The COVID-19 pandemic has redoubled attention to the challenges families face in making sure their children are fully prepared and supported in their journey through school. This first of three Quality Counts 2021 installments provides grades and scores for the nation and each state on a range of factors setting students up for success in school…

In a bid to help more students read proficiently in 3rd grade--a skill considered critical to their future educational success--new laws and initiatives springing up around the country require educators to step up their efforts to identify and help struggling readers even before they enter kindergarten. It's not unusual for states or school…

Computer-based instruction in kindergarten classrooms can be controversial, but one Los Angeles charter school is showing promising results and plans to expand the hybrid approach. The school conducted an experiment with a teaching method called blended learning, in which students learn from computers as well as teachers. The kindergarten…

At the beginning of each school year, the school-nurse coordinator for the 3,000-student Ashland, Oregon, district plans a "parent's night" around the topic of vaccinations for the safety and health of children. That is only the beginning of the school-nurse coordinator's contact with parents who are skeptical about the necessity of…

Faced with concerns about Internet predators, cyberbullying, students' sharing of inappropriate content on social networks, and the abundance of sexually explicit or violent content online, many school leaders and technology directors are placing tighter restrictions on Web access to shield students from potential harm. Yet in Trussville and other…

This article reports that two programs for teaching mathematics in the early grades--Math Expressions and Saxon Math--emerged as winners in early findings released last week from a large-scale federal experiment that pits four popular, and philosophically distinct, math curricula against one another. But the results don't promise to end the…

This article reports that amid tight budgets and shrinking revenue, states are wagering that voters in next month's elections will agree to expand state-sanctioned gambling in exchange for increased school aid. Initiatives on six state ballots Nov. 4 involve gambling revenue intended to raise money for everything from community college funding and…

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired from 1995 to 1999 by Barack Obama, is being portrayed by John McCain's campaign as an attempt to push radicalism on schools. Founders of the project say it has been distorted in the presidential campaign. The project undertaken in Chicago as part of a high-profile national initiative reflected, however,…

This article discusses a pilot project in New Mexico that gives kindergartners--and some 1st graders--20 extra days before the school year begins to learn the ropes and jump into their lessons. The project is called Kindergarten-Plus, the concept is the brainchild of former American Federation of Teachers President Sandra Feldman. According to…

Just a few years ago, a set of tests known as "dibbles" would have elicited little more than a chuckle from educators or anyone else. Today, they're taking it seriously, because the acronym DIBELS has come to symbolize the standard for early-literacy assessment throughout much of the country. Teachers in Reading First schools in more…

A study released last fall by the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, showed that, contrary to what many observers suspected, the amount of time spent on homework has not increased for children in the upper-middle grades. But it has jumped significantly for 6-to 8-years-olds, which would include…