Today’s Literacy Headlines

Two decades of research across the U.S. also proves that two-way, dual-language programs can not only narrow the academic gap, but in some instances fully close it. Longitudinal studies show that multilingual learners often outperform their English-only peers in math, literacy, and graduation rates once reclassified. If multilingualism builds stronger students and communities, then schools must treat it as the asset it is. That means adopting curricula that support both language development and content learning, instead of watered down instruction. 

At the end of each year, as I wander through bookstores in search of holiday gifts, I’m always struck by the sheer number of children’s books I haven’t yet read or even heard about. As a writer, a parent, and the author of this column, it’s literally my job to know about books! This holiday season, when you visit your local bookstore to pick up the ten great books from the past year that I’ve recommended below, please take some extra time to ask the booksellers on duty what their own favorite new titles are. I guarantee you’ll leave with an armful of wonders.

In addition to opening public schools to a whole population of children, the IDEA law became the catalyst for legions of innovative practices and tools cultivated from both public and private sources. The transformations, special education experts say, were spurred by an ongoing need to individualize student supports while helping children with disabilities progress in general education classrooms. Many of these practices and technologies — such as universal design for learning, assistive technology, and positive behavioral interventions and supports — would not only be proven to help students with disabilities, but also to benefit their peers without disabilities.

Data released recently by the Indiana Department of Education showed 3.6% of the 84,000 children who took the statewide IREAD exam were retained in third grade under the first enforcement of a requirement approved by the Legislature in 2024. Those 3,040 retained students are more than seven times the 412 children held back in third grade two years ago. Education Secretary Katie Jenner credited improved performance by students in the IREAD exam given last school year with the retention figure being lower than anticipated when the literacy requirement was being debated.

All right, all right, all right! Let’s start this month off with a bang! A board book bang, that is. When you think about it, board books are a relatively new inclusion in the pantheon of children’s literature. For a long time (and, sadly, continuing to this day) parents were under the impression that reading to babies, toddlers, and preschoolers was a relative waste of time. Little did they suspect that the very seeds of literature love sometimes lie in these early engagements with books.

A recent study found less than half of children are read to daily. The consequences are serious for early learners who enter school unprepared. For many new parents, a dislike of reading stems from their own classroom experiences in the early 2000s that emphasized reading as a skill for testing. Many also are unfamiliar with the importance of reading to young children or may instead undervalue reading because of a dependence on online educational programs that have limited benefits for learning. For children not getting the benefits of being read to at home, the opportunity gap has widened, with those young students entering school unprepared compared to those who have been read to.

New research by HarperCollins UK reveals that parents are losing the love of reading aloud, with fewer than half sharing that reading to children is “no fun for me.” Gen Z respondents think of reading as “more a subject to learn than a fun thing to do.” Of course, this is alarming news for parents, educators, and all those who care about children and literacy. But we, librarians and lovers of stories and information, have the solution. It’s been ingrained in us since we entered this profession—it’s why we entered this profession. Bring back readers’ choice. Bring back read-alouds. Bring back the joy of reading. It’s why 28 librarians and five reviews editors came together to select 191 Best Books for children and young adults. Months of reading and discussion, spreadsheets and caffeine, all in service to this splendid list of enjoyable, excellent, and engaging books to preach that gospel.

When a complex phenomenon like learning is described in the objective, rigorous language of brain science, it feels like progress, reassuring us that teaching is grounded practice, not guesswork. But there is a subtle danger in allowing neuroscience to dominate our understanding of learning. When education is framed primarily as optimizing neural circuitry, we risk losing sight of the full complexity of human growth. When the brain becomes the only object of our concern, the richness of learning—its emotional, cultural, and ethical dimensions—can fade from view.

Loralyn LaBombard is the only reading specialist at Bow Memorial School, a middle school serving grades 5-8 in a leafy town outside Concord, N.H. In the world of literacy education, that is not an unusual distinction. After elementary school, many schools reduce or eliminate positions for supporting struggling readers. But several years ago, LaBombard started to feel like student needs were outpacing what she could handle. More middle schoolers needed help with foundational skills, like decoding words, and many students had the same gaps. Spearheaded by LaBombard, Bow has since launched an ambitious program to tackle foundational reading difficulties. In specialized classes across grades 5-8, students learn how to break down complex, multisyllabic words, improve their spelling, and practice reading fluently—all while also digging into novels and other whole books.

The state prioritized inclusivity for English learners in the tools it uses to screen for reading difficulties, says Robin Irey, education research specialist at the University of California-San Francisco Dyslexia Center. The center developed one of the state’s four recommended screening tools, called Multitudes. “We built in ways for the system to direct you to give Spanish and English in different measures after you get a sense of a child’s ability in both languages. That’s the benefit of a more thoughtful process,” she said, adding that specialists in African American English also were consulted to ensure that dialectical differences weren’t coded as errors.

Illustrator Frank Morrison and writer Carole Boston Weatherford have finished their sixth book together. In Family Feast!, the day begins early for Big Ma and Pops, who spend the morning peeling fruit for a pie and dressing the fish to fry. When aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers arrive, everyone gathers in the kitchen to cook, share recipes, gossip, catch up, shoot the breeze and lick the bowls. Boston Weatherford says that everyone brings something different to the party, “whether it’s a dish or, you know, somebody got to be the joke master or the storyteller.”

Once upon a time, children read books. In the corners of classrooms and libraries students got lost in books. However, there has been a dramatic shift in the system and books are no longer the center of the curriculum. Just 17% of third through eighth-grade teachers say they teach using mainly whole texts. Almost half of full texts are mixed with anthologies and short excerpts. When did we start teaching Cliff Notes versions of Shakespeare as complete works or as a substitute for the real thing?

Beloved by tweens, the Percy Jackson books have launched two movies, a Broadway musical and a Disney+ television series. But what’s a sixth grader to read next after devouring all that mythological media? These 11 titles, many of them series starters, will send kids off on thrilling new adventures that rival those of Percy and friends.

Though turn and talk is a go-to peer-to-peer reflection activity in many classrooms for a reason, teachers can face some common setbacks when they implement it. It’s easy for conversations to get off-topic or stall. Students can get stuck in ruts of pairing with the same people, or they can get left out altogether. But engaging with classmates to discuss class topics is an important practice for students, and a few simple structures that teachers can put in place will help everyone get the most out of turn and talk.

A new study has discovered a direct link between the number of milliseconds it takes a child’s brain to process the form of a printed word and how well that child understands what they are reading. The finding provides a new way to measure this neural timing in individual children with millisecond precision, a breakthrough that could advance our understanding of how reading skills develop. The research was published in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. The investigation was led by a team of researchers at Stanford University who were interested in the brain changes that support the development of fluent reading from late childhood into early adolescence. 

Establishing dedicated funding for ECE can be an effective way to ensure these programs don’t get left out during the budget process. The pace of states adopting these sorts of dedicated funding streams has increased in recent years. In 2022, New Mexico voters approved a constitutional amendment to direct an additional 1.25 percent of revenue from the Land Grant Permanent Fund to early education each year. These funds, most of which come from leases and royalties from oil and gas companies operating on public lands, have allowed the state to make significant investments in early childhood education. Recently, these funds enabled New Mexico to become the first state to offer free child care to all residents.

The new legislation would create a framework for more rigorous assessment, teacher training and tailored strategies to help Wyoming’s struggling readers. The bill aims to ensure that every K-12 Wyoming student develops strong language and literacy skills and that struggling readers do not fall through the cracks. It comes as reading scores in Wyoming and nationally have ticked down in recent years. In 2024, 36% of the state’s fourth graders and 29% of eighth graders performed at or above the proficient level in reading on national standardized NAEP tests, lower than the previous five years. ‘Please do not fail these children,’ one grandfather said.

The U.S. Department of Education is transferring management of six programs to other federal agencies in the Trump administration’s continued push to eventually close the agency and give states more control over education funding decisions, according to a Tuesday announcement. The shifting of responsibilities is a historic change for the 46-year-old agency that has been the central hub of federal grant-making, technical assistance and civil rights enforcement for schools and colleges. The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education programs will be transferred to the U.S. Department of Labor. The changes do not include movement for the management of special education, civil rights enforcement or student financial aid at this time.

The teaching profession is one of the most female-dominated in the U.S.. 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? A new national analysis finds no evidence that boys perform or behave better with male teachers in elementary school. This challenges a widespread belief that boys thrive more when taught by men, and it raises questions about efforts, such as one in New York City, to spend extra to recruit them. Middle and high school students might see more benefits.

In honor of Native American Heritage Month, we asked Indigenous creators to discuss how their works reflect different aspects of their culture and history. Hear from James Bird, Art Coulson, Michaela Goade, Cynthia Leitich Smith, and Steph Little Bird.

The best K–3 reading reforms are actually birth–3 policies in disguise. To realize the full promise of the science of reading policymakers must write birth–5 into literacy laws and budgets; districts must create a unified B–3 spine linking curriculum, PD, assessment, and MTSS; and schools must make oral-language growth as measurable and routine as mastery of letter-sounds. Until early childhood sits at the heart of literacy policy, we’ll keep trying to fix in third grade what could have been built from birth.

Common Sense has teamed up with Day of AI, a nonprofit organization that works to educate students on the technology, to create an AI toolkit—released Nov. 17—to help parents better understand the technology and talk about it with their children. AI safety concerns are already on the radar of parents and policymakers, attention spurred by high-profile cases of teens dying by suicide after prolonged engagement with chatbot companions. It’s important that schools and parents work hand-in-hand to make sure students understand AI’s benefits and drawbacks, said Jeffrey Riley, the executive director of Day of AI. Riley likened learning AI literacy to learning to drive. “AI is an even more powerful tool than a car,” he said.

A growing number of studies in recent years show students of color, particularly Black children, are more likely to be identified for mental health issues and underidentified for learning disabilities like dyslexia. And despite increased dyslexia screening in many states, many students are still not receiving the support they need. While dyslexia affects about one in five people and it’s one of the most common causes for reading difficulties in elementary school children, only 10% of kids with dyslexia receive special education services and intervention, according to the University of Michigan. It’s worse for Black and brown kids. 

American classrooms have been transformed by screens in the last five years, with most students, of all ages, now learning on computers or tablets during the school day. Even as schools have moved rapidly to ban cellphones, screens are nearly universal: Ninety-nine percent of teachers said their school provided devices to students for use in class, in an informal national survey of 350 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers conducted by The New York Times in October. Among elementary schoolteachers, 81 percent said students at their school receive devices for use in class by kindergarten.

The district as a whole has been making impressive gains in reading and math over the last few years. In 2025, it reported its highest-ever performance on California’s state test. Moreover, those gains were broadly shared across the district’s most challenging, high-poverty schools. LAUSD had a disproportionately large share of what we identified as the state’s “bright spot” schools. L.A. accounted for 8% of all California schools in our sample but 16% of those that are the most exceptional. All told, we found 45 L.A. district schools that were beating the odds and helping low-income students read proficiently. Some of these were selective magnet schools, but many were not. 

We spend a lot of time on Heavy Medal thinking about the Newbery Terms and Criteria. We most often focus on the “literary qualities” that are named in the Criteria. Also known as “the big 6”:  Theme, Information, Plot, Characters, Setting, and Style. Very important stuff in a literary award…but not the only stuff when it comes to the Newbery. “Committee members must consider excellence of presentation for a child audience.” Does that mean that is one of the criteria too? What does “excellence of presentation for a child audience” mean? And why does that get overlooked so much?

As school districts push to lower absenteeism rates, the software company SchoolStatus, which helps schools keep track of students and communicate with parents, examined four years of its own attendance intervention data across hundreds of school districts. It analyzed 3.3 million text messages across 15 states, representing 88,000 students and 22,000 educators. In a recent report, it finds that improving attendance often comes down to a handful of basic tasks. One takeaway: ‘accessible, timely and specific’ messages to parents, students can trim absences.

Guided by Universal Design for Learning (UDL), quick formative assessments can provide multiple ways for students to engage, represent, and express understanding. Using tools such as comprehension questions, informal checks, and exit tickets, teachers can identify student strengths, correct misunderstandings, and plan for next steps. By allowing students to demonstrate understanding in varied ways, formative assessment supports individual needs and informs instructional decisions. 

State Secretary of Education Katie Jenner praised Johnson for her embrace of the science of reading, calling her “a dedicated literacy champion.” Johnson say, “In my 19 years of teaching, literacy is the subject that requires the most effort, care, and understanding of each individual student. It is something that I am always studying and reflecting on, trying to find the best ways to reach every learner in my classroom. I truly believe that students need to have a purpose for everything they do in reading. When I let them in on what that purpose is, they invest more deeply in their learning and take greater ownership of their progress.”

At Sugarloaf Elementary School in Frederick, Maryland, kindergarten teacher Heather Van Eck does something intentional with her students to help make learning stick better during their math lesson on groups of 10—as she roams the room, instead of showing them what they did wrong or providing them the correct answer, she approaches their work with curiosity, prompting them with simple questions tailored to get them to explain their thinking—and often, arrive at a new understanding on their own. It’s one of the ways Van Eck injects more research-backed learning science into her daily classroom practice. By asking students to walk her through their thinking by saying, “Tell me more about how you did this,” she’s helping them cement the concepts she’s trying to teach.

Through our singular focus on the components of how, we have lost sight of why we read in the first place. Like Icarus whose fall makes a splash quite unnoticed, we have forgotten what his wings were for. If kids aren’t taught to understand and appreciate art for art’s sake, they may learn to read, but they won’t learn to love it. They’ll know the words, but not the world they open. And so: We have lost the plot. To fulfill the promise of the science of reading, states, districts, and schools must also reclaim the art of reading—ensuring that every child not only learns to decode and comprehend but also learns to love and live in books.

Alongside explicit instruction in the core components of phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension, teachers can weave together a broad (and fun!) range of research-backed strategies to scaffold the crucial skills students need to become good readers. Here are five excellent ways to support budding literacy in your classroom. 

Has the education system, however, done enough to respect the learning characteristics of each young child? Each learner possesses an unimaginably intricate human brain that is capable of modifying itself to respond to an ever-changing world. Each child is equipped with neurological richness through thoughts, plans, memories, and feelings. What could we understand about student learning that could revolutionize schools into more effective learning environments, beginning with very young developing readers?

“Shelf is a biannual magazine celebrating picture book matters, because picture books matter! SHELF was founded in 2024 by illustrator & owner of the picture book shop Shelf Editions, Helen Hancocks, as a love letter to the art of the picture book and to broaden the coverage they receive. Through its pages and the website we hope that we can shine a spotlight on authors, illustrators, the industry and the market as a whole as well as treating picture books as an art form deserving of criticism and focus.” To know more about the publication I just had to go to the source: Helen Hancocks herself. And Helen, happily, was willing to answer a couple of my questions.

The 10 winners of The New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Books Award are chosen each year by a rotating panel of three expert judges. On the 2025 panel were the Hans Christian Andersen Medal-winning illustrator Peter Sís, the children’s author Tracey Baptiste and the children’s librarian Amber Moller. Children’s book publishers were invited to submit up to 10 picture books published this year in the United States. The judges made their selections from the nearly 800 books we received purely on the basis of artistic merit.

The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) has released its 2025 Dyslexia Definition—the first revision since its widely recognized 2002 definition that has guided research, shaped educational policy, informed legislation, and supported countless families worldwide. The 2025 definition has been revised to be more international, encompassing the biological and environmental influences of dyslexia and expanding the recognition of its secondary consequences, such as challenges to psychological well-being and vocational opportunities. Key changes include moving away from IQ-discrepancy models, recognizing that difficulties exist on a continuum despite effective instruction, and emphasizing the importance of early identification and intervention.

A suburban district’s experience with a virtual provider, experts say, reinforces the importance of sticking to a high-dosage tutoring model. The results add to a growing body of research at a time when tutoring has shifted from being viewed as an emergency stopgap to an ongoing teaching strategy.

New Mexico and Vermont made splashy funding announcements to push early childhood programs forward. Maryland has been charting its own path for years. Thanks to a new $10 million initiative in Montgomery County, Maryland, early childhood educators have a shot at upping the quality of their programs. The lion’s share of the funding, $6.1 million, is earmarked to expand Head Start; the remainder of the $10 million will go to a new $4 million loan program to help existing child care facilities add seats or improve the quality of their centers. 

A beacon is a salient auditory or visual pattern that tethers sound and form in working memory. The teacher’s role is first to sensitize learners to those useful patterns, then help learners anchor the forms to meaning for understanding to take place. This is where teaching becomes artistry: knowing where students are, knowing where they must go, and building memorable bridges—drawing on stories, pictures, clever mnemonics, sensory cues, emotions, or kinesthetic movements to help the form stick.

In response to news that 12th-grade reading scores are at a 30-year low, teenagers diagnose the problem — and warn of the high stakes for their generation. They voiced urgent concerns for the future, warning of a crisis where a generation is left unprepared to understand politics, get a job or read a legal contract. They also made suggestions for how schools, teachers, parents and students themselves could address the problem.

After nearly doubling during the pandemic, the rates of chronic absenteeism in K-12 schools are finally showing steady signs of improvement. “Thousands of students have returned to schools, which means that states are putting in the work,” said Carl Felton, III, a policy analyst at EdTrust, a nonprofit that advocates for underrepresented students. Felton is the author of a new report that looks at how policies in 22 states plus Washington, D.C., have helped improve student attendance. He said there are several things states are doing right, including collecting and publishing reliable data, and investing in early interventions and outreach programs instead of punitive practices.

Nearly 60% of special education teachers reported using AI to develop an IEP or Section 504 plan during the 2024-25 school year. Teachers are increasingly using generative artificial intelligence tools to support students with disabilities in ways that save time for educators and provide best practices for interventions and clear communication for students and parents, according to a new paper from the Center for Democracy and Technology. 
CDT however, warns of risks in using AI to craft individualized education programs, including potential violations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and privacy laws, as well as possible introduction of inaccuracies and biases.

New analysis compares literacy vs. poverty rates for 10,000 districts, 42,000 schools and 3 million kids. Last year, The 74 set out to find the school districts that were doing the best job of teaching kids how to read. Now, they are expanding that search to individual schools — and have found 2,158 where third-grade reading scores are much higher than might be expected, based on the schools’ poverty rates. The data are available in an interactive online tool. The exceptional schools are in the top 5% of their state in terms of outscoring their expected reading proficiency. For example, Hoover Street Elementary in Los Angeles is a high-poverty school that nonetheless earned high marks

As more schools have introduced phonemic awareness instruction, two big questions have emerged about the most effective way to conduct it. One has to do with how letters are — or are not — integrated. The other question about phonemic awareness instruction centers around what skills to practice, including “advanced phonemic awareness” tasks such as phoneme deletion and substitution. In a new study, teachers used a 2014 version of Heggerty, which included only oral phonemic awareness routines (newer versions have incorporated connections to printed letters). Results showed that the Heggerty program improved students’ phonemic awareness skills, with a statistically significant effect size of .65, which the researchers describe as a moderate to large effect. But students who received Heggerty didn’t do significantly better than those who didn’t on measures of word-reading and oral reading fluency. This was the case for both higher- and lower-performing readers.

