Education

American diets have gotten a little healthier, but still fall short of federal government recommendations for healthy eating, finds an analysis of nationally representative interview data from 1999 to 2016.

Massachusetts charter schools that give their donors a seat on their governing boards raise more money, take on less debt and have greater enrollment growth than those that don’t, recent research finds.

In June, New York became the fifth state to require its schoolchildren to be vaccinated despite their parents’ religious beliefs or philosophical objections.

In the past decade, researchers have pinpointed a phenomenon in children who have experienced adversity or trauma that can have negative health effects that extend well into adulthood. They call it “toxic stress.”

Education reporters nationwide are looking for fresh ways to tell their annual back-to-school stories. Because I covered education for the Orlando Sentinel and other news outlets for more than 15 years before joining Journalist’s Resource, I remember the struggle. Consider this post a journalism gift of sorts: Three great back-to-school story ideas with the matching research to get you started.

As the U.S. prepares for the 2020 census, news outlets nationwide will be working to help the public understand the importance and impact of the once-every-10-years population count.

To help journalists bolster their coverage, we reached out to two experts — a research professor at George Washington University and a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau — to ask them to point out weaknesses in and ways newsrooms can improve their census coverage. They offered great feedback.

Sex education has been a controversial subject for decades as public school officials and parents have debated the best ways to help teenagers avoid unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Not all states require schools to teach sex ed. But many states require sex education instructors to discuss or stress abstinence from sexual activity, with some schools offering abstinence-only programming, which urges kids to wait until marriage and often excludes information about contraceptives.