HALIFAX COUNTY, N.C. — When Ivy McFarland first traveled from her native Honduras to teach elementary Spanish in North Carolina, she spent a week in Chapel Hill for orientation. By the end of that week, McFarland realized the college town on the outskirts of Raleigh was nowhere near where she’d actually be teaching. On the car ride to her school district, the city faded into the suburbs. Those suburbs turned into farmland. The farmland stretched into more farmland, until, two hours later, she made it to her new home in rural Halifax County.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As principal of Hartsfield Elementary School in the Leon County School District, John Olson is not just the lead educator, but in this era of fast-expanding school choice, also its chief salesperson. He works to drum up enrollment by speaking to parent and church groups, offering private tours and giving Hartsfield parents his cell phone number. He fields calls on nights, weekends and holidays. With the building at just 61 percent capacity, Olson is frank about the hustle required: “Customer service is key.” It’s no secret that many public schools are in a battle for students.

After he graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Drew Wesson hopes to begin a career in strategic communication, a field with higher-than-average job growth and earnings. One year into his time at the university, Wesson became more strategic about this goal. Like nearly 1 in 3 of his classmates, he declared a second major to better stand out in an unpredictable labor market. It’s part of a trend that’s spreading nationwide, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of federal data, as students fret about getting jobs in an economy that some fear is shifting faster than a traditional college education can keep up.

New York City, where I live, will elect a new mayor Tuesday, Nov. 4. The two front runners — state lawmaker Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent — have largely ignored the city’s biggest single budget item: education.  One exception has been gifted education, which has generated a sharp debate between the two candidates. The controversy is over a tiny fraction of the student population. Only 18,000 students are in the city’s gifted and talented program out of more than 900,000 public school students.

The first hint of trouble for McKinley Hess came in August. Hess, who runs an infant and toddler care program in Conway, Arkansas, heard that the teen moms she serves were having trouble getting their expected child care assistance payments. Funded by a mix of federal and state dollars, those subsidies are the only way many low-income parents nationwide can afford child care, by reimbursing providers for care and lowering the amount parents have to pay themselves. In Arkansas, teen parents have long been given priority to receive this aid. But now, Hess heard, they and many other families in need were sitting on a…

When I was a kindergartner in the 1980s, the “gifted” programming for my class could be found inside of a chest. I don’t know what toys and learning materials lived there, since I wasn’t one of the handful of presumably more academically advanced kiddos that my kindergarten teacher invited to open the chest. My distinct impression at the time was that my teacher didn’t think I was worthy of the enrichment because I frequently spilled my chocolate milk at lunch and I had also once forgotten to hang a sheet of paper on the class easel — instead painting an elaborate and detailed picture on the stand itself.

For families in more than a hundred Head Start programs across the country, November could mark the beginning of some hard decisions. On Saturday, 134 Head Start centers serving 58,400 children would normally receive their annual federal funding, but the ongoing government shutdown has put that money in jeopardy. The federally funded Head Start provides free preschool and child care for low-income families, and is particularly important to rural communities with few other child care options.  At the same time, the federal government has said that because of the shutdown, it cannot distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that families also expect on the first of the month.

Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has spent his career evaluating education research and helping teachers figure out what works best in the classroom. A leader of the National Reading Panel, whose 2000 report helped shape what’s now known as the “science of reading,” Shanahan has long influenced literacy instruction in the United States. He also served on the National Institute for Literacy’s advisory board in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Shanahan is a scholar whom I regularly consult when I come across a reading study, and so I was eager to interview him about…

This story first appeared in Hechinger’s climate and education newsletter. Sign up here. In Illinois, the Chicago Teachers Union won a contract with the city’s schools to add solar panels on some buildings and clean energy career pathways for students, among other actions. In Minnesota, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators demanded that the district create a task force on environmental issues and provide free metro passes for students. And in California, the Los Angeles teachers union’s demands include electrifying the district’s bus fleet and providing electric vehicle charging stations at all schools.

Analysis of Florida school district after 2023 classroom cellphone restrictions shows reading and math test score gains

At their meeting, Charlie Kirk’s name was on everyone’s lips.

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — It’s not a rebrand. But the Moms for Liberty group that introduced itself three years ago as a band of female “joyful warriors” shedding domestic modesty to make raucous public challenges to masks, books and curriculum, is trying to glow up. The group’s national summit this past weekend at a convention center outside Orlando leaned into family (read: parental rights), faith — and youth. The latter appeared to be a bid to join the cool kids who are the new face of conservatism in America (hint: young, Christian, very male), as well as a recognition of the group’s “diversity,” which includes grandparents, men and kids.

