A new review of state education data shows teacher pay increases can't keep up with inflation and fewer students are enrolled in public schools.

Schools, colleges and other public institutions originally had until this week to make online content accessible to people with disabilities. Now, the Justice Department has delayed that deadline.

The president claimed he achieved them all. The reality is more complicated.

Republicans won in 2024 by promising to cut the cost of living, but high gas prices are frustrating voters and providing a potent line of attack ahead of this year’s elections.

The Education Department is rescinding agreements that required schools to stop discriminating against transgender students. The agency will continue to investigate sex discrimination.

A House Ethics Committee panel found Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, accused of misusing covid funds, violated ethics rules. She has maintained her innocence.

Including off-year elections last year, Democrats have flipped 30 Republican seats since the start of 2025.

The president’s decision to vote by mail comes as he pushes a sweeping bill to reform balloting nationwide, including restrictions on mail-in voting.

Behind closed doors, Republicans have tamped down their hopes of unseating Jon Ossoff, a 39-year-old powerhouse fundraiser, as he seeks another term.

Groups that include pro-Israel organizations obscured their spending in some midterm races to try to defeat candidates that oppose their cause.

The Washington Post’s essential guide to power and influence in D.C.

Brandon Herrera, the de facto Republican nominee after Rep. Tony Gonzales exited amid a scandal over an affair, has been criticized for videos on his gun-focused YouTube channel.

Past GOP leaders, including George W. Bush, spoke out against Islamophobia. Now it is going unchallenged.

John Cornyn casts himself as one of the president’s biggest supporters in the Senate, and Ken Paxton is running ads in the Florida region that includes Mar-a-Lago.

Israeli officials told U.S. counterparts they hope for an uprising even though it would lead to a massacre, according to a State Department cable reviewed by The Post.

With President Donald Trump determined to weed out arts programming he deems “woke,” major artists across media are relocating their works from the nation’s capital to its neighbor to the north.

A lack of childcare is one big barrier to training more machinists, so a union-backed institute in Washington state decided to train up more childcare workers too.

The Philadelphia-bre(a)d insurgency taking over Baltimore’s cheesesteak scene goes beyond the major chains and viral fads. It’s also being propelled by Charm City’s small businesses.

Famed composer and Baltimore native Philip Glass pulled his symphony from the Kennedy Center in protest of Donald Trump. Now, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will perform “Lincoln” in 2027.

What is immigration enforcement doing to kids and families? And what can schools do to protect their students’ mental health and physical safety?

The Trump administration is dropping its appeal of a federal court ruling that blocked a campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion threatening federal funding to the nation’s schools and colle...

Conservatives have long argued that unwed motherhood and single parenting are major drivers of poor student achievement. They contend that traditional two-parent families — ideally with a married mother and father — provide the stability children need to succeed in school. Single-parent households, more common among low-income families, are blamed for weak academic outcomes. That argument has resurfaced prominently in Project 2025, a policy blueprint developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation that calls for the federal government to collect and publish more education data broken out by family structure.

About six years ago, an apprentice training to be a machinist in Washington state told her supervisor she would probably have to drop out of the training program after having her baby: She couldn't find child care that accommodated her shift. It was one of the first challenges Shana Peschek was tasked with solving when she became executive director of the Machinists Institute, which trains workers for jobs in the aerospace, manufacturing and automotive industries all over the state. Peschek knew it was essential to do something for workers with young children.

PEACHAM, Vt. — Early on a chilly fall morning in this small Vermont town, Principal Lydia Cochrane watched a gaggle of kids chase one another and a soccer ball around their school recess yard. Between drop-off and first bell, they were free, loud and constantly moving. With only about 60 students in prekindergarten through sixth grade, Peacham Elementary is the sort of school where all the kids know one another and locals regularly respond to calls for supplies and volunteers for field trips and other school activities. Cochrane gestured at the freshly raked wood chips around the swings and climbing structures, one of many tasks Peacham families completed at a recent community workday.

