A Shout-Out to 19 Education Stories We Admired in 2025

The news came fast and furious in 2025, and it was easy to miss some of the amazing journalism our colleagues at other media outlets produced. So, per our annual tradition, the team at The 74 has compiled a list of the most memorable and moving education coverage that we’ve read elsewhere this year. Full disclosure: We borrowed this idea from Bloomberg Businessweek’s Jealousy List; we’ve just put our own education-focused twist on it.

This year’s list of stories takes us to Chicago, where several public schools sit mostly empty due to under enrollment; to Baltimore, where students are navigating a complicated transit system to get to school, often causing them to miss their first period class; and to Austin, where tweens attend “cotillion” classes that teach them how to fold a napkin, hold utensils and dance. They also tell the stories of a beloved child care worker detained by ICE, a teen who tragically fell in love with a chatbot and Black-owned barbershops that have made it their mission to get boys in their communities to fall in love with reading. And there’s more…

The selections come from large national publications, as well as local news and nonprofit newsrooms. Below, in no particular order, are 19 stories our team admired most this year. We hope you take the time to read (and share) these important stories written and produced by talented education journalists in newsrooms across the country.

100 Students in a School Meant for 1,000: Inside Chicago’s Refusal to Deal With It’s Nearly Empty Schools

By Mila Koumpilova, Chalkbeat, and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica

The need to close underenrolled schools has become an important storyline this year, but few areas are dealing with as many nearly-empty buildings as Chicago Public Schools. ProPublica’s Jennifer Smith Richards and Chalkbeat’s Mila Koumpilova completed an in-depth analysis of underutilized schools in the country’s fourth-largest district and found that three in 10 buildings sit half-empty. And many come with a steep per-student price tag — the highest being $93,000. Richards and Koumpilova carefully explained Chicago’s history of school closures and the tense fight between district officials, families and the teachers union about next steps. They tune into what matters most: How tiny schools — some with enrollments in the double digits — impact student opportunities and educational experience. Some students seem to thrive in a tight-knit community, but the overarching lack of resources causes challenges for everyone. “You try to have a homecoming, but there’s no football team,” said a former principal of Hirsch High School, which has 100 students in a building that can fit 1,000. “There’s nothing to come home to.”

After a Child Care Worker Is Detained by ICE, a Community Is Left Reeling 

By Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th

As immigration enforcement activities have escalated over the past year, the early care and education workforce has been on edge. Immigrants represent more than 20% of the child care workforce nationwide. Chabeli Carrazana’s story for The 19th about Nicolle Orozco Forero — an immigrant child care provider who takes care of children with disabilities and was taken into ICE custody with her family — sheds light on the immense impact her detention and eventual deportation had on her community. Carrazana traces Orozco Forero’s journey: from fleeing Colombia two years earlier with her husband and sons, to searching for answers to her son’s unexplained illness to working toward her dream of opening her own child care program. Carrazana also illustrates how Orozco Forero’s rare expertise in supporting children with disabilities filled a critical gap in a field already strained by staffing shortages and limited specialized care. This story stays with you, especially the deep ripple effect of Orozco Forero’s deportation on the families and community she served.

Where Kids Put Down Their Phones and Pick Up the Correct Fork

Visuals by Eli Durst; Text by Dina Gachman, The New York Times

In Austin, tweens are attending “cotillion” classes where they learn how to fold a napkin, hold utensils and dance. These aren’t essential life skills but surreptitiously the founders of the Southwest Austin Cotillion hope to teach the kids social skills and build their confidence. The strict no-electronics policy ensures the kids embrace the awkwardness of it all. It’s inspiring to see these kids put on a brave face and give way to the odd social mores – at least for a few hours. The fly on the wall black-and-white photography and spare text of this article did an excellent job illustrating the story. Kudos to producers Jolie Ruben and Josephine Sedgwick for creating an interactive experience that feels like an old Life magazine article reinvented for the web. Here, the future of storytelling borrows from the past and utilizes the latest technology where it works.

Pass or Fail? Midwest Families and Districts Are Learning From the 4-Day School Week

By Nicole Grundmeier, Iowa Public Radio

Following the pandemic, school districts ramped up the use of the four-day school week to address a teacher absenteeism crisis and recruit staff at a time of severe shortages. Nicole Grundmeier with Iowa Public Radio’s Midwest Newsroom took a deep look at the trend with her August feature on how the policies have affected students. With data, research and personal stories, she captured the tough choices districts face as they weigh the benefits and drawbacks of giving staff and kids a longer weekend. Jayce Moody, who used to wander out of class and throw things in frustration, could better manage his behavior with a shorter school week. “He no longer has to miss school for therapy and other appointments,” she wrote. “Jayce jumped several levels in reading.” But other families, she wrote, depend on schools for child care or food pantries to stretch meals until Monday. Grundmeier’s reporting offered a thoughtful examination of what happens before and after school boards vote on such a pivotal change to the schedule and how opting in favor of a reduced school week might not accomplish what they’d hoped it would.

