Author: Reporter

by Christina A. Samuels, The Hechinger Report April 2, 2026 When my son was about to turn 5, I was faced with a decision that may be familiar to parents of children whose birthdays are close to kindergarten enrollment cutoff dates. In my local school district, children must be 5 years old on or ahead of Sept. 1 before they enroll in kindergarten. With a late September birthday, my son was only a few weeks too young to make that cutoff. A friend of mine whose child had a similarly timed birthday was trying for early enrollment. Should I, too?…

Recently, I was preparing to give my middle school students a survey to conclude the semester together. Like many educators, I wanted genuine feedback — what worked, what didn”t, and what would help me serve them better next semester. I built a 20-question form: some multiple choice to track patterns, some open-ended to capture the nuance that numbers can’t. In the past, this would have meant hours of reading through responses, manually categorizing themes, and trying to make sense of conflicting feedback. But this time was different. Using Google Gemini Pro directly inside Google Forms, I was able to: Create…

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Dylan Lopez Contreras sat waiting for a copy of his class schedule in a sunny fourth-floor room of his Bronx high school as his counselor walked in wearing a “Free Dylan” button attached to the strap of his messenger bag. Dylan stood, and Hedin Bernard lifted Dylan’s more-than-6-foot frame off the floor in a tight bear hug. It had been more than 10 months since Dylan set foot in ELLIS Preparatory Academy, a high school geared toward older, newly arrived immigrant students. The last time…

The University of Michigan wants to bring hundreds of jobs and a high-performance computing facility to a township nearly 20 miles away from its Ann Arbor campus. However, local opposition could derail the project. Among other concerns, the local leaders and community members say they are worried the facility could make the township a target for terrorism. They also accused the university of lying to them. The Ypsilanti Township Board of Trustees unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday night “declaring strong and unequivocal opposition” to a proposed computational research facility to be built in collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory.…

Shenandoah University and Yangtze Normal University (YZNU) in China have established a landmark partnership to launch two collaborative undergraduate engineering programs, making Shenandoah the only foreign university in China to be approved for two programs simultaneously. The programs – engineering physics and computer engineering – will be delivered on the YZNU campus, which serves as one of Shenandoah’s official off-campus instructional sites in China. Structured under a “4+0” model, students will complete all four years of study in China and earn degrees from both institutions. Beginning in Fall 2026, the programs will enroll up to 240 students annually through China’s…

Steven Mintz, Chronicle What the University of the Future Will Look Like?

This summer, Illinois will launch a state-level department of early childhood, bringing under one roof a host of programs for children, families and educators that have long been dispersed across different state agencies.  In doing so, it will become the latest in a wave of states that have established standalone departments for early care and education in recent years, joining the ranks of Colorado, New Mexico and others. The shift toward unified governance structures comes at a time when the sector is getting more attention and, in some states, more investment. That, plus an effort to improve families’ experiences in…

Microlearning Solutions For Mobile If your employees are sprinting from meeting to meeting, a 60-minute course is more a burden than a benefit. Two forces make traditional, lengthy training hard to justify today: first, time scarcity—half of U.S. learning leaders and 53% of employees say their workload leaves little room for training [1]. Second, fragmented attention—a report by Gloria Mark reveals that the average employee’s attention span has shrunk to just 47 seconds before they switch tasks. For L&D leaders, this metric represents a significant barrier to organizational learning. With 91% of U.S. adults now owning smartphones, employees are constantly…

How To Build A Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy For Enterprise Buyers Every enterprise marketing looks familiar on the surface. There is a funnel that includes the steps of the journey a potential buyer takes. These steps are often awareness, consideration, and conversion, or similar ones in this sphere, depending on the marketing goal. However, once you start working real enterprise deals, the cracks show quickly. That is mostly due to the complexities of an enterprise deal. In reality, buyers do not move in steps. They do not convert after a single campaign, and they almost never engage early. Therefore, by the…

Responding to the complaint, a Department of Labor spokesperson said, “It appears a small group of employees would rather protest their detail to Labor than do their actual jobs and deliver for the American people.” Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images Education Department employees sent to the Labor Department are working in offices that are “unsafe and in disrepair,” according to the union representing the ED staff, which filed a complaint this week with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration over the working conditions. The employees started working out of the Labor Department after ED outsourced career and technical education and…