LA School Report

Not so long ago, it seemed the data on COVID-19 held a degree of comfort when it came to children: not too many of them got infected, fewer still got sick and almost none were hospitalized. As for schools, they were not believed to be super spreaders of the virus, for either adults or students....

For years, a patchwork of afterschool programs in Dallas have provided care for thousands of children and reassurance to working parents their kids are in a safe place for the hours after classes end. Then the pandemic hit—and like so many other facets of family life in America, Dallas’ afterschool programs felt the effects, closing...

In the spring of 2020, facing massive disruptions to in-person instruction, state education chiefs urged then-U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to waive federal test requirements that had been in place for nearly 20 years. She granted a blanket, one-year “accountability waiver.” But in February, with a new administration in place, then-Education Secretary nominee Miguel Cardona...

When a little girl in Chris Nelson’s family child care center painted a picture of a purple cow, a boy in the program was quick to correct her: Cows, he said, could only be black and white. So the North Troy, Vermont, provider began organizing cow-related field trips so the preschoolers could reach their own...

Why some are comparing the national backlash against anti-racist teaching to Virginia’s strident campaign to resist school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education Arnold Ambers was still a teenager when he woke up at 4 a.m., jumped behind the wheel of a rickety bus and shuttled dozens of children to a nearby segregated elementary...

It felt like this fall would — at long last — be different. Last March according to the National Center for Education Statistics, just short of 40 percent of U.S. students were still learning entirely remotely. Roughly the same percentage were back attending full-time in-person learning (another 23 percent of students were enrolled in hybrid learning)....

A decade ago, journalist Amanda Ripley wanted to answer a simple question: Why do international tests routinely show dozens of countries outperforming the United States academically? Her resulting book, The Smartest Kids in the World, became a bestseller and one of the most talked-about releases in 2013. Following three American students as they traveled to high schools...

Over the past school year, the the Center on Reinventing Public Education has tracked how pandemic learning pods evolved from emergency responses to, in some cases, small, innovative, and personalized learning communities. This summer, as COVID-19 vaccinations increased, it seemed like the major impetus for these efforts was fading from view. We turned to our existing...

As students return to colleges and universities this fall, the highly communicable Delta variant of COVID-19 creates unexpected challenges to keep campuses safe and open. Higher education leaders now need to respond rapidly to protect their students, staff, faculty, and people with whom they come in contact. Everyone recognizes the benefits of in-person learning, but...

Some key absences complicated the return to school in Wayne Township, Indiana: 461 to be exact. After just eight days in classrooms, 37 positive coronavirus cases in the 16,000-student district outside Indianapolis had triggered hundreds of student quarantines, forcing young people to miss out on classes and extracurriculars. Superintendent Jeff Butts knew he had to...