Four educators from disadvantaged communities in California’s Bay Area join Katharine Stevens to discuss the challenges and effects of virtual teaching.

As a third COVID wave sweeps the United States, achievement gaps between higher- and lower-performing students are widening. A national tutoring program is our best chance for averting an educational disaster.

We need good schools now more than ever. But it’s hard to see how they’ll be any better after COVID than they’ve been for decades before it.

Learning loss has been extensive during the pandemic, hurting some students more than others. Katharine Stevens joins the National Press Foundation for an in-depth conversation on how to close schools' growing COVID inequality gap.

Our excessive focus on schooling — rather than the non-school environments that most powerfully shape children’s lives — continues to hurt the very children we are trying so hard to help.

Paul Gessing and Katharine Stevens discuss the impact of COVID 19 on children's learning. Katharine also shares findings from her recent report, "Still Left Behind: How America’s Schools Keep Failing Our Children," and explains why universal pre-K will not solve our nation's persistent education achievement challenges.

Early reading proficiency is a crucial predictor of school, work, and life success. But a deeply flawed idea about how to teach reading is widening early inequalities, setting millions of children up to fail.

Research tells us that the achievement gap doesn’t originate in schools; a half century of history tells us it can’t be closed by schools either.

One-third of lower-income eighth graders still fail to demonstrate even minimal competence in reading and math, and wide achievement gaps persist in every state, despite decades of ever-intensifying school reform and steadily increased spending,

High-quality early care — whether at home, a childcare center, or grandma’s house — matters greatly to young children’s healthy development. But to get the economy going again, the critical problem is care for school-age children.

A groundbreaking new study has found that despite enormous public investment, achievement gaps between wealthier and poorer children have remained unchanged over the past 50 years.

Leaders from Public Prep and the Parent-Child Home Program explain their innovative, new partnership, followed by a panel discussion on the potential of K–12 collaboration with early childhood and the implications of including birth-to-kindergarten in federal education law.

While good schools are important to children’s success, education really means human development, not schooling. And the educational opportunities that children most need to succeed begin not in school but before they can walk.

Tacking additional grades onto a poorly performing school system won’t help the children who need help the most. Improving the 13 grades they already attend could help them a lot.

School choice alone isn’t enough. Real education choice means enabling parents to make sure their child’s foundation is built right in the first place, starting at birth.

Done right, high-quality early childhood programs can help to level the playing field for disadvantaged kids before they enter school. But no program can inoculate children to the damaging effects of poor-quality education down the line.

It’s hard to see how funneling a little more money into a badly underperforming, inefficient system will result in the “high quality” schools promised by Issue 44 promoters.

Despite decades of effort and trillions of dollars, neither preschool nor other reforms have made a difference by the time it really matters: when children finish school.

Early education is starting with a clean and unencumbered slate. This is the right time to make crucial decisions about how teachers should be prepared to educate very young children.

Early education advocates would be wise to remember the fundamental value of school choice and what it means for the long-term viability of the early education sector.