Education
March 15, 2025
43 views 16 mins 0

Chaos and Confusion as the Statistics Arm of the Education Department is Reduced to a Skeletal Staff of 3

President Donald Trump promises he’ll make American schools great again. He has fired nearly everyone who might objectively measure whether he succeeds. This week’s mass layoffs by his secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, of more than 1,300 Department of Education employees delivered a crippling blow to the agency’s ability to tell the public how schools […]

Education
March 13, 2025
35 views 20 mins 0

Handwriting Helps Kids Learn. Here’s How to Make the Most of It.

View the full episode transcript In an age where screens dominate classrooms and workplaces, handwriting might seem like a relic of the past. But research shows that putting pen to paper plays a crucial role in literacy development. “I can’t talk about handwriting without talking about reading and spelling—they’re integrated. In our brains, the networks […]

Education
March 10, 2025
31 views 18 mins 0

Serve and Return: How Talking with Young Children Helps Them Flourish

This story about talking to kids was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, with support from the Spencer Fellowship at Columbia Journalism School. Sign up for the Early Childhood newsletter. BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — When Rickeyda Carter started teaching young children, she led story time […]

Education
March 10, 2025
30 views 9 mins 0

Why is Teaching Reading Comprehension Such a Big Challenge?

Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it. Some didn’t. Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster […]