
8/26/2026
Meta settled with 52 attorneys general and agreed to default limits on teen accounts: two hours a day, no access overnight, hidden likes, and muted notifications during school hours. It does not block the apps during class, and it does not cover TikTok, YouTube, or Snapchat.
Mary Johnson
8/26/2026
Shifting bedtime 15 to 30 minutes earlier each night for a week or two is the method pediatricians recommend. It works well for younger kids. For teenagers there is a complication worth understanding, because their body clocks are working against the school bell.
Kate Carter
8/26/2026
Chronic absenteeism does not mean skipping school. It means missing 10 percent of the year, about 18 days, and it counts the sick days and the family trip too. Here is what the label means and what to actually do about it.
Mary Johnson
8/25/2026
House Bill 959 requires every North Carolina public and charter school to bar phone use during instructional time. An Asheville charter school that adopted the same rule two years early says parents report happier, more talkative kids, and that a few students are gaming the system with decoy phones.
Kate Carter
8/25/2026
New federal guidance says considering race in student discipline is itself discrimination, reversing a decade-old policy that told schools to examine their discipline data for racial disparities. Two districts are under investigation, and both say they have not been told why.
Arthur Chen
8/24/2026
Rob Burnside let a homeless student keep attending Lakota East High School after the district said he had to withdraw, then took him into his home. It ended a 31-year career. It also points at a federal law most families have never heard of.
Mary Johnson
8/24/2026
If your child was born in June, July, or August, they will likely be among the youngest in their class, and you can usually choose to wait a year. Here is how deferring works in the US, what the research says about whether it helps, and the questions that matter more than the birthday.
Kate Carter
8/23/2026
Mills Park Elementary in Cary posts the highest test proficiency of any public elementary school in Wake County, home to Raleigh. The strongest schools cluster in the Cary, Apex, and Morrisville tech corridor, and the scores track neighborhood income closely. Here are the top 15.
Mary Johnson
8/22/2026
Officers in Nebraska's largest district had been carrying gloves that deliver an electric shock on contact, and used them twice last school year. After students and parents objected, Omaha police agreed to stop. Bellevue police, who patrol nearby schools, are keeping theirs.
Mary Johnson
8/22/2026
Central Magnet School in Tennessee took the top spot, and Arizona's BASIS charter network placed 12 schools in the national top 100. But read the list closely and a pattern emerges: nearly every school at the top is small, selective, or both.
Kate Carter
8/21/2026
A Reason Foundation analysis scored the 100 largest districts on eight financial measures. Fort Bend ISD in Texas triggered seven of eight warning signs and Gwinnett County in Georgia six, while only two large districts, Baltimore City and Rutherford County, triggered none.
Arthur Chen
8/21/2026
Both let a high schooler earn college credit before graduation, but they earn it in very different ways. Which one pays off depends less on prestige and more on where your student is actually headed.
Kate Carter
8/20/2026
There is no federal ban on paddling students, so it is left to states. Fifteen still have laws allowing corporal punishment in public schools, almost all in the South, even as psychologists broadly agree it is harmful and ineffective. Here is where it happens, what the research shows, and why supporters defend it.
Mary Johnson
8/20/2026
Birmingham City is the most predominantly Black large school district in the country at 83.2%. allk12 ranked every district with 20,000-plus students by Black enrollment share using NCES 2024-25 data, and the list splits into two clear groups.
Kate Carter
8/19/2026
A Farnsley Middle School student agenda labeled Kentucky 'Venecky,' Illinois 'Vitoiis,' and included a distorted periodic table. Parents pay a $10 fee for the booklets and suspect the pages were AI-generated. The school told teachers to have students tear the bad pages out.
Mary Johnson
8/19/2026
The DeKalb County School District agreed to pay $29.5 million to seven charter schools that sued over withheld funding, nearly triple the roughly $10 million they first claimed. A judge had ruled the district breached its contracts, and the deal now requires it to show its funding math every month.
Arthur Chen
8/18/2026
Gov. Brian Kemp suspended all seven members of the Dublin City school board as the small Georgia district works through a roughly $20 million financial crisis that began with a missed health insurance payment and has already cost 46 jobs. A committee will recommend temporary replacements.
Mary Johnson
8/18/2026
Texas grades every public district and school from A to F each year, based mostly on STAAR results but through three domains that also credit student growth and progress at high-poverty schools. Here is what the ratings measure, how the letter grade is calculated, and how to read one.
Arthur Chen
8/17/2026
The goal isn't a lunch that looks good in a photo. It's one that comes home empty. Here's how to build a lunch from a formula instead of a recipe, keep it safe without a fridge, and beat the sandwich rut, plus the honest question of whether packing beats the school meal at all.
Kate Carter
8/17/2026
Aurora Public Schools opened Escuela Bilingüe Betty Benavidez this month, its first dual-language magnet, built on the idea that Spanish is an academic strength to grow rather than a gap to close. About 150 young students start in a model that aims for full biliteracy by the upper grades.
Mary Johnson