Transit Nightmare: Thousands of Baltimore Kids Can’t Get to School on Time

By Liz Bowie and Greg Morton, The Baltimore Banner

Every day, hundreds of Baltimore middle and high schoolers are missing when the first-period bell rings — the result of a public transit system that makes it virtually impossible for as many as 25,000 students to get to class on time. Without a yellow bus system beyond elementary school, an investigation by The Baltimore Banner found, children as young as 11 crisscross the city on long, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous journeys that frequently get them to class late, or not at all. They stand in drenching rain, endure sexual harassment from strangers and witness violent fights on buses on commutes that can take 40 minutes each way on a good day — and often last twice as long. As the district doesn’t collect data on how students get to school, The Banner modeled their trips based on where they live and the school they attend. It then tracked the location of every Maryland Transit Administration bus every five seconds, 20 hours a day, and mapped those commutes using innovative, interactive graphics. The result: a poignant portrait of young people whose futures are being put at risk by the simple lack of a safe, dependable ride to school.

She Wanted to Keep Her Son in His School District. It Was More Challenging Than It Seemed

By Bianca Vázquez Toness, The Associated Press

Housing insecurity can be incredibly disruptive to a family’s life, especially when it comes to children’s education. To highlight this challenge, Associated Press reporter Bianca Vázquez Toness followed an Atlanta mother as she navigated the process of finding an apartment in the right school district, keeping her son on track academically and making enough money to keep the family afloat. There’s something about how Toness opened this story that felt brilliantly relatable and illustrated how issues, like housing insecurity, can happen to anyone. Toness does a good job humanizing these vulnerable circumstances and giving a glimpse into how hard parents work and fight to make sure their children are set up for success. You can tell Toness not only earned the trust of the family she highlighted, and told their story with the utmost amount of dignity, but she also was incredibly well-informed and resourced on how complex eviction is and can be.

A Teen in Love With a Chatbot Killed Himself. Can the Chatbot Be Held Responsible?

By Jesse Barron, The New York Times Magazine

Florida attorney and mother of three, Megan Garcia, has become perhaps the best-known face in the fast-emerging legal and regulatory battle over AI chatbots. After her 14-year-old son died by suicide after forming an intensely romantic and sexually explicit relationship with a Character.AI bot, Garcia sued the tech creators for wrongful death, participated in multiple interviews and testified before the U.S. Senate about the need for stronger guardrails. By giving writer Jesse Baron access to her son’s conversations with the bot that personified Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, Garcia enabled a masterful Baron to produce a gripping and illuminating account of how a lonely and often-despairing young teen can fall in love with a robot, losing the line between reality and fantasy and slipping further away from the physical world and its human relationships. It’s a harrowing descent. The Garcia case will likely be among the first to establish legal precedent around the juggernaut that is AI. Days after Barron’s story ran, Character.AI announced that it was banning those under 18 from using its chatbots. All of that comes too late for Sewell Setzer III, who truly believed that by dying he would be going home to Westeros and his one true love.

This Is a Teenager

By Alvin Chang, The Pudding

How much do children’s environment and experiences influence the rest of their life? Alvin Chang’s interactive “This Is a Teenager” tackles that question with ease — turning National Longitudinal Surveys data into conversational, visual storytelling. The project follows hundreds of teens into their late 30s, allowing viewers to dive into 24 years of circumstances and consequences. As the interactive timeline moves through the years, you can see who went to college, who stayed financially stable, who was the victim of violence, who considers themselves happy. I was absorbed for hours. The project revisits one teen in particular, called Alex, who grew up in a high-risk environment. He had a difficult home life, was bullied and held back in school. By 2021, he reported feeling depressed “most of the time.” Yet, as Chang writes, “we are blamed for not going to college, for being unhealthy, for being poor, for not being able to afford healthcare and food and housing.” That line hit hard, especially after watching Alex’s life unfold. The equally engaging explainer video complements the piece, making decades-long data feel digestible.

Trump’s Attacks on DEI May Hurt Men in College Admission

By Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report

A report on Trump administration college admissions proposals, published earlier this month by The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus, may turn out to be one of the most consequential pieces of journalism of the year.

Marcus looked at admissions data and found that while President Trump’s scrutiny largely zeroes in on race, his ban on DEI policies could harm men, notably white men, his most loyal demographic.

That’s because universities for decades have been quietly offering men, who tend to leave high school with fewer skills and lower GPAs, an advantage. While they’ve historically enrolled more women than men, federal data show, they’ve also admitted higher percentages of male applicants. At Baylor University, for instance, 56.8% of males who applied got in, versus. just 47.9% of females.