Two months after Education Secretary Linda McMahon was confirmed, she and a small team from the department met with leadership from the National Center for Learning Disabilities, an advocacy group tha...

Thirty states now limit or ban cellphone use in classrooms, and teachers are noticing children paying attention to their lessons again. But it’s not clear whether this policy — unpopular with students and a headache for teachers to enforce — makes an academic difference. If student achievement goes up after a cellphone ban, it’s tough to know if the ban was the reason. Some other change in math or reading instruction might have caused the improvement. Or maybe the state assessment became easier to pass. Imagine if politicians required all students to wear striped shirts and test scores rose.

Two months after Education Secretary Linda McMahon was confirmed, she and a small team from the department met with leadership from the National Center for Learning Disabilities, an advocacy group tha...

Two months after Education Secretary Linda McMahon was confirmed, she and a small team from the department met with leadership from the National Center for Learning Disabilities, an advocacy group that works on behalf of millions of students with dyslexia and other disorders. Jacqueline Rodriguez, NCLD’s chief executive officer, recalled pressing McMahon on a question raised during her confirmation hearing: Was the Trump administration planning to move control and oversight of special education law from the Education Department to Health and Human Services? Rodriguez was alarmed at the prospect of uprooting the 50-year-old Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which spells out the responsibility of schools to provide a “free, appropriate public education” to students with disabilities.

This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission. WASHINGTON – For a generation of young Americans, choosing where to go to college — or whether to go at all — has become a complex calculation of costs and benefits that often revolves around a single question: Is the degree worth its price? Public confidence in higher education has plummeted in recent years amid high tuition prices, skyrocketing student loans and a dismal job market — plus ideological concerns from conservatives. Now, colleges are scrambling to prove their value to students.

The Hechinger Report is a nonprofit news outlet that covers education across the United States. We’re a small newsroom with big ambitions to cover the most pressing issues facing classrooms and campus...

Last January, Diego Sandoval’s high school in San Diego County closed abruptly one Friday because of wildfires menacing the Southern California area. Classmates evacuated their homes as the fire spread. Frida Vergara, whose school was among the few in the area that didn’t close, recalls that friends with asthma were coughing and wheezing from the smoke. It wasn’t the first time the students — both 17-year-old seniors in the Sweetwater Union High School District — saw how extreme weather disrupted learning. A year earlier, floods swamped parts of the county, …

In New Jersey, fewer than half of 6- and 7-year-olds in special education spend the vast majority of their day with their classmates without disabilities. That might change, though, because a state special education advisory group has pledged to examine the issue. Earlier this year, a Hechinger Report investigation revealed New Jersey is the worst in the nation when it comes to what’s known as inclusion — measured by how often students of all abilities are learning alongside one another in the classroom for at least 80 percent of the day.

MEAD, Wash. — A few weeks after President Donald Trump took office, the conservative school board leaders in this town near the Idaho border made a bet. They would pit one Washington against the other and see what happened. For years, Democrats in control of the state had required every school district to have policies on the books that protect transgender students from bullying and prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The Mead school board unanimously approved a policy in 2019 to comply with the state guidelines, with little comment.

Social emotional learning — lessons in soft skills like listening to people you disagree with or calming yourself down before a test — has become a flashpoint in the culture wars.  The conservative political group Moms for Liberty opposes SEL, as it is often abbreviated, telling parents that its “goal is to psychologically manipulate students to accept the progressive ideology that supports gender fluidity, sexual preference exploration, and systemic oppression.” Critics say that parents should discuss social and emotional matters at home and that schools should stick to academics. Meanwhile, some advocates on the left say standard SEL classes don’t go far enough and should include such topics as social justice and anti-racism training.

Summer usually provides a respite for Connor Pavlicko from his duties as student body president at Slippery Rock University. But this summer, he was bombarded by classmates demanding to know why their tuition was suddenly going up. What made these students particularly angry was that the 3.6 percent increase followed a span since 2018 in which tuition at public universities in Pennsylvania, including Slippery Rock, had been frozen in place, said Pavlicko, a junior political science and government major from Ohio. “This is happening everywhere,” he said he found after “endlessly doomscrolling” social media.