Education

Shabana Basij-Rasikh speaks at SESSION 1 at TEDWomen 2021: What Now? December 1-3, 2021, Palm Springs, California. Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED

Shabana Basij-Rasikh: The ongoing fight to educate Afghan girls

9:23am April 29, 2022

In 2016, Shabana Basij-Rasikh created Afghanistan's School of Leadership for girls. When the Taliban took control in 2021, she helped her students flee and continued their education abroad.

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News brief: missile strike, Biden wants more Ukraine funding, education poll

7:46am April 29, 2022

A missile hit Kyiv after the U.N. chief finished a news conference. President Biden urges lawmakers to send more money to Ukraine. NPR poll: most parents are happy with what schools are teaching.

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The education culture war is raging. But for most parents, it's background noise

5:13am April 29, 2022

by Anya Kamenetz

By wide margins, parents across the political spectrum are satisfied with how their children's schools teach about race, gender and history. That's according to a new national poll by NPR and Ipsos.

A teacher walks through an empty classroom at Hazelwood Elementary School in Louisville, Ky., on Jan. 11.

How social-emotional learning became a target for Ron DeSantis and conservatives

7:17pm April 28, 2022

by Terry Gross

Florida officials recently rejected a slew of math textbooks, claiming they included "prohibited topics." Journalist Dana Goldstein theorizes the objections related to social-emotional learning.

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Students make their way through the Sather Gate near Sproul Plaza on the University of California, Berkeley, campus on March 29 in Berkeley, Calif.

University of California will waive tuition and fees for many Native American students

11:44am April 28, 2022

by Rina Torchinsky

The program applies to undergraduate and graduate students who are members of federally recognized Native American, American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and will begin in the fall.

Encore: A library system announces a program to challenge the tide of book bans

4:35pm April 27, 2022

by Andrew Limbong

As more and more school districts ban books from their classrooms and libraries, the Brooklyn Public Library is sharing its resources with teens around the country to fight encroaching censorship.

Harvard University has committed $100 million to redress its early ties to slavery

4:58pm April 26, 2022

by Max Larkin - WBUR

Harvard University has committed $100 million to redress its ties to slavery. The University says the wealth used to found the school came from wealthy slave owners.

Among the books banned in Llano County, Texas, public libraries were: Robie H. Harris's It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health; Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; and Maurice Sendak's In the Night

In a lawsuit, a group of Texas library patrons says a book ban amounts to censorship

4:11pm April 26, 2022

by Joe Hernandez

Llano County officials said they wanted to remove "pornographic" material from libraries but actually censored books based on political and religious grounds, the library patrons' lawsuit says.

Students attend a pre-K class at P.S. 124 in New York City on Jan 13, 2021. A new report found enrollment drops at state-based preschool programs during the 2020-2021 school year.

Education

The pandemic erased a decade of public preschool gains

3:18pm April 26, 2022

by Cory Turner

An annual review of state-based preschool programs found big drops in enrollment and state funding in the 2020-2021 school year.

Supreme Court seems sympathetic to a coach who claims the right to pray

6:43pm April 25, 2022

by Nina Totenberg

The court's liberal wing has no desire to overturn the court's precedents, but its conservatives want to focus on accommodating religion in public schools and other public institutions.