On Wednesday, New York City schools chancellor Carmen Fariña announced that every single one of the city’s 1.1 million public school students will now be offered free lunch, beginning on Thursday, the first day of the school year. As far as back-to-school news goes—hell, as far as any news goes these days—this is…
The school district of Mercer County, West Virginia—population 61,984—has been thrust into the national spotlight now that a lawsuit, filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, challenges the constitutional legality of the county’s voluntary weekly Bible study class for elementary and middle public schoolers.
In August, the Washington D.C. Public School System opened Ron Brown College Preparatory High School, a 100-student all-boys school, specifically aimed to help black and Latino students with academic achievement as part of a tax-funded “Empowering Males of Color” initiative. The school system will reportedly not be…
As part of the women’s strike on Wednesday, public schools in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina and in Alexandria, Virginia opted to shut down for the day. School officials made the call after hundreds of faculty members requested leaves for what was otherwise known as “A Day Without a Woman.” The strike urged…
Chance the Rapper announced that he’s donating a total of $1 million to public schools in his hometown of Chicago. He also told the governor: “Do your job.” He is an actual saint.
When I was a freshman in high school, we were told that they—Hollywood—would be shooting a major motion picture at our school. It was all a little cloak and dagger and none of the school officials would give us much info. They did tell us to stay away from the football bleachers, though.
From kindergarten to my senior year, I attended public school in Wyoming, the state whose “grizzly bear school” became a flashpoint for Betsy DeVos’s confirmation hearings. Because I was in the city of Cheyenne, though, my school’s greatest threat was probably ourselves, the students; I hated living there as a teen,…
Betsy DeVos’s hearing for Secretary of Education is underway, and considering she is a billionaire GOP donor with little demonstrable regard for or experience with the public schools she’ll be tasked with running, her reception amongst Democrats in the committee has been pretty chilly.
Teachers have been dealing with the specter of Donald Trump long before he was actually elected President of the United States. They’ve apologized for assigning the presidential debates as homework, faced frighteningly emboldened bullies, and comforted the terrified children of immigrants. This was imagined, by many,…
According to a new petition directed at NYC Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina, admittance to LaGuardia High School has been undergoing a serious and damaging shift under the care of principal Dr. Lisa Mars.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer who is defining the landscape of education journalism, has written a landmark story at the New York Times magazine on school segregation in New York City.
California teachers have won an appeal to overturn a 2014 case brought by student advocacy group Students Matter, which limited educators’ rights to tenure and eased the ability with which they could be fired.
Educational publisher McGraw-Hill is updating one of their textbooks after a Texas-based mother and teacher publicly complained about a page that refers to slaves as “workers.”
In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a revised social studies curriculum that, wrote The New York Times that year, would “put a conservative stamp on history” once going into effect in 2015. In advance of their debut in Texas classrooms last week, it was widely reported that the new textbooks, published by…
School vouchers, in theory, give low-income students the opportunity to attend the same parochial and private schools their wealthier counterparts can afford. In practice, they siphon money away from already-struggling public schools and into organizations that routinely expel kids for being gay. And no one is doing…
It's an honest mistake, assuming that the Constitution only protects your own personal megachurch faith. But one Louisiana Republican is learning the hard way that religious school vouchers can be used to fund education at all sorts of religious schools, even Muslim ones. And while she's totally in favor of taxpayer…
A charter school in America's insufferable kid and parent-related news mecca of Brooklyn has outlawed hugging in the halls between classes because school officials find the practice "distracting" for the children. Smiling, eye contact, quotes from Will Ferrell movies, and dumb made up handshakes are still allowed. But…
"Nice shoes. You wore them the last time," former Hearst Magazines chair and newly-minted New York City Schools chancellor Cathie Black told a second-time job interviewee.
New Jersey parents are calling their kids' cafeteria fare "prison food" — and as anyone who's eaten lunch in our country's public schools knows, that's not actually far off. Exhibit A: nachos.
[Chicago, June 24. Image via Getty]
