A new study finds parents often assume everything is fine when their child’s report card shows mostly A’s even when standardized test scores slide. That assumption may underestimate the help and guidance their child needs.
✍️: @jillbarshay
📹: @lyn_byn
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An entirely new kind of bachelor’s degree muscling into the space between the traditional four-year version and the two-year associate degree. Three-year degrees have existed, but they simply jammed those 120 credits into fewer semesters.
Much of this activity has occurred in just the last few months. Yet precisely because it’s come so quickly, and at a time when political controversies have dominated the wider conversation about higher education, the dramatic implications of this reimagining of bachelor’s degrees have gotten surprisingly little attention.
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Story: Jon Marcus
Video production: @lyn_byn
Student loan scams have been operating for years and they’ve eluded multiple efforts by regulators to quash them. They often become particularly active during periods of significant change to the student loan program. Now, as student loan repayment rules shift and the Trump administration reduces oversight of the student loan system, these companies see an opportunity to capitalize on borrowers’ confusion, experts say.
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🎨: Elena Lacey for The Hechinger Report
✍️: Jeffrey R. Young
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Julian Lawrence, 16, looks at cuts of wood for a house he is building with this carpentry classmates, as James Gallow, the head of the carpentry department, lends a hand at Harvard H. Ellis Technical School in Danielson, Connecticut.
A mediocre student in middle school, Lawrence is now earning straight A’s and says he’s excited to come to class each day.
“In middle school, I hated sitting at a desk every day,” Lawrence said. “This gets my mind moving more.”
While a couple of the other trades taught at Ellis Tech skew female — hairdressing and health care technology, in particular — Ellis Tech’s overall enrollment is 70 percent male. Statewide, more than 60 percent of the roughly 11,000 students attending technical high schools are boys.
Yet many boys who might thrive in a technical high school are missing out, due to a systemwide shortage of seats. This year, only 44 percent of the 7,850 applicants to the state’s 17 technical schools got in. Those schools enrolled 11,700 students this year.
The popularity of the programs has led to fights in both Connecticut and neighboring Massachusetts over who gets into the schools. Both states recently switched from competitive admissions to a lottery, amid allegations that their systems were shutting out at-risk students.
Others say the solution lies not in reassigning the limited seats, but in adding more of them. Nationally, boys lag behind girls on multiple measures of educational achievement, from kindergarten readiness to college completion. If technical high schools can help narrow that gap, advocates reason, why not build more of them?
📸: Sophie Park
✍️: Kelly Field
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It seems like a tale of two school systems.
Washington, D.C., has emerged as the fastest-improving school system in the nation, according to a major new analysis of student test scores released last week by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth.
The Education Scorecard analysis, which compares more than 5,000 school districts across 38 states, finds that most of the country has been stuck in a reading recession — a decade-long slide in achievement that predates the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2025, only five states and the District of Columbia showed meaningful gains in reading. The nation’s capital posted the strongest growth of all and also led in math improvement.
Washington students in both public and charter schools gained roughly two-thirds of a grade level in math and about a third of a grade level in reading over that period, according to the analysis. A grade level represents roughly a year’s worth of learning, which means that eighth graders in 2025 were about six months ahead in math compared with eighth graders in 2022.
But the gains should not obscure a grimmer reality.
In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate report from the D.C. Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Just 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered to be college or career ready.
✍️: @jillbarshay
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This Utah law is the first of its kind targeting higher education, but it’s an extension of concerns being expressed at the K-12 level. There have been efforts to emphasize conservative and religious values in public schools, and limit what can be taught about subjects including racial history, gender and sexuality. The Utah law is also reminiscent of a case the Supreme Court took up last year, in which the justices sided with parents of public school students who wanted to take their children out of class during lessons that violate their religious beliefs — such as using books about LGBTQ+ identities. President Donald Trump has said that colleges are “corrupting our youth and society with woke, socialist, and anti-American ideology.”
✍️: @oliviarsanchez
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Research that Stanford University’s Center on Early Childhood conducted on Thriving Providers shows that the predictable funds allow early educators to pay off debts and buy food; in some cases, it’s the difference between keeping their businesses open or closed. Child care income can fluctuate based on enrollment, attendance and state voucher policies, which makes reliable income more critical, experts say. With predictable funds, “you are able to just continue functioning without any concerns about funding,” said Kyriakou. That supports providers but also enables a “continuity of care and a stable, nurturing environment” for children.
✍️: @jackiemaderwrites
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The form Ryan was filling out last fall, known as the FAFSA, is required for anyone applying for federal financial aid, and for many low-income students it is the only possible route to affording a college degree. The Education Department is not supposed to share student information with agencies responsible for immigration enforcement. But now that the federal government has been disregarding longstanding norms on data sharing, some students with undocumented parents are not applying for federal financial aid, even though they’re eligible.
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Students who attend schools near data centers are more likely to see their math performance decline than those who don’t. Attending school near noisy airports is also associated with declines in math scores.
After participating in a math lesson incorporating information on renewable energy, U.S. students were more likely to say they knew about climate change and felt some hope about combating it. Children in India who learned about air pollution in arts lessons were more likely to understand the environmental problem, but not necessarily to change their behavior in ways that might alleviate it.
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Some parents, educators and experts say that losing offices and education leaders whose sole job is to advance equity — by reducing racial disparities in academics, school discipline and staffing — will have both short- and long-term consequences for Black, brown and low-income students and those with disabilities.
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Financial aid offer letters are supposed to tell families how much they will have to pay for college, which can be the deciding factor in where — or even whether — students go to college. But too often, the letters leave out important information and use terms that make it confusing to figure out the final cost.
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✍️: Meredith Kolodner
🎨: Elena Lacey
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Did you understand your financial aid letter? Share your view.
Women in the United States now earn 40 percent more doctoral degrees overall, and nearly twice as many master’s degrees, as men, according to the U.S. Department of Education — a trend transforming high-end work.
This is no longer some distant statistical abstraction. Americans can see it when they take their pets to the vet or their kids to the dentist, need a lawyer or an eye exam, see a therapist or pick up a prescription.
Women studying veterinary medicine now outnumber men by four to one.
The number of women has surpassed the number of men in veterinary school, law school, medical school, pharmacy school, optometry school and dental school.
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📹: @lyn_byn
📝: Jon Marcus
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