So while colleges may soon follow U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s exhortation to judge aspiring students “solely on their merits, not their race or sex,” the end result could be thousands of young men who don’t have a place in future freshman classes — a development that “drips with irony,” says one top policy wonk.

Bedbugs, Lounge Chairs and ‘Absolutely Nothing’ to Do: Tales from Inside Philly Schools’ Rubber Room

By Kristen A. Graham, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Anyone who’s spent much time reading about schools will remember New York City’s “rubber room” — an archipelago of reassignment centers for hundreds of school employees awaiting arbitration for alleged professional offenses. In January, more than 15 years after journalist Steven Brill first popularized the term, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Kristen Graham gave us an account of Philadelphia’s own rubber room, a way station where some teachers and administrators spend years gathering paychecks and dust. The dispatch offers excellent texture about wasted days in what is effectively a professional prison — the long-timers graduate into the best seats, while access to extension cords is carefully negotiated — but many of the details are dispiritingly familiar: Complaints from former rubber room occupants first bubbled into a citywide scandal back in 2011. It increasingly feels like the broader subject of teacher job protections and complaint adjudication is itself akin to the rubber room, a windowless abyss to which all education journalists must eternally return.

How Black Barbershops Are Helping Boys Fall in Love With Reading

By Maya Brown, NBCU Academy

Alvin Irby, a former first grade teacher, saw an opportunity to improve literacy among Black boys while watching one of his students get a haircut. In 2013, he founded Barbershop Books, providing books for children to read while sitting in the barber’s chair and training barbers to become mentors to their young clients. Reporter Maya Brown, who was then with NBCU Academy Multimedia, provides a beautiful masterclass in visual storytelling that shows how familiar cultural settings can be used to boost literacy and reading comprehension. In Brown’s video and text package, we see students getting haircuts and walking away with a stronger motivation to read and barbers who are passionate and committed reading coaches. What excited me most about this story was knowing that Black boys across the country are being seen and supported through Barbershop Books, which is now in 60 cities across the U.S. Brown brilliantly captures how these encounters not only shape the students’ hairline but their education journey, too.

These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department.

By Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica

What if the leaders put in charge of the nation’s public schools are actually rooting against them? ProPublica analyzed dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events — as well as writings — for Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s appointees finding “a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools.” Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards’s story dug deep into these records to paint a vivid picture of the powerful forces that both govern and seek to dismantle public education. Every sentence was impactful and the graphics, while cartoonish and playful, powerfully illustrate each point. The voices that fill the piece were well chosen, each offering an insightful view, to a movement that started well before the current administration. For instance, Maurice T. Cunningham, a retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts provided helpful context, saying parents’ rights groups have long aimed “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization.”

One State Tried Algebra for All Eighth Graders. It Hasn’t Gone Well

By Steven Yoder, The Hechinger Report

In 2006, Minnesota passed a law requiring all eighth graders to take Algebra I, a move designed to boost the number of students taking calculus and eventually going into math and science careers. But an investigation by The Hechinger Report suggests it hasn’t worked as planned. Reporter Steven Yoder analyzed federal data from 2009 to 2017 and found the share of the state’s students taking calculus rose modestly, from 1.25% to 1.76%. But other states saw far larger gains, and Minnesota dropped from sixth to 10th place among states for calculus enrollment as a share of total enrollment. The state’s ranking for eighth grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress also fell. Yoder’s research, including visits to classrooms in one Minnesota school district, demonstrates the need for more nuance in determining who should take algebra and when.

A Family Opened a Town’s First Bookstore. A Bathroom Bill Is Driving Them Away

By Casey Parks, The Washington Post

You would know this compulsively readable feature was written by The Washington Post’s Casey Parks even without the byline. Parks is a master at coming to inhabit a small community, chameleon-like, and finding its social glue. In this case, it’s the lone bookstore in Vermillion, South Dakota, threatened with closure when the state legislature voted to force the 10-year-old daughter of its owners to use the boys’ bathroom at school. Five and a half years ago, Mike and Jen Phelan opened the store on Vermillion’s Main Street where, red state reputation notwithstanding, most of the brick storefronts sported Pride flags. The locals embraced the couple’s transgender daughter, with the Vermillion School Board voting in 2021 to allow her to use the girls’ bathroom. Which she did without incident until South Dakota’s GOP statehouse majority passed a bathroom ban this year. As the Phelans packed to move to a New England community where the girl would be affirmed, they prepared to sell the business to Nova and Elias Donstad, a trans couple. “They fell in love reading next to each other most evenings, and they fell for South Dakota the way many transplants did — accidentally,” writes Parks. The bookworms were desperate to rescue the store, but couldn’t afford to buy it. As it happens, their neighbors couldn’t imagine Vermillion without the shop, and raised $22,000 for the couple’s down payment.