OAKLAND — In 2020, California led the nation in outlawing transcript-withholding, a debt collection practice that sometimes kept low-income college students from getting jobs or advanced degrees. Five years later, 24 of the state’s 115 community colleges still said on their websites that students with unpaid balances could lose access to their transcripts, according to a recent UC Merced survey. The communications failure has been misleading, student advocates said, although overall, the state’s students have benefited from the law. It “raises questions about what actual institutional practices are at colleges and the extent to which colleges know the law and are fully compliant with the law,” said Charlie Eaton, a UC Merced sociology professor who led the research team that conducted the survey in October.

LUBBOCK, Texas — The meeting of the local NAACP chapter began with a prayer — and then the litany of injustices came pouring out. A Black high school football player was called a “b—h-ass” n-word during a game by white players in September with no consequence, his mom said. A Black 12-year-old boy, falsely accused last December of touching a white girl’s breast, was threatened and interrogated by a police officer at school without his parents and sentenced to a disciplinary alternative school for a month, his grandfather recounted. A Black honors student was wrongly accused by a white teacher of having a vape (it was a pencil sharpener) and sentenced to the alternative school for a month this fall, her mom said.

About 1.5 million people teach on college campuses in the United States, and nearly 4 million teachers work in its public elementary and secondary schools. More than 15 million undergraduates attend U.S. colleges and universities. There are more than 50 million school-age children across the country. They all have one thing in common: Federal education policy affects their lives. President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon say they want to close the Department of Education and return control of education to the states. At the same time, however, they have aggressively, and rapidly, wielded federal power over schools.

Even with a conservative think tank’s blueprint detailing how the second Trump administration should reimagine the federal government’s role in education, few might have predicted what actually materialized this year for America's schools and colleges. Or what might be yet to come. “2025 will go down as a banner year for education: the year we restored merit in higher education, rooted out waste, fraud and abuse, and began in earnest returning education to the states,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told The Hechinger Report. She listed canceling K-12 grants she called wasteful, investing more in charter schools, ending college admissions that consider race or anything beyond academic achievement and…

It was almost impossible for the average observer to keep track of the Trump administration’s biggest impacts on education in 2025. Here’s what changed across colleges and universities, K-12 schools, ...

LONG BEACH, Calif. — When Edgar Rosales Jr. uses the word “home,” the second-year college student with a linebacker’s build isn’t referring to the house he plans to buy after becoming a nurse or getting a job in public health. Rather, the Long Beach City College student is talking about the parking lot he slept in every night for more than a year. With Oprah-esque enthusiasm, Rosales calls the other students who use LBCC’s Safe Parking Program his “roommates” or “neighbors.” Between 8 and 10:30 p.m., those neighbors drive onto the lot, where staff park during the day.

The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window. The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor. Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a ban on the practice known as seclusion, in which children, typically those with disabilities, are involuntarily isolated and confined, often after emotional outbursts.

Preschool teachers are generally in short supply, and many who attempt this work quickly quit these typically low-paying jobs. Some places are using apprenticeships — a training arrangement more commo...

This audio is sponsored by Teaching Strategies SAN FRANCISCO — In a playground outside a YMCA, Mayra Aguilar rolled purple modeling dough into balls that fit easily into the palms of the toddlers sitting across from her. She helped a little girl named Wynter unclasp a bicycle helmet that she’d put on to zoom around the space on a tricycle. Aguilar smiled, the sun glinting off her saucer-sized gold hoop earrings. “Say, ‘Thank you, teacher,’” Aguilar prompted Wynter, who was just shy of 3. Other toddlers crowded around Wynter and Aguilar and a big plastic bin of Crayola Dough, and Aguilar took the moment to teach another brief lesson.

Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year. The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show. The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.

The Institute for Museum and Library Services was established in 1996 and is the largest source of federal funding for museums and libraries like the South Dakota Discovery Center in Pierre. The Trump...

