Sometimes when I take a Lyft to LAX, the driver will ask what I do. If I tell the truth and say I’m a professor of education, I almost always regret it, because I’ll immediately get a variety of (usually) uninformed and inaccurate ideas about what’s wrong with schools and how to solve the nation’s...

When Tami Morrison, a teacher and mom from outside Youngstown, Ohio, discovered Superkids, she thought she’d found the perfect way to help young children learn to read. Kids like her daughter Clara, a second grader, glommed on to its rich characters; she’s especially fond of Lily, who wears her black hair in a short bob...

Seventy years after the Supreme Court outlawed separating public school children by race, a new report breathes life into an old question: how the most coveted public schools are able to legally exclude all but the most privileged families. In the first of its kind state-by-state breakdown by nonprofits Available to All and Bellwether Education,...

New York City districts with above-average reading scores have asked for flexibility from Chancellor David Banks’s new literacy curriculum mandates. This raises an important question for school leaders nationwide: What’s the right goal for student achievement? Is 50% of students reading and writing proficiently good enough? Is 63%? What is the right number? Edwin Locke...

A proposed bill to increase child literacy rates in California has died in the legislature this year after objections from the state teachers union and English learner groups. A December 2023 policy brief by EdVoice, Decoding Dyslexia CA and Families In Schools found that 60% of California students aren’t reading at grade level skills by...

Racial segregation in classrooms edged upward over the past three decades, according to the work of two prominent sociologists. Across America’s largest school districts, the expansion of school choice and the winding down of court-mandated desegregation decrees have resulted in white students being more racially isolated from their non-white peers, the authors find. Timed to...

A new report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that about 40% of high school graduates who enrolled in college or a certification program in 2013 hadn’t received a degree or credential eight years later. The study followed 23,000 students starting with their freshman year of high school in 2009. Though 74% enrolled...

A growing New York nonprofit is using a newly released report to cement data around the axiom that social capital — or who you know — is key for first-generation college graduates searching for their first job. The report by Basta, an organization that connects first-generation college graduates with careers, tracks the experiences of young...

The California Charter Schools Association last month filed a lawsuit against LA Unified over its controversial new policy barring charters from using classrooms in certain district school buildings.  It’s unclear if the CCSA will prevail in court, but the suit is already making an impact on the nation’s second-largest district.  LAUSD’s new colocation rules were...

Looking at our country in 2024, it seems like Americans can barely talk to each other anymore, much less understand and navigate differences to come up with solutions that benefit us all. Heading into another election cycle, everyone from talking heads on television to community leaders are worrying about bringing American adults together. But it’s...