LA School Report

Parenting during COVID-19 can feel overwhelming. While managing worries about our family’s health, financial and emotional well-being, we were also responsible for homeschooling and ensuring our children continued learning, which is a heavy weight to carry. As we navigated these pressures, I gained a newfound appreciation for the invaluable role our schools and teachers played...

In developing its public school system, the United States deliberately departed from the traditional European model of channeling students from wealthy backgrounds into rigorous academic tracks and those from the working class into vocational ones. Instead, as Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz note in their book The Race Between Education and Technology, the aim was...

While all students have experienced disruption to their daily lives this spring, COVID-19, the economic disaster that followed and the continued violence against African Americans are disproportionately affecting communities of color, particularly black students. Educators need to step up and help students regain their footing, heal and flourish. The country’s education system’s typical, standardized response...

In 2019, The Sidewalk School opened in a cramped tent city on the U.S.-Mexico border. Now its students, craving educational opportunities in the States, face their latest challenge: learning during a pandemic The Sidewalk School in Matamoros, Mexico, founded last summer by two American volunteers, defied convention from the start. Located just three miles from...

A new research effort underway at Tulane University aims to track how every K-12 school in the United States — district, charter and private — responded to the coronavirus pandemic and the abrupt shift to remote learning that came with it. Led by economist and education researcher Douglas Harris, the project is part of REACH, the National...

Amber Bennett was 11 when she took her first class at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio. As a seventh-grader, she was eligible for College Credit Plus, a statewide dual enrollment program designed to increase access for low-income students, students who were the first in their families to attend college and children of color. “It...

This essay originally appeared on the FutureEd blog. When schools were shuttered around the country three months ago, the pandemic did what nearly a decade of activist parents and testing skeptics could not do — put a systemwide pause on statewide standardized testing. It wasn’t because the tests were too long or poorly aligned to classroom...

Over the next several weeks, LA School Report will be publishing stories reported and written before the coronavirus pandemic. Their publication was sidelined when schools across the country abruptly closed, but we are sharing them now because the information and innovations they highlight remain relevant to our understanding of education. This interview is one in...

Bilingual special education teacher Karen Reyes was in her Austin, Texas, home, using sign language to tell a story about an elephant and a pig to her 4- and 5-year-old students, when the text messages started rolling in. Not yet, she thought to herself, trying to stay calm, aware of the kids watching her over...

Education groups cheered a Supreme Court opinion Thursday that blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to end a program that provides work authorization and deportation relief to some 650,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children. The administration’s move to terminate the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program — in...