For decades, Mississippi students struggled to read, and the state ranked low on education quality. Not anymore. Strong student test scores – dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle” – have catapulted the Southern state into the national spotlight. But the state superintendent at the helm during those literacy reforms has repeatedly pushed back against that buzzy term. Instead, Carey Wright has described the state’s success as the “Mississippi Marathon.” Literacy experts say it happened with the steady drumbeat of a “science of reading” instructional approach — and a trained workforce to back it up. Slowly but surely, they say, the nation’s higher education and K-12 systems are trying to bridge knowledge gaps between science of reading laws and the workforce tasked with teaching children to read.

In Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, Timothy Shanahan focuses on what role the teacher should play in direct instruction, and how we can and should choose the texts. The result is a devastating takedown of leveled literacy—not because the book is bombastic, but because it’s careful: historically grounded, methodically argued, and relentlessly focused on what actually helps students learn (which, as Shanahan repeatedly points out, is largely missing from efforts to promote leveled literacy). Shanahan’s core claim is bracingly plain. Leveled reading might work if three things were true: (1) we could accurately level texts, (2) we could reliably pinpoint a child’s “reading level,” and (3) students learned more by engaging with texts independently with minimal teacher guidance. 

By middle school, the consequences of early reading failure are compounded by years of frustration. Students who can’t read fluently are excluded from real, meaningful engagement with grade-level content, and their confidence dies. Without intervention, they often disengage from reading altogether, creating a vicious cycle that’s difficult to break free from. If the goal of the science of reading revolution is for every child to read well, we must address this unfinished work: Supporting the many students who are already beyond the prevention stage and now require intervention. By recognizing literacy as a K–12 continuum, states can ensure that support doesn’t disappear the moment a student turns nine.

Social-emotional learning programs can boost students’ academic performances, but a recent analysis found that program length matters when it comes to how much. Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine analyzed 40 studies on SEL programs that included data from more than 33,700 students in first through 12th grade. They found that students who participated in SEL programs saw improved academic performance no matter their grade level or whether their performance was measured with GPA or standardized test scores. When broken out by subject, literacy achievement increased by about 6.3 percentage points and math achievement increased by 3.8 percentage points.

A team of researchers and technologists is partnering to make the science of reading easier to implement in the classroom. The University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI) has developed a comprehensive, step-by-step phonics program called UFLI Foundations for teachers to deliver high-quality instruction in phonics that is aligned to the science of reading. UFLI has partnered with Project Read AI, a startup that offers a structured literacy platform powered by artificial intelligence and used by over 150,000 teachers. Together, they created a technology portal to help teachers implement progress monitoring as designed within the UFLI Foundations program.

More often than not, book bans are born of fear — an effort to tamp down stories that hold up a mirror to our country. But how will we understand our history (both our triumphs and our missteps) if certain voices are silenced? How can we expect to grow as a nation if we are not willing to be self-critical? These questions are at the heart of “A Sea of Lemon Trees,” a stunning new historical novel-in-verse by María Dolores Águila. The book sheds light on an unheralded moment in American history when a Mexican community came together to fight educational injustice.

The downsizing of the U.S. Department of Education this year has sparked increased debate among parents, special education advocates and policy experts about how the federal government can best serve students with disabilities. Some critics of the Education Department’s Office of Special Education Programs say the office needs to be overhauled so it can be more responsive to parents’ concerns and school districts’ needs. Others are calling for its complete elimination. OSEP oversees implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — the nation’s landmark special education law.

The 21st century has brought children’s literature more diversity and a willingness to explore difficult and complex topics. Through it all, children’s authors and illustrators have created titles that teach empathy, reflect the lives of the most marginalized, and share everyone’s story. They have created books that change and save lives, along with those that entertain, connect, and create lifelong readers. And we wanted to know what our readers thought were the most influential titles of the last 25 years.

