The vast majority of Los Angeles Unified School District employees will not be at work for most of this week, leading to the closure of schools. SEIU Local 99, which represents 30,000 support workers, called a strike because of what it calls unfair labor practices by the district. United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents 32,000...

No worker in America should succumb to poverty-wages, be denied health care, or experience homelessness. And no child should be the victim of labor disputes. But that is exactly what is happening in Los Angeles – and the temptation is to pick sides as we see the tensions play out between SEIU and LAUSD. But...

Once again, March Madness has taken hold of much of the nation as this month’s NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament gets off the ground. As we have done over the past six years, we take this opportunity, when the nation is focused on figuring out which colleges produce the best basketball teams, to examine...

Americans are skeptical of science. Public ambivalence has shown itself clearly in concerns over the safety and necessity of vaccines and in the dismissal of public health guidance designed to curtail the spread of COVID-19. None of this is surprising, given the anemic state of science education in the U.S. Far too many young people...

The nation’s schools are facing a crisis. The pandemic slowed student learning, and schools and families are eager to see academic improvement as quickly as possible. Access to trained school counselors can help students succeed in their classes, but there are too few counselors supporting too many kids with too varied challenges. This problem predates...

As a little girl growing up in El Salvador, Aracely Valdes loved school and dreamed of becoming a teacher. Yet, when she enrolled in the Fort Worth, Texas, public schools at age 15, a new immigrant who spoke no English, the path to fulfilling her dream was far from clear.  Then, in her final year...

The past year has seen several prominent Black celebrities making anti-semitic remarks. Rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) proclaimed in an interview with Alex Jones, “I like Hitler … I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.” Brooklyn Nets star point guard Kyrie Irving promoted on social media a film that included elements of Holocaust denial. Whoopi Goldberg stated...

Just before the winter holidays, the National Center for Education Statistics released new data on school staffing in the 2021-22 academic year. The data are provisional, but they represent the best look yet at how school staffing levels have changed over the course of the pandemic.  As I forecast in September, the new data show that schools have been...

As schools face rising behavioral challenges, debates rage on about restorative justice, which rejects traditional, punitive discipline in favor of relationship-based work to address underlying causes of conflict. Studies show widely disparate results — for example, on school violence and academic performance. Many advocates explain these discrepancies by noting that neutral-to-negative results come about when schools cherry-pick restorative practices —...

Did you, like me, take time over the break to play with one of the new artificial intelligence bots? I asked ChatGPT to write a blog in the style of Robin Lake on the topic of helping students recover from the impacts of COVID-19 and related school closures. Here’s what it offered: As the director of the...