September 6, 2026

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There has been a LOT of news going on in the education realm just as the school year gets underway for most students — if they haven’t already been in class for weeks. Keep reading this newsletter to catch up on what you missed about an IRS proposal to yank tax-exempt status for some colleges and schools, just-released public school civil rights data and more.

Since it is that back-to-school time of year, however, the NPR Ed team wanted to resurface a piece about how even when surrounded by fellow students, young people may still feel isolated.

Earlier this year, researchers found that more than half of U.S. college students report feeling lonely. The data, examined by researchers at the University of Cincinnati, came from nearly 65,000 students at more than 120 colleges. It found that students who used social media at least 16 hours a week, or more than two hours a day, had significantly higher odds of reporting loneliness.

Our colleagues at Here & Now spoke to Sasha Zhou, who works to understand and address the mental health needs of young adults and college students through her work at the Department of Public Health at Wayne State University in Detroit.

“As a professor who teaches undergrads,” Zhou said, “I think about social connectedness all the time in my course design. I really try to incorporate a lot of small-group work into my courses and semester-long projects to give students this opportunity to really get to know a smaller group of their peers.

“Because I think just having consistent time in person with other students and other peers is really important when we're addressing things like loneliness.”

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Speaking of the new school year, NPR education editor Nirvi Shah chatted with Weekend Edition host Ayesha Rascoe about some of the things K-12 schools must contend with this school year, including artificial intelligence and a clamor for more limits on screentime beyond cellphones. They also talked about some of the things that happen in schools but don’t always make headlines. Take a listen.

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No holiday for education news...

The Trump administration wants to take away tax-exempt status for private colleges and K-12 schools that have programs designed to help racial minority students: It’s the latest in the Trump administration’s assault on diversity initiatives at public and private institutions across the country, NPR’s Adrian Florido reports. A lot of schools have programs or scholarships to support Black or Latino students, who may be the first in their families to go to college. What could this mean for the schools that could be affected? NPR’s Steve Inskeep spoke with the president of Wesleyan University about just that.

Federal civil rights data about students is finally out. But there’s a catch: The Civil Rights Data Collection includes information about which groups of students are being bullied, which students across the country can access Advanced Placement classes and more. Instead of being published at the end of last year, it finally posted last week, but what’s available is different from what has been provided in the past. The Department "didn't make it usable for somebody's mom to be able to see what's happening in a school community," Catherine Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under Presidents Obama and Biden, told NPR Ed’s Jonaki Mehta.

The U.S. Department of Justice is suing the school district in Kansas City, Kan., over its policies for transgender students, escalating a monthslong standoff and threat to withhold federal funding if the school district did not comply, KCUR’s Jodi Fortino reports. The lawsuit, which the department is calling “first-of-its-kind,” alleges the district “maintains policies that direct staff to help students socially transition to a different gender at school and to withhold this information from parents as confidential.”

Good reads and listens...

A high school teacher in Connecticut and his students learned of archeological artifacts in a Massachusetts dumpster. They catalogued and documented more than a thousand pre-Hispanic items, determined where they came from and returned them to Mexico. Teacher Jeremy Pilver, who is a licensed archaeologist, spoke to NPR’s All Things Considered about the discovery and the years of work he and his students undertook.

As millions of kids lose SNAP food benefits, free school meals are also at risk: When Republican lawmakers secured cuts to the country’s largest food assistance program last year, senior policy analyst Paige Shoemaker DeMio wasn't worried about children going hungry just at home — but at school, NPR’s Juliana Kim reports. "Anytime we're hearing about cuts to SNAP or Medicaid, we're worried about what's going to be the domino effect of this," she said. And while it’s hard to make a direct link, going into this academic year, dozens of schools nationwide have ended their universal free meal programs — including schools in San Antonio, Houston and Miami-Dade County.

Goal: Finding the best young soccer players...

With the World Cup still fresh in the minds of many Americans, a debate has resurfaced online and on television over how to make youth soccer more affordable in the United States and whether the pay-to-play model that prevails is preventing America from reaching its true potential — at least on the men's side.

In Argentina, the most promising young players in the country’s third-largest city train free. The rest pay around $25 a month to train twice a week with coaches who are mostly former professionals. On weekends competitive matches are held against other squads from around the city.

"You have the chance that your child can develop his skills," said Carlos Gil, whose 8-year-old son participates in the low-cost training — the same place Lionel Messi trained in his youth. Gil shook his head and chuckled after learning that in the United States, parents pay between $1,000 and $3,000 a year for the kind of instruction his son gets.

"If you did that here, almost nobody could play." And if Argentine clubs charged their young players thousands of dollars each year, the country's status as a global soccer powerhouse might be at risk.

"Our best players tend to come from low-income backgrounds," Gil said. "Where would they train?"

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