What I heard at both events: safety concerns, frustration with legislators and calls for action around gun laws. Hope for children, love for community and citizens flexing their civic muscles. In my role as Illinois Newsroom Engagement Strategist, I attended two events related to the debate over guns. At March 24th’s “March for Our Lives” [...]

Earlier this month, we posted a story about discipline practices inside Noble Network of Charter Schools , which educates approximately one out of 10…

Every Sunday, a group of women meets in the basement of a church in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood to sort and package boxes of books. The boxes are sent to women

The trend toward school choice has educators across the country looking at Chicago’s Noble Charter Schools — an award-winning network of mostly high schools that specializes in helping inner-city kids achieve the kind of SAT scores that propel them into four-year universities. But despite its prestigious reputation, Noble has a peculiarly high teacher turnover rate. [...]

Thousands of students, teachers, parents and victims carried signs and marched across Illinois in the cold, snow and sleet on Saturday as part of the nationwide March for Our Lives against gun violence. The marches were largely led by students, many of them moved to action after last month’s high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. [...]

For more than 30 years, kids with a certain streak of genius have found a home at Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in suburban Chicago. It’s the rarest of gems in the educational landscape: a public, affordable, boarding school. One of just a handful of such schools nationwide, Wired magazine dubbed it “Hogwarts for Hackers.” After [...]

Hundreds of classes have been canceled and dozens more relocated as a strike by graduate employees at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign continues into a second week. On Tuesday night, graduate workers occupied the office of university president Tim Killeen. Strikers have a variety of demands, but one of the most contentious points focuses on the future of [...]

The publisher of a newsletter about the criminal justice system filed a lawsuit this week against the Illinois Department of Corrections alleging that multiple state prisons barred inmates from receiving all or part of several publications. The complaint alleges that inmates who subscribe to Prison Legal News (PLN), a 72-page monthly newsletter that includes news, analysis and [...]

About 100 teachers and school support staff spent the better part of three hours inside a junior high school gymnasium in rural, east central Illinois in early January. They were role playing people living in poverty. The event — a professional development training hosted at the Mahomet-Seymour Junior High School — was a poverty simulation. The staff spent [...]

If you’ve seen Gov. Bruce Rauner’s campaign commercials , you might think the school funding issue was settled last summer. But as often happens with…

It’s a question most parents will wrestle with at some point — when is the right time to give my child a smartphone? Let’s tick through a few other questions first.

Derek Hutchins is the superintendent of Crab Orchard Schools. It’s a district of only 530 students, east of the town of Marion, in southern Illinois.  So he was surprised last week when his tech support guy showed up in his office with big news. “He said, ‘You’ll never guess what’s going on today.’ I said, [...]

A new study shows students’ self-image suffers in middle school and junior high. And it’s not just hard on low-income kids. Having a teacher who understands the teenage brain can help.

The Anxiety and Depression Association of America estimates anxiety-based school refusal affects 2 to 5 percent of school-age children. It is often triggered by an underlying mental health issue.