Education

Last Friday, students trained their sights on the State House, appealing to lawmakers for support in advance of a Dec. 5 School Committee vote on the planned closure of their schools.

Educators in Boston’s public schools have begun outlining plans for an ethnic studies program, one they hope will help make the district’s curriculum more representative of its diverse student population.

Gov. Charlie Baker signed a nonpartisan civics education bill last week aimed at encouraging youth involvement in national and local government.

Across Massachusetts, school districts have adopted exacting new standards to prepare students for college. Nearly half of the state’s workforce has a college degree. But for the other half — those who never finish college or those who never start — the path to employment success is riddled with pitfalls, according to a report released this week by a coalition of agencies working with young adults.

Last year, 99 percent of the 9th grade students at Brooke High School performed at the highest level of any school in the state on the biology MCAS test. This year, all of the 10th graders scored proficient or higher on all three MCAS tests — English Language Arts (ELA), math and science. Brooke was the only high school in the state to do so.

Students, teachers and parents from the McCormack Middle School say they’ve invested too much in the school to see it broken up as part of the district’s BuildBPS plan.

City Councilors voted last week to review the admissions process at Boston's exam schools after Harvard University researchers released a report that found that black and Latino students are less likely to take the entrance exam the schools rely on.

The shuttering of the McCormack and two high schools, Urban Science Academy and West Roxbury Academy, are the first three school closures announced as part of city’s BuildBPS plan.

The Boston City Council said it will reexamine Boston Public Schools’ strategies to serve “off-track” students, after a report published in May found that more than 3,000 high school students in the BPS system are off-track to graduate.

Boston public school students, parents and staff demonstrated at Northeastern University’s campus on Friday afternoon to persuade one of the city’s wealthiest institutions to make higher voluntary property tax payments.

A small school district in affluent Marin County, California, serving about 2,000 youngsters in the bucolic West Marin towns of Fairfax and San Anselmo, has contracted with Thomson Reuters, — a firm linked to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to check on the residential status of its students.

“I’m not the type of kid to give up on something,” responds Nate Lopes, a senior at Roxbury Latin. When asked to consider what personal trait he is proud to have developed over time at the school, he quickly focuses on determination. “Whether in sports or in class — whatever the hard challenge is that I am facing — I’m just not going to give up on it. I will keep working and, at the very least, will try my hardest because otherwise there is nothing to gain.”