Anya Kamenetz

School vaccine mandates have been around for two centuries, but they've always brought pushback.

School vaccine mandates go back 200 years. They've defeated many legal challenges. Will they work for COVID?

With vaccines now available for children as young as 5, some school districts are easing up on their mask policies.

Education issues took on an outsized role in this week's elections in Virginia and elsewhere. The question for politicians of all stripes is whether education will remain an important topic into 2022.

The first vaccine required for school was for smallpox, over 200 years ago. And for decades, all states have required that kids be vaccinated against contagious diseases like polio to attend school.

This week's election results show education issues foremost in the minds of many voters, and suggest many parents may be seeking a course correction after 18 months of disruptions.

Several organizations are offering toolkits, legal advice and other resources for parents with a range of grievances against their local elected school boards.

Karen Watkins ran for her local school board because she wanted to be involved in her children's education. Since her election in 2020, she's been yelled at, threatened and followed to her car.

And more than 1 in 3 adults in households with children say they have experienced serious problems meeting both their work and family responsibilities, according to an NPR poll.

Test-to-stay policies could help keep students in in-person school. But amid a national shortage, rapid tests can be hard to come by, and the practice isn't common.

It's grabbed a lot of headlines, but the evidence on social media and teen mental health — including that Facebook and Instagram research — is far from a smoking gun.

It's grabbed a lot of headlines, but the evidence on social media and teen mental health — including that Facebook and Instagram research — is far from a smoking gun.

School board meetings, usually one of the most mundane examples of local democracy in action, have exploded with vitriol across the country in recent months, and many school leaders are scared.

School districts are once again making enormous changes at the last minute. New York City, the nation's largest district, is one of the few holdouts against offering a remote option.

On Thursday, the president announced a series of actions to encourage K-12 schools to mandate masks for all and require vaccines for employees.

Many New Orleans area students had re-enrolled in other schools within two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. This time, one expert predicts "five or six weeks of essentially no learning happening."

"In previous years, we've seen regionalized driver shortages, but nothing to the extent that we're seeing today," one researcher told NPR.

The new children's book Hear My Voice/Escucha Mi Voz pulls from the author's interviews with migrant children detained in U.S. facilities in 2019.

Multigenerational households and anti-Asian bullying may play a role.

Federal data suggests Asian Americans as the most likely to be learning remotely this year. Experts and community members say the reasons range from differing views of the pandemic to racist bullying.