A new report, based on 120 studies on effective reading instruction conducted across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and covering more than 170 different languages, finds that training educators in evidence-backed instruction—as in the Science of Reading—could help solve the global literacy crisis, while recognizing that “home-language instruction consistently produces better reading outcomes than second-language instruction.” The report, “Effective Reading Instruction in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: What the Evidence Shows” synthesizes the growing research from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It identifies key skills pupils must learn, and that teachers must learn to teach, to effectively support the acquisition of literacy.

We’ve all heard the argument that keyboards and screens have made this foundational skill obsolete. But research keeps confirming what many teachers have known for years: Handwriting is more than just penmanship — it’s an important part of a child’s thinking and literacy development, particularly during the formative years of pre-K through fifth grade. A recent study, “Writing by Hand Helps Children Learn Letters Better,” reinforces this, showing that the physical act of forming letters strengthens memory and accelerates learning. Far from being a relic of the past, handwriting is a powerful tool that prepares young students for reading, improves their cognitive abilities and builds the groundwork for becoming confident, capable writers.

A prolonged federal government shutdown is causing some school systems and government agencies to provide outreach and extra supports for low-income families and children affected by the likely expiration of benefits. Advocates for low-income families are warning that childhood hunger will increase when funding expires Nov. 1 for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the nation’s largest federal food assistance program. While SNAP benefits are of immediate concern, some school systems, advocates and policymakers also said they are worried about the long-term sustainability of free-or reduced-price school lunch programs, as well as access to Head Start services if the shutdown isn’t resolved soon.

New Jersey’s largest school system will receive nearly half a million dollars in new federal funding to strengthen reading instruction and engage families in literacy as part of a first-year $13.6 million initiative announced this week by the state’s Education Department. Two grants will support Newark Public Schools’ literacy work, with $400,000 to update instructional materials and train teachers in evidence-based practices and $60,000 to create home-based literacy programs for parents and children under age 3.

Clear family-school communications and robust supports for students with learning differences are just a few ways education systems can improve family-school connections to support student outcomes, nonprofit Learning Heroes said in a new report. The organization used 10 years of research on family-school partnerships to inform best practices that improve these relationships with the aim of driving student success. One of the biggest barriers to family-school partnerships is what the report calls a “perception gap,” or when families believe their child is performing at higher academic levels than what’s really occurring. 

In a 2022 study, researchers discovered that a neuroscience-based professional development program not only improved teachers’ understanding of key brain functions like attention, memory, cognitive load, and emotion, but also led to meaningful changes in classroom instruction, resulting in “significant improvements” in students’ reading competence, mathematical competence, and empathy. Understanding how student brains work doesn’t provide “exact rules that can tell the teachers what to do in every situation,” the researchers explained. Instead, it can help teachers understand the underlying mechanisms that shape learning and provide insights into how to fine-tune instruction to meet the needs of all learners. Here are 15 tips to align your teaching with the science of how student brains work.

As an adult, I’ve mostly avoided horror as a genre; real life is terrifying enough. And my own kids are resolutely anti-scariness. I was terrified of the Old Elephant King in “The Story of Babar.” My daughter was freaked out by “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” Then came my niece. Lucy opened up a whole haunted world I didn’t know as a child, or with my children. And as she got older, she recommended books to me.

Beginning last year, transitional kindergartners were not assessed for English language proficiency, a decision many TK teachers celebrated. For now, California has no formal way of determining transitional kindergartners’ English proficiency, which means schools miss out on federal and state funding for English learners. Schools are not required by law to provide students with language services or report their academic or language progress on the California School Dashboard. But this summer, the state Legislature set aside $10 million in the budget to select a new screener for schools to use to identify TK students who need more help learning English. The state superintendent of public instruction has to select a list of screeners by March 31, which will then be tested in some districts in 2026-27 before requiring screening in 2027-28.