It’s 85 degrees on a recent morning on Chicago’s West Side. Gabriela Tenorio and her team of parent ambassadors gather on the corner of Madison and Central Park in the Garfield Park neighborhood with a mission: They’re looking for 3- and 4-year-olds to recruit for preschool.

The moms are doing street outreach on behalf of the parent advocacy group COFI, or Community Organizing and Family Issues. Armed with pamphlets and clipboards, they plan to knock on every door in sight to spread the word about universal preschool at Chicago Public Schools...

American students saw some of the biggest declines in academic achievement recorded in the last 50 years, according to a nationwide assessment that paints a stark picture of the pandemic’s effect on education.

The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is run by the U.S. Education Department, show that average scores for 9-year-old students fell five points in reading and seven points in math this year, compared to 2020. That marks the first-ever score decline in math and the largest decline in reading since 1990...

Your child’s art class involves a lot more than just the Crayola marker scribble-scrabble that will end up hanging on your refrigerator.

“Good arts education is not about the product,” says Jamie Kasper, director of the Arts Education Partnership and a former music teacher. “It is about the process of learning.”

Carlos is a doctoral student in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. His research interests broadly include social and racial inequality within urban education, pre-k-12 education reform, and the politics of the teaching profession. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, Carlos is investigating policies and practices that address educational inequality for students of color, immigrant, and Latinx students. Carlos served as an educator and administrator in Chicago and New York City schools and has extensive teaching experience.

Alex Gordon is a Research Analyst II for the UChicago Consortium, where his current projects include teacher retention, early-grade literacy, and early college credit acquisition. His other research interests include the career pathways of substitute teachers and the political economy of school board decisions. Before coming to the UChicago Consortium, Alex taught 5th-8th grade math at the St. Bartholomew School, where he still teaches every summer. He is proud to have served with City Year Chicago.

Amy Arneson is a Senior Research Associate at the UChicago Consortium, leading and supporting mixed-methods research projects with advanced quantitative analysis, visualization, and modeling. She focuses on conducting rigorous, meaningful, and timely research and, importantly, making the results accessible so that they can be used by educators to improve college and career outcomes for public school students. In particular, she examines equitable access to and outcomes of early college opportunities in high school and secondary and post-secondary career and technical education programming.

“Evidence-based, research-backed, data-driven…”: our world is increasingly focused on evidence at all levels – and rightly so. Evidence is a central part of any argument and allows us to verify our hunches while laying solid ground for future action. In education, we rely on evidence to understand which programs and policies have the greatest impacts for students. In the realm of quality science education, two new pieces of evidence offer a reminder of just how far we all have to go – but also some good news about the transformational potential of strong instruction.

Bilingual educators weren’t immune to the COVID-19 burnout that hit teachers this year. For example, last October, Illinois school districts reported 98 vacancies for bilingual educators. In the early childhood setting, that dearth of bilingual teachers could hurt students in the long run.

On a hot Friday afternoon, students at Lenart Regional Gifted Center dance with zest in the parking lot as a DJ plays music. They are excited to get out of their public school classrooms for a walkathon, a fundraiser for the school in Chicago’s West Chatham neighborhood on the South Side.

Three times around the school equals a mile, and for each mile students earn money for their school. So far, the kindergarten class is in the lead, pulling in $1,000 in the last hour...