Legislators on Connecticut’s Education Committee started the 2026 session with big plans.

At the top of the list: increasing, for the first time since 2013, the cost-per-pupil written into the state’s main school funding formula. This number had been set at $11,525 for over a decade, with no adjustment for inflation. With such an adjustment, this so-called “foundation amount” would be about $16,000 per student today — a difference of hundreds of millions of dollars across all the state’s school...

James Tierinni has seen what happens when schools ban phones.

“About eight, nine years ago, I had to police people’s cellphones. And I’d have to talk to the same kid over and over again,” Tierinni said. Now, when he gives out a class exercise, “they turn their desks, they talk to each other … and it’s generally just so much more of a positive environment.”

Tierinni teaches math in Manchester. The district became an early adopter of a bell-to-bell cellphone ban across all schools a few years ag...

The country’s flagship affordable-housing program uses scoring criteria that end up eliminating many poor, rural areas. And that’s exactly how it’s designed to work.

ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB/Report for America) — There’s a pattern emerging at school board meetings across southeast Ohio: Districts are losing money, and they’re cutting staff to stay afloat.
Some districts, such as Meigs and Alexander, have made these cuts quietly, through a process called attrition: If a staff member retires, the district doesn’t hire someone new. For other districts, attrition isn’t enough. The cu...