Heinous, Heartbreaking — and Expensive. California Schools Face Avalanche of Sex Abuse Claims

By Carolyn Jones, CalMatters

Since The Boston Globe’s early 2000s reporting exposed widespread childhood sexual abuse in the Catholic church, similar school-based stories have proliferated. This has been made possible as states open “look-back” windows, temporarily lifting the statute of limitations on civil abuse cases. Survivors of childhood sexual abuse I’ve spoken with for my own reporting have shared the power of these windows: they provide an opportunity — albeit delayed — for justice. CalMatters Carolyn Jones’ reporting on California’s 2020 law — which provided a three-year window for victims to file claims and made it easier to sue school districts and counties — stands out because of her ability to skillfully and thoughtfully walk a tough line: emphasizing the very real presence of sexual abuse in schools and the need to hold complicit institutions accountable, while also exposing the unintended financial consequences that can result from these windows. The story raises complex and thorny questions: Who should be held accountable for years-old sexual abuse, especially in cases where the perpetrator is dead and school district personnel have since turned over? And how can we hold the systems that failed these victims responsible, without pulling funding from current students?

A Photographer Captures Life Inside Chicago Public Schools

By Melissa Ann Pinney, NPR

NPR’s November interview with photographer Melissa Ann Pinney included a trove of incredible pictures that practically jump off the page, err screen. After being granted access to two Chicago schools starting seven years ago, Pinney began taking photos in her “Becoming Themselves” series. Pinney captures incredible facial expressions and body language of what she called “often overlooked communities of children and teens in Chicago.” Her ability to play with light and shadows adds a dimension of moodiness that feels right when teens are the subject. Each picture tells its own story with a range of emotions and experiences, including hope, fear, friendship, and love. My favorites include Lizzie Williams in her My Little Pony leggings;  Kho’vya Greenwood and her brother Coby at a prom celebration; and Jo Gonda and Andrew McDermott at the prom. Each photo is truly a gem — and Pinney’s interview adds to the experience.

He Died at a School for Disabled People. Decades Later, His Brother Sought Answers

By Sonia A. Rao Photographs by Lucy Lu, The New York Times

This year’s 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act offers a stark reminder that we’re not that far removed from the days when people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were sent away to special public institutions. One of those, the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts — “the Fernald,” as locals call it — housed John Scott, who had spina bifida and spent most of his 17 years there before his death and burial in an unmarked grave in 1973. In this heartbreaking and masterfully told story, New York Times reporter Sonia Rao describes the journey of Scott’s brother David, who was just 7 when John died, as he seeks to learn more about his brother and what happened to him. A direct appeal to the governor eventually led him to a rust-colored accordion folder filled with 70 documents about his brother’s short life. In interviews, a teacher described John as one of her brightest students and “a little ray of sunshine.” But she also spoke of what David called “atrocities” at the school. “Eighty percent of the stuff I saw there, I wish I could erase from my mind,” she said. That reality is especially poignant given that there were at least 10,000 unmarked graves for people like John in Massachusetts alone — and the Fernald is one of hundreds of similar institutions for people with disabilities that once dotted the national landscape.

As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

By Jakob McWhinney, Voice of San Diego

Just when you thought you’d seen every kind of shady behavior around AI and digital learning, along comes Voice of San Diego’s Jakob McWhinney with an absolute stem-winder: Would you believe that fraudsters are stealing community college students’ identities and enrolling in remote classes to cash in on their financial aid? McWhinney finds that thieves create “bot students” that enroll in large online classes and remain just long enough to cash in on state and federal aid. They often turn to generative AI to fake the first few assignments. McWhinney finds that one in four California community college applicants last year was a suspected bot. He offers an explainer to help readers understand exactly how it all works. If the aid theft isn’t bad enough, he finds that the bots also bump real students from classes — and wreak havoc around enrollment. He talks to a Southwestern College professor who realizes that, two weeks into last spring’s semester, just 15 of the 104 students enrolled in her classes and a wait-list, were real. As a result, Southwestern now requires all remote students to show up face-to-face at enrollment time just to prove they’re real.

One Photo, a Deluge of Threats: Inside the Arizona High School Turned Upside Down by Right-Wing Activists

By Tyler Kingkade, NBC News

In a year that will be remembered for intensifying political extremism on the internet and a sharp increase in political violence in the physical world, investigative reporter Tyler Kingkade of NBC News surfaces a compelling tale of what happens when everyday people find themselves in the crosshairs of the culture wars. After Charlie Kirk’s murder led to government-endorsed revenge against the far-right pundit’s critics, Kingkade highlighted how a small school district in Arizona was thrust into a campus safety crisis after an online disinformation campaign falsely accused teachers of celebrating his death. The lie, which centered on a costume worn by math teachers, was perpetuated by conservative influencers and Republican lawmakers. The resulting firestorm offers clear evidence that online vitriol can destabilize public safety — including in schools.

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