Author: Reporter

We live in uncertain and unstable times. The job market is contracting due to economic uncertainty, political instability and the increase of AI-driven automation. In my role as a career adviser, I talk to many students and recent graduates who have faced a long and difficult job search. The words and phrases I hear most often in these conversations are “dejected,” “soul-crushing,” or “I feel like I am screaming into the void.” International students face an added challenge, with H-1B visas seeming out of reach as they become more difficult and expensive for employers to process. All of this uncertainty…

by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report December 15, 2025 This year, a lot of my reporting focused on the dismantling of federally funded education research and statistics inside the Department of Education. (If you want the full post-mortem, you can read my year-end recap.) But 2025 wasn’t only about watchdog work. Week after week, I also dug into new studies that reveal what is and what isn’t working in American classrooms. When I look back at the most-read stories, the pattern is unmistakable. You were hungry for clarity on special education, reading instruction, cellphones in schools and, of course, AI. Here…

Early on August 8, 2023, Hurricane Dora drove unusually strong winds across the seaside town of Lahaina, HI. At dawn, a downed power line sparked a brushfire. By the afternoon, most of the town was in flames. 2,200 homes were destroyed and more than 100 people had died. In Yancey County, NC, on the evening of September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene was predicted to bring heavy rainfall to the mountain community. By the following day, 1400 homes were lost with 10 lives taken. Bridges, roads, electrical lines, and water mains had been washed away. And in the early hours of…

Listen to the article 1 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Most clicked story of the week: The U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 8 declined to hear a Texas case that could have decided the constitutionality of book bans in public libraries. By not hearing arguments in Little v. Llano County, the justices left in place a lower court ruling allowing state and local governments to make decisions on book bans.The case turned on whether book removal decisions — which have intensified across public schools and libraries in the past few years —…

Republish This Article We want our stories to be shared as widely as possible — for free. Please view The 74’s republishing terms. Each year, The 74’s staff shares a list of stories from other media outlets that we wish we had written. By The 74 Staff This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox. The news came fast and furious in 2025, and it was easy to miss some of the amazing journalism our colleagues at other media…

If you want to know what it was like to live in sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Lon­don, read the diary of Samuel Pepys. While doing so, take note of his fre­quent ref­er­ences to the unclean­li­ness of the city’s streets: “very dirty and trou­ble­some to walk through,” “mighty dirty after the rain,” and dur­ing the large-scale rebuild­ing in the after­math of the Great Fire of 1666, “much built, yet very dirty and encum­bered.” If you want to know what it was like to live in nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Lon­don, read Charles Dick­ens. How­ev­er much-lament­ed the dif­fi­cul­ties it presents to young read­ers, the open­ing of Bleak House remains high­ly…

Paulette Granberry Russell is stepping down as president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE) after a dramatic and unpredictable five years at the helm. She represented campus diversity professionals amid the national racial reckoning that accompanied the Black Lives Matter movement, and then through the dizzying years that followed as anti-DEI laws swept the country. She also spent 22 years as a diversity professional at Michigan State University. Granberry Russell told Inside Higher Ed she never planned to stay at NADOHE longer than five years, so she’s ready to move on and facilitate a “smooth…

Key points: Between kindergarten and second grade, much of the school day is dedicated to helping our youngest students master phonics, syllabication, and letter-sound correspondence–the essential building blocks to lifelong learning. Unfortunately, this foundational reading instruction has been stamped with an arbitrary expiration date. Students who miss that critical learning window, including our English Language Learners (ELL), children with learning disabilities, and those who find reading comprehension challenging, are pushed forward through middle and high school without the tools they need. In the race to catch up to classmates, they struggle academically, emotionally, and in extreme cases, eventually disengage or…

Setting off another high-stakes dispute between the Trump administration and Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Commerce threatened this summer to take control of the Ivy League institution’s patents arising from federal funding.  At stake are patents that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber that took aim at the university’s patent portfolio, accusing Harvard of failing to “live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer.” The letter said the Commerce Department would begin “an immediate comprehensive review” of whether Harvard’s federally funded research complies with…

Most clicked story of the week The U.S. Department of Education is warning students who fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid if they’ve expressed interest in colleges with relatively poor student earnings outcomes. The disclosure, based on College Scorecard data, is intended to “empower prospective students to make data-driven decisions before they are saddled with debt,” according to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Number of the week: 3.6% The increase in operating costs colleges saw in fiscal 2025, according to the Commonfund Institute’s Higher Education Price Index. Inflation in the higher ed sector is “elevated above what…