Segregated schools, education for the incarcerated, elementary curriculum: What Education Lab is reading this week

We haven’t stopped marveling at the U.S. women’s national soccer team and their World Cup victory. You probably haven’t either, but eventually, you will stop and realize we’re in the slowest period of the year for most sports now.

So what better time to pay attention to something else, like the best education stories of the week?

We’re sharing the “What We’re Reading” section from our weekly Education Lab newsletter right here.

Subscribe to the newsletter to see our favorite education stories from around the country in your inbox first, plus our best features from the week and upcoming Seattle-area education events. The newsletter also includes opportunities for readers to join the conversation.

Here’s what we’re reading this week.

Racial and economic segregation in schools is still a fact of daily life for millions of black and Latino children in the U.S. The issue of school segregation and mandated busing has gained new attention since the recent Democratic presidential debates. The federal government has done little about school desegregation since the 1970s, The Los Angeles Times reports, and until this year most candidates have avoided the topic: “The effect of segregation is profound. Children in integrated schools are more likely to graduate high school and attend college, and they get jobs with higher incomes, studies show.” Stay tuned for more from Education Lab on busing and segregation in the Seattle area. 

Only 4 percent of formerly incarcerated people have a bachelor’s degree, but a movement to change that figure is gaining momentum. In 2017, Louisiana became the first state to ban public universities from asking whether an applicant has a criminal record, and many other states are trying to follow that lead, according to The Hechinger Report. Lawmakers also want to allow incarcerated people to access federal Pell Grants to help pay for school. A pilot program testing this access to the grants, with 67 colleges offering more than 1,000 courses in state and federal prisons, has allowed nearly 600 incarcerated people to earn a degree. 

Are we teaching elementary school students incorrectly? American elementary schoolers are made to spend time “learning to read” before “reading to learn,” but they haven’t become better readers, The Atlantic reports. Since 2001, when the federal No Child Left Behind legislation made standardized reading and math test scores important measures of progress, schools have spent significantly less time on science and social studies. This emphasis on reading skills over reading for knowledge has devastating results, the article found, especially for poor children.