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So poor was the education she received at her public high school, Pilar Vega Martinez had to take an extra year to study for the Prueba de Selección Universitaria — the Chilean version of the SAT.

The work paid off. Her score on the exam was good enough to get her into the top-rated University of Chile. Vega is now in her third year, studying to be a nurse. And thanks to an important change in government policy, life got easier after that: She didn’t have to pay.

When Austin school officials applied for a $1.5 million federal grant to embark on a school integration initiative, they were blunt.

The city and school district had a long history of intentionally segregating black and Latino families and students, they said, and recent attempts to desegregate schools had failed.

At issue is the delicate politics of race and education. For more than two decades, Democrats have largely backed public charter schools as part of a compromise to deliver black and Latino families a way out of failing district schools. Charters were embraced as an alternative to the taxpayer-funded vouchers for private-school tuition supported by Republicans, who were using the issue to woo minority voters.

The family engagement room at Belleaire Elementary School in the suburbs of Omaha is bustling on a late October morning. Kindergarten teacher Kelsea Heesacker comes in to chat with the school counselor and to grab a winter coat for a little girl who came to school without one. Meghan McCormack, whose job is to visit families in their homes, pulls on her own coat as she hurries outside to meet a mom whose kids aren’t old enough for school yet.

More college students are turning to their schools for help with anxiety, depression and other mental health problems, and many must wait weeks for treatment or find help elsewhere as campus clinics struggle to meet demand, an Associated Press review of more than three dozen public universities found.

In a recent study, a high school counselor offered this honest description of the uncertainty of her job: “Maybe later, I’ll start to see kids come back and they’ll be like, oh this helped or that helped,” she said. Still, “Sometimes I leave and I’m like, I’ve done nothing.”

Now, new research captures exactly how much of a difference a counselor like her can make — and it’s substantial, particularly for low-income students.

Nearly five decades ago, this town on Jackson’s outskirts decided to send students to schools organized by grade level, rather than geography.

So all of the kindergartners and first-graders would go to one school, all of the children in second and third grades would be at another, and so forth, all the way through 12th grade. The approach in Clinton was rolled out in 1971 to little fanfare.

Growing up poor outside Detroit in Dearborn Heights, Tanner Bonner worked at a sandwich shop part-time during the school year and full-time during the summer to help support his family.

His mom is unemployed, while his dad has been on disability since hurting his back cleaning carpets.

His senior year of high school, Bonner earned a perfect score on the ACT and won a national scholarship for students whose families earn, on average, less than $13,000 each year. He was accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and started classes there last fall.

Probation chiefs and other officials in many counties across California say juvenile halls, which stand mostly empty following years of steep declines in youth crime, primarily hold the most serious and violent criminals. But a Chronicle investigation found that is not true: Thousands of teens like Marie are held for minor offenses.

This question was on an online exam given recently to more than 3,000 American high school students. I think it exposes a threat to both our education system and our national security.

On the first day of sixth grade, at his new school in a new neighborhood, Angel Angon Quiroz, 11, sat by himself in the corner of the cafeteria, wondering if he had made a mistake.

Students at Angel’s old elementary school overwhelmingly come from poor and Hispanic families. Now, a new integration plan in Brooklyn had placed him at a middle school called the Math & Science Exploratory School. It was popular with affluent families, but would he fit in?

But still, despite excelling in her other classes, Marqell McClendon has struggled in the remedial math class she’s taking during her first semester at Michigan State University.

It’s an unfamiliar scene for McClendon, the valedictorian of her graduating class at Detroit’s Cody High School who’s used to students coming to her for help. Now, the tables are turned. She describes it as “bittersweet.”

Half of Indiana’s public school students will be out of classrooms Tuesday while thousands of teachers from across the state rally at the Statehouse to demand better pay.

It’s an unprecedented move from Indiana’s teachers, who have spent the last several years watching their counterparts in other states and cities striking, walking out and marching their way toward higher salaries and better working and learning conditions.

Like nearly all teachers in America, Becky Cranson spends her own money to buy supplies for her students. Working in a rural school district in Michigan, where 70 percent of her middle school students come from low-income families, she shells out at least $1,000 a year for pencils, books, journals, glue sticks, tissues and much more.

But opening her wallet without reimbursement is only a small part of what she — and many others in America’s corps of 3.2 million teachers — do to secure classroom supplies they can’t get from their schools or from students’ families.

When they marched on the statehouse in Frankfort, Ky., in the midst of a spring snowstorm and a political firestorm last year, teachers warned the governor: “We’ll remember in November.”

Nearly 20 months later, they appeared to have delivered on that promise, helping Democrat Andy Beshear receive about 5,100 more votes than Republican incumbent Matt Bevin in the Kentucky governor’s race. It is a state President Trump carried by 30 points in 2016.