Even before the World Health Organization labeled the Omicron coronavirus strain a new “variant of concern” Friday, school closures were continuing to increase across the country. Last week, 621 schools across 58 districts announced new closures for a variety of reasons including teacher burnout, staffing shortages and virus outbreaks, according to counts from Burbio, a...

Early on, it seemed mentoring could be another casualty of the pandemic, the developmental relationships so many young people depended on for guidance and stability dissipating right when they were needed most. The COVID-19 crisis not only had the potential to disrupt learning, it threatened the ability to develop, maintain and grow networks of support...

Despite promises to focus on the growing racial and income divide among the nation’s students, new fall testing data show academic gaps have worsened, falling heaviest on some of the most vulnerable children. While education researchers have sounded the alarm for more than a year — that pandemic learning hurts low-income students and students of color most...

In the “isolation room” at Indian Springs High School — the command center for any COVID-related issues on campus — Janak Kaur seals the school security officer’s swab sample in a plastic bag. Meanwhile, the officer fills out a registration on a website where he’ll get his results in a day or two. As the...

As schools work to mitigate COVID spread in classrooms and get a handle on how many teens have been immunized, they may not be able to rely on vaccination data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In many cases, CDC numbers clash with locally reported vaccination rates, an analysis from The 74...

Most of the students at Monte Del Sol Charter School live along what is known as the Airport Road corridor in Sante Fe, New Mexico — a high-poverty, mostly immigrant community where “trailer parks hide behind fake adobe walls,” said Cate Moses, the school’s homeless liaison. These are the families she had in mind last...

Since COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring, American children have been subjected to a kind of natural experiment in inactivity. The last 18 months have seen three school years interrupted sporadically by closures, quarantines, and virtual instruction, during which time children have spent more time in front of screens than ever before. And the physical...

It wasn’t long after school started in California’s Solana Beach School District that some classrooms shifted to remote learning because of positive COVID-19 cases. During the first four weeks of school, there were 19 positive cases among students and staff and eight classrooms in quarantine. But on Aug. 30, the 2,800-student district began requiring students to...

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....

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...