In the nearly 13 years since I wrote my first early childhood story for The Hechinger Report, I have never experienced a year quite like 2025. From the gutting of federal early childhood offices to threats to Head Start and the deeply felt ramifications of aggressive federal immigration enforcement, news on the early ed beat felt constant — and especially urgent — this year. Amid all this, there were some promising steps taken, especially at the state level, to elevate children’s issues and pay for programs that support the earliest years of life.

OAKLAND — In 2020, California led the nation in outlawing transcript-withholding, a debt collection practice that sometimes kept low-income college students from getting jobs or advanced degrees. Five years later, 24 of the state’s 115 community colleges still said on their websites that students with unpaid balances could lose access to their transcripts, according to a recent UC Merced survey. The communications failure has been misleading, student advocates said, although overall, the state’s students have benefited from the law. It “raises questions about what actual institutional practices are at colleges and the extent to which colleges know the law and are fully compliant with the law,” said Charlie Eaton, a UC Merced sociology professor who led the research team that conducted the survey in October.

It started with Harvard University. Then Notre Dame, Cornell, Ohio State University and the University of Michigan. Colleges are racing to close or rename their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices, which serve as the institutional infrastructure to ensure fair opportunity and conditions for all. The pace is disorienting and getting worse: since last January, 181 colleges in all. Often this comes with a formal announcement via mass email, whispering a watered-down name change that implies: “There is nothing to see here. The work will remain the same.” But renaming the offices…

LUBBOCK, Texas — The meeting of the local NAACP chapter began with a prayer — and then the litany of injustices came pouring out. A Black high school football player was called a “b—h-ass” n-word during a game by white players in September with no consequence, his mom said. A Black 12-year-old boy, falsely accused last December of touching a white girl’s breast, was threatened and interrogated by a police officer at school without his parents and sentenced to a disciplinary alternative school for a month, his grandfather recounted. A Black honors student was wrongly accused by a white teacher of having a vape (it was a pencil sharpener) and sentenced to the alternative school for a month this fall, her mom said.

About 1.5 million people teach on college campuses in the United States, and nearly 4 million teachers work in its public elementary and secondary schools. More than 15 million undergraduates attend U.S. colleges and universities. There are more than 50 million school-age children across the country. They all have one thing in common: Federal education policy affects their lives. President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon say they want to close the Department of Education and return control of education to the states. At the same time, however, they have aggressively, and rapidly, wielded federal power over schools.

Last year, Project 2025 was a conservative wish list: a grab bag of proposals large and small that would transform the federal government, including in education. Months later, many of those wishes have become reality. That includes, at least in part, Project 2025’s ultimate goal of doing away with the Education Department. The department still exists — getting rid of it completely would require congressional action—but it is greatly diminished: Much of the department’s work is being farmed out to other federal agencies. Half of its workforce of about 4,100 people have left or been fired.

Child care workers, students and teachers shared dismay over Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that are disrupting learning. School superintendents and college presidents described how uncertainty around federal funding is making their jobs far trickier. Others — including a charter school leader and a for-profit college president — told The Hechinger Report they were grateful for recent changes to education policy, including a new emphasis on school choice and on the importance of workforce education. Those were just a few of the many reactions we heard from 17 parents, students, educators and others around the country when we asked about the impact of President Donald Trump’s actions this year on their schools and communities.

Even with a conservative think tank’s blueprint detailing how the second Trump administration should reimagine the federal government’s role in education, few might have predicted what actually materialized this year for America's schools and colleges. Or what might be yet to come. “2025 will go down as a banner year for education: the year we restored merit in higher education, rooted out waste, fraud and abuse, and began in earnest returning education to the states,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told The Hechinger Report. She listed canceling K-12 grants she called wasteful, investing more in charter schools, ending college admissions that consider race or anything beyond academic achievement and…

Each day, nearly 70 percent of the world’s children are cared for and educated by adults other than their parents in home-based settings, many of which are informal and run by women. (In the United States, it’s about 30 percent.) In many countries, these home-based settings receive little financial or training support from their governments. This summer, I moderated a panel made up of global child care experts at the National Association for Family Child Care’s (NAFCC) global learning convening. The event marked the first time that the association brought together child care leaders from across the globe to share their expertise in how…

Ohio resident Megan Cutright lost her hospitality job during the pandemic. At her daughter’s urging, she found her way to Lorain County Community College in Ohio and onto a new career path. Community colleges will soon have a new opportunity to help more students like Megan achieve their career goals. Starting next summer, federal funds will be available through a program known as Workforce Pell, which extends federal aid to career-focused education and training programs that last between eight and 15 weeks. Members of Congress advocating for Pell Grants to cover shorter programs have consistently highlighted Workforce Pell’s potential, noting that the extension will lead to “

This year, a lot of my reporting focused on the dismantling of federally funded education research and statistics inside the Department of Education. (If you want the full post-mortem, you can read my year-end recap.) But 2025 wasn’t only about watchdog work. Week after week, I also dug into new studies that reveal what is and what isn’t working in American classrooms. When I look back at the most-read stories, the pattern is unmistakable. You were hungry for clarity on special education, reading instruction, cellphones in schools and, of course, AI.

