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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

For many teachers, building relationships is a priority in the classroom – they put in time and effort to incorporate strategies into lesson plans and daily routines to forge bonds with their students. But what happens when there’s a breakdown in communication or a relationship degrades over time due to conflict or disagreements? Developing a […]