hiring more substitute teachers and attempting to address student learning loss and disengagement. This story, of districts in distress, is an easy...

An Arkansas school district has one teacher leading instruction for several classes while others support children in small groups. A suburban Cleveland elementary school teamed up teachers and restructured its school day to expand staff planning time. A St. Louis charter school is making sure every educator also serves as an education navigator or coach...

A year after mayors and governors announced the first school closures related to COVID-19, many have turned to personalized tutoring to cope with disruptions to learning. Families that could afford to hire private instructors began doing so even before the 2020-21 school year began, while governments in Europe launched full-fledged programs to work with thousands...

The House is soon expected to pass what President Joe Biden calls an “urgently needed” funding package that sends $126 billion to K-12 schools — almost twice as much provided in COVID-19 relief last year and significantly more than they received to recover from the Great Recession. The vote, expected by Wednesday, sets the stage for Biden...

Twenty percent fewer kindergartners are on track to learn how to read than their peers were at this time last year, and most haven’t made much progress since the fall, according to new assessment data released in February. Thirty-seven percent of this year’s kindergartners are on-track in early reading skills, compared to 55 percent during the 2019-20...

On any given school day, just one or two students show up in-person for Houston teacher Trevor Toteve’s lectures. With the bulk of his class opting to learn remotely during the pandemic, several beam themselves into the classroom via webcam. But most students appear as static, black boxes. Toteve urges the high schoolers in his...

After nearly a year of disastrous COVID news, it emerged in mid-February like a light at the end of the tunnel. Infections began dramatically falling and “herd immunity,” some experts began to say, could spell the end of the pandemic in the not-so-distant future. At some point this year — estimates range from mid-summer to...