You don't have to be Christian to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) at Pioneer High School in San Jose. You don't have to be an athlete. You don't have to be heterosexual. But the after-school club does ask its leaders -- not members -- to affirm sex should wait for marriage and that "marriage is exclusively the union of one man and one woman." The school district, which recognizes a group called "Satanic Temple," decided in 2019 that FCA discriminates against g

Jay Wamsted, who is White, teaches math in an Atlanta middle school where most students are Black. Last year, before Georgia passed a law restricting teaching of "divisive concepts," he overheard several students discussing the Trail of Tears, which they'd learned about in history the day before. The school is built on what used to be Cherokee land. He joined the conversation, he writes in Education Week, saying, “It is no joke what we did to the Indigenous Americans.” A stu

New laws restricting how teachers can discuss "divisive issues" try "to impose a singular narrative of the United States, because — unfortunately — we don’t have a shared one anymore," writes Jonathan Zimmerman in a Washington Post column on the history education wars. Past conflicts over history in schools centered on who was included in the "grand national narrative" of "America as a land of freedom and progress," he writes. Immigrants, women and racial minorities didn't wa

Graduation rates are down in at least 31 states, reports Sarah D. Sparks in Education Week. Low-income and special-needs students have been "hardest hit." States had been making "progress in boosting graduation rates for students of color," she writes, but pandemic-inspired disruptions reversed that trend in many states. Graduation rates held steady for the class of 2020 thanks to flexibility in meeting course requirements, Sparks writes. The graduation flexibility states pro

The pandemic -- and the response to the pandemic -- was a disaster for students. We knew that, but now we really know that. Reading and math scores fell sharply for 9-year-old students from 2020 to 2022, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) known as the Nation's Report Card. It's the largest drop in NAEP's 50-year history, putting students in 2022 at the levels seen two decades earlier. The average math score declined by seven points since 2020

In the ten years before the pandemic, high achievers did better in math and reading while everyone else slid, writes Fordham's Michael Petrilli. Achievement gaps widened. Achievement trends on what's known as the Nation's Report Card from 2009-2019 show students in the top 10 or 25 percent "held steady or even gained ground," while those in the bottom 10 or 25 percent "saw their test scores fall in both reading and math, at least in the fourth and eighth grades." Science scor