DENVER — On a bus headed downtown, Cherri McKinney opened a compact mirror and — even as the vehicle rattled and blinding morning sun filled the window — skillfully applied eyeliner. McKinney is a licensed aesthetician. She went into bookkeeping after graduating from high school in 1992, then ran a waxing salon for years. Later she shifted into human resources at a homeless shelter. But stepping off the bus, she started her work day as a benefits and leave administrator for Colorado’s Department of Labor and Employment. She wouldn’t have made it past some hiring managers.

This audio is sponsored by SXSW EDU Inauguration Day was a time of hope for the MAGA faithful who watched President Donald Trump take his second oath of office in the Capitol rotunda. But less than a mile away, at the Department of Education, fear and uncertainty reigned. Researchers, contractors and federal staff — the corner of the Education Department that I cover — braced for potentially devastating upheaval. Would the department itself be eliminated, as Trump had promised during the campaign? Would congressionally mandated research and statistical programs move to other agencies?

In North Idaho, a local mom’s efforts to wrest school board control from MAGA conservatives ended in disappointment on Election Day. How it happened carries a message about political power.

YouTube video by The Hechinger Report

This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission. ATLANTA — It was the worst summer in years. Sechita McNair’s family took no vacations. Her younger boys didn’t go to camp. Her van was repossessed, and her family nearly got evicted — again. But she accomplished the one thing she wanted most. A few weeks before school started, McNair, an out-of-work film industry veteran barely getting by driving for Uber, signed a lease in the right Atlanta neighborhood so her eldest son could stay at his high school.

PLEASANTVILLE, N.Y. — As she approached her senior year in high school, the thought of moving on to college was “scary and intimidating” to Milianys Santiago — especially since she would be the first in her family to earn a degree. Once she began working on her applications this fall, however, she was surprised. “It hasn’t been as stressful as I thought it would be,” she said. It’s not that Santiago’s anxiety was misplaced: The college admissions process has been so notoriously anxiety inducing that students and their parents plan for it for years and — if social media is any indication — seem to consider an acceptance as…

The teaching profession is one of the most female-dominated in the United States. Among elementary school teachers, 89 percent are women, and in kindergarten, that number is almost 97 percent. Many sociologists, writers and parents have questioned whether this imbalance hinders young boys at the start of their education. Are female teachers less understanding of boys’ need to horse around? Or would male role models inspire boys to learn their letters and times tables? Some advocates point to research that lays out why boys ought to do better with male teachers.

Even with the government shut down, lots of people are thinking about how to reimagine federal education research. Public comments on how to reform the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Education Department’s research and statistics arm, were due on Oct. 15. A total of 434 suggestions were submitted, but no one can read them because the department isn’t allowed to post them publicly until the government reopens. (We know the number because the comment entry page has an automatic counter.) A complex numbers game There’s broad agreement across the political spectrum that federal education statistics are essential.

HALIFAX COUNTY, N.C. — When Ivy McFarland first traveled from her native Honduras to teach elementary Spanish in North Carolina, she spent a week in Chapel Hill for orientation. By the end of that week, McFarland realized the college town on the outskirts of Raleigh was nowhere near where she’d actually be teaching. On the car ride to her school district, the city faded into the suburbs. Those suburbs turned into farmland. The farmland stretched into more farmland, until, two hours later, she made it to her new home in rural Halifax County.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As principal of Hartsfield Elementary School in the Leon County School District, John Olson is not just the lead educator, but in this era of fast-expanding school choice, also its chief salesperson. He works to drum up enrollment by speaking to parent and church groups, offering private tours and giving Hartsfield parents his cell phone number. He fields calls on nights, weekends and holidays. With the building at just 61 percent capacity, Olson is frank about the hustle required: “Customer service is key.” It’s no secret that many public schools are in a battle for students.

After he graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Drew Wesson hopes to begin a career in strategic communication, a field with higher-than-average job growth and earnings. One year into his time at the university, Wesson became more strategic about this goal. Like nearly 1 in 3 of his classmates, he declared a second major to better stand out in an unpredictable labor market. It’s part of a trend that’s spreading nationwide, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of federal data, as students fret about getting jobs in an economy that some fear is shifting faster than a traditional college education can keep up.