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It’s well established that growing up in poverty correlates with disparities in educational achievement, health and employment. But an emerging branch of neuroscience asks how poverty affects the developing brain.

Some of the children in Room 132 have turned nine years old since I last saw them in-person in October.

The Level 3 (like third grade) students at the Josephine Hodgkins Leadership Academy in the Westminster Public School District are thrilled to be back in class after going through remote learning part of November and all of December.

The kids crowd around me at recess to catch up, bursting to tell me about what remote learning was like, how they think they’re doing in school now, and what it feels like to be back.

In what quickly became a conversation about science, personal liberty, and the role of government, the town’s two school boards, New Braunfels ISD and Comal ISD, landed on opposite sides of the face covering debate earlier this month after Gov. Greg Abbott announced the statewide mask mandate would end March 10.

Six years ago, barely a third of the students at East High School, in Rochester, N.Y., graduated on time. Students were being suspended at a rate of more than 2,000 each year. More than half were chronically absent, and more than three-quarters couldn’t meet the state’s academic benchmarks.

In 2015, at a time when East High—one of the city’s oldest and biggest—had been deemed New York state’s worst-performing school, the district’s board let the University of Rochester take the reins.

Over the last year, some educators, school officials and teachers’ union leaders in New York and across the country have declared that teachers are not babysitters, and that schools are not child care centers. The sentiment has been meant to convince the public that teachers should not be responsible for supervising children just so that parents can return to work.

About 72,000 people will have their federal loans fully canceled after Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Thursday scrapped a plan to give partial debt relief to students defrauded by their colleges, ending a controversial policy instituted by his predecessor Betsy DeVos.

The move — Cardona’s first major higher education announcement since being confirmed — amounts to roughly $1 billion in debt relief. But it only addresses a subset of the nearly 200,000 people who have filed claims in the last six years under a statute known as “borrower defense to repayment.”

Few issues this year have been as rife with division and drama as the on-again, off-again efforts of school districts to restart in-person learning. President Biden vowed to open most public schools in his first 100 days—but his pledge was quickly scaled back to only a majority of elementary schools.

A new study adds to the mounting evidence of lost learning due to school closures during the coronavirus pandemic, with the ability of students in early grades to read aloud quickly and accurately about 30 percent lower than normal over the past year.

The research released Tuesday by Policy Analysis for California Education, an independent research center based at Stanford University, examined 250,000 oral reading fluency scores for students in first through third grade last spring and fall in over 100 school districts across 22 states.

The polarizing debate over how and when to reopen schools has revolved around an argument that children — especially students of color — do better when they’re learning in school buildings. But some families are pushing back against that idea, finding that their children are doing just as well, and sometimes better, when learning from the safety of their own homes. Not because online learning has been great, but because in-person school was awful.

In Texas, students have been assigned history textbooks that downplay slavery and avoid talking about Jim Crow. In Massachusetts, Black girls have been reprimanded for violating dress codes that ban hair extensions. And across the country, according to federal data, Black students are more likely than white classmates to be disciplined at school.

In Oregon, where Josh lives, Black students have lower graduation rates. They’re also less likely to be identified as “talented and gifted.”

In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.

In a major overhaul of the Los Angeles School Police Department, the Board of Education on Tuesday approved a plan that cuts a third of its officers, bans the use of pepper spray on students and diverts funds from the department to improve the education of Black students.

In a move long awaited by educators, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines on Friday for how to operate schools safely during the pandemic.

The recommendations, more detailed than those released by the agency under the Trump administration, attempt to carve a middle path between people who want classrooms to reopen immediately and those teachers and parents who remain reluctant to return to in-person instruction before widespread vaccination.