Student-athletes across the U.S. are now participating in National Signing Day, when some top high school recruits will officially commit to play for an institution in exchange for six- or seven-figure signing bonuses. That’s on top of name, image and likeness (NIL) contracts student-athletes can sign that allow them to monetize their personal brands. There’s a lot of money on the table with signing bonuses, NIL contracts and the recent changes in revenue-sharing. But it should not just be about the money. Although the money can be life-changing, it raises the stakes of college sports considerably, leaving athletes with…

MACCLESFIELD, England — Ishan Goshawk, an apprentice with global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, donned a lab coat and safety glasses and entered a room filled with robots. His first stop was a machine programmed to fill dozens of tiny vials with a compound he needed for an experiment. Everything seemed in order, so Goshawk went to check on a second robot, a gleaming apparatus that, he noted, cost half a million pounds (about $620,000). When the first robot finished filling the vials, Goshawk would bring them here, to test how efficiently drug compounds can be purified using different solvents.

The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window. The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor. Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a ban on the practice known as seclusion, in which children, typically those with disabilities, are involuntarily isolated and confined, often after emotional outbursts.

This story was produced in partnership with Work Shift and reprinted with permission.  MOBILE, Ala. — Three or four times a week, LaTyra Malone starts her day at Mobile Infirmary hospital at 6:30 a.m. For the next 12 hours, she makes her rounds and visits with patients — asking if they’re in pain, checking vitals, administering fluids. To an outside observer, she appears to be a nurse. But Malone, 37, is a registered nurse apprentice. Everything she has learned how to do in her nursing classes at Coastal Alabama Community College, she can do at the hospital under the supervision of registered nurse Ondrea Berry, her journeyworker — a term typically used in the skilled trades.

Here’s something I have heard a lot in committee meetings and discussions with fellow teachers: “I teach my students how to use artificial intelligence responsibly and ethically because it’s here to stay.” And as an early career educator, I typically agreed at first, even though I ban AI usage in my own high school English classroom. But as AI continues to influence education and society at large, I now have serious questions about the ethics of AI use and its validity as a “great equalizer” that bolsters educational outcomes. By telling students that they can utilize AI in an ethical manner, too many educators disregard its glaring environmental harms.

LONG BEACH, Calif. — When Edgar Rosales Jr. uses the word “home,” the second-year college student with a linebacker’s build isn’t referring to the house he plans to buy after becoming a nurse or getting a job in public health. Rather, the Long Beach City College student is talking about the parking lot he slept in every night for more than a year. With Oprah-esque enthusiasm, Rosales calls the other students who use LBCC’s Safe Parking Program his “roommates” or “neighbors.” Between 8 and 10:30 p.m., those neighbors drive onto the lot, where staff park during the day.

This audio is sponsored by SXSW EDU California finally rolled out free preschool for all 4-year-olds in the 2025-26 school year, after more than a decade of expanding what the state calls transitional kindergarten. Many advocates hoped the move would ease child care shortages and close learning gaps between rich and poor. But a new University of California, Berkeley, study of Los Angeles shows the opposite happened: More than 150 child care centers closed, and the biggest beneficiaries were families in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Why does free preschool sometimes backfire?

Since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has unleashed a wave of sweeping cuts to federal spending. The Department of Education has shuttered entire offices and dismantled student support programs. For students already navigating complex systems with limited resources, the implications are immediate — and serious. Broad, indiscriminate cuts are likely to impede progress and deepen inequities that exist in education today. Widespread concern about these policies is warranted. But, as practitioners and researchers in behavioral science, we also believe that not all cuts are bad. In fact, some forms of cutting — what we call…

This audio is sponsored by Teaching Strategies SAN FRANCISCO — In a playground outside a YMCA, Mayra Aguilar rolled purple modeling dough into balls that fit easily into the palms of the toddlers sitting across from her. She helped a little girl named Wynter unclasp a bicycle helmet that she’d put on to zoom around the space on a tricycle. Aguilar smiled, the sun glinting off her saucer-sized gold hoop earrings. “Say, ‘Thank you, teacher,’” Aguilar prompted Wynter, who was just shy of 3. Other toddlers crowded around Wynter and Aguilar and a big plastic bin of Crayola Dough, and Aguilar took the moment to teach another brief lesson.

Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year. The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show. The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.

This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission. The mother was just arriving to pick up her girls at their elementary school in Chicago when someone with a bullhorn at the nearby shopping center let everyone know: ICE is here. The white van screeched to a halt right next to where she was parked, and three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents piled out. They said something in English that she couldn’t decipher, then arrested her on the spot. Her family later said they never asked about her documentation.

Decades of carefully built infrastructure aimed at improving and tracking how American children learn vanished in an ideological attack

In North Idaho, a local mom’s efforts to wrest school board control from MAGA conservatives ended in disappointment on Election Day. How it happened carries a message about political power.

Too many high school graduates are unsure how their education connects to their future. Even the most driven face a maze of options, with little guidance on how classroom experiences connect to real-world careers. It’s no wonder that fewer than 30 percent of high school students feel “very prepared” to make life-after-graduation decisions, according to a recent study. This isn’t just an education gap; it’s an economic fault line. During this period of significant economic transition, when the labor market is demanding specialized skills and adaptability, students must be prepared for what comes next.