LA School Report

When I was young, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I came to the United States from El Salvador when I was five years old, and while my mom and I liked to dream, we were more focused on meeting our day-to-day needs...

In 2019, Westcliffe Elementary in Greenville, South Carolina, got troubling news: It was one of 265 schools in the state where more than a third of third graders failed to meet literacy standards. Then the pandemic hit and “there were bigger fish to fry,” said Principal Beth Farmer. But the state had a plan. Teachers...

COVID-19 impacted every aspect of life, and schools are still dealing with its residual effects. Many teachers blame the pandemic for low achievement and isolation from peers as the root cause of student conflicts in schools. But are there more positive narratives to tell? In doing research for my Ph.D. program, I sought out the...

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Jesika Gonzalez will tell you that she wasn’t the biggest fan of Porterville, California, while she was growing up. “When I was younger, I was very, like, angsty,” the 18-year-old said as she flicked her purple hair over her shoulder. “Whatever,...

It’s well established that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. But a new analysis of federal data shows the problem may be worse than previously understood. Two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme rates of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year — more than double the rate in 2017-18,...

Experts have spent years trying to quantify the pandemic’s toll on a generation of K–12 students. Some have focused on the months of incomplete or nonexistent learning opportunities while instruction was being delivered remotely in 2020 and 2021. Others were most disturbed by the deferred development of social-emotional skills for the youngest students, or the...

This nation’s economic security will be won or lost based on the ability of elementary schools to energize science education. That is because the country is at the start of a massive effort intended to bring semiconductor manufacturing to the Southwest, battery research and development to rural upstate New York and more. It’s an effort...

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s recent decision to drop its staff vaccine mandate sparked little concern among parents and health officials as COVID-19 enters an endemic phase. “We face vastly different circumstances,” LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. “It is a decision based on scientific knowledge and current conditions, nothing more, nothing less.” Carvalho said...

When the Supreme Court delivered its landmark ruling prohibiting the consideration of race in college admissions, Richard Kahlenberg was the rare liberal intellectual who celebrated. A prolific researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, Kahlenberg didn’t just welcome the end of affirmative action as we knew it — he served as an...

The back-to-school scene as I dropped my daughter off for her first day of school today was delightfully, if unnervingly, normal. For parents around the country, this is the first back-to-school season since the end of COVID-19 as a public health emergency, and that is something to celebrate. As the country emerges from a pandemic that...