Fewer Students News Today

Public school enrollment rose steadily throughout the first two decades of the 2000s. The National Center for Education Statistics was projecting public school enrollments to continue to grow, although its future projections were becoming less optimistic, thanks to falling immigration and birth rates. When COVID-19 hit, enrollments took an immediate dive, and the center lowered its […]

The exact date varies across grades and subjects, but Indiana’s student achievement scores peaked about a decade ago and have been falling since. The decline started well before COVID-19 and has not affected students evenly. Perhaps not surprisingly, Indiana’s lowest-performing youngsters have suffered the largest losses. This wasn’t always the case. In the early 2000s, […]

All around the country, districts are drafting budgets that will bring cuts to schools starting this fall. As those budgets come before school boards this spring, board members will undoubtedly hear from staff and families. Communities will push back against decisions that include layoffs; cuts to gifted programs, athletics and college advising; and reductions to […]

Nationally, school districts and charter schools have poured billions of federal pandemic relief dollars into staffing. Most states don’t detail that spending precisely, but North Carolina does. A FutureEd analysis of how North Carolina is spending its last and largest round of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money suggests that localities across the […]

Objectively speaking, it’s a weird time to be talking about layoffs in schools. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021 had the fewest layoffs in public education in the last two decades. Last year was just a bit higher, and so far 2023 is tracking about the same. There are still pockets of layoffs […]

You’re probably familiar with the 1993 movie comedy Groundhog Day, in which the main character finds himself reliving Feb. 2 over and over again. Despite his best efforts to break the cycle, he keeps returning to the same starting point. This is known as a time loop, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction states, “When […]

Post-pandemic staffing challenges have eased up slightly this fall, but many school leaders report that they still have crucial vacancies to fill. The latest federal data on the public education workforce, released Tuesday, shows 45% of leaders said they were understaffed as the new school year began. That’s down from just over half last year. […]

In the wake of the pandemic and its devastating impact on student learning, tutoring has been having a moment. The National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University has found that students can go further faster in the classroom when schools follow a proven tutoring model. The blueprint includes groups of no more than four students […]

Melissa Kearney begins her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege with a scene from an academic conference she attended a few years ago. After days speaking with colleagues about declining U.S. employment and social mobility, the University of Maryland professor asked whether scholars should give more thought to the condition of families. Given their centrality to […]

Judge: New Mexico Must Give At-Home Students Fast Internet - By Cedar Attanasio Associated Press / Report For America A New Mexico judge has ordered education officials to provide computers and high-speed internet to students who still dont have them in a landmark ruling that for the first time in the state has set a standard for internet speeds for public school children. The ruling requires state officials to immediately determine which students covered by the sweeping lawsuit are still lack...