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The Senate’s plan to address the school choice voucher system’s shortfalls was made public Friday.  “A myriad of accountability problems” went on display this week when two legislative committees reacted to an independent audit showing “funding did not follow the child” to private schools or homeschool. Now, Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Crestview, has put out his […]

The child advocacy nonprofit Fairplay issued an advisory on Thursday warning people against buying AI toys this holiday season. It's not the only group.

Rural school district superintendents are trying to find the best use of limited resources. Taking on the state's unmaintained buildings, they say, will only increase their burden.

Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College has classes on everything from Native American studies to gardening to equine sciences to the Hidatsa language. Like other tribal colleges and universities (aka TCUs), it's a space where students can get their degrees while steeped in Indigenous traditions and learning techniques. But since the start of this presidential administration, funding for these colleges has been precarious, and tribal college administrators have been left scrambling to make sure they can continue with business as usual. So this week on the show, we're diving deep into what makes tribal colleges unique — and what these spaces mean to the students, faculty and staff who work there.

The introductory narrative of "The American Revolution" takes up a style Burns established at the outset of "The Civil War."

“The war grew out of a multitude of grievances lodged against the British parliament by British subjects living an ocean away in 13 otherwise disunited colonies,” says narrator Peter Coyote a few minutes into Episode One of “The American Revolution,” now showing on PBS.

“It was also a savage civil war that pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, American against American, killing tens of thousands of them,” Coyote says.

It is a sentence that might have been lifted verbatim from Burns’ other epic documentary about a war fought on American soil -- “The Civil War,” the series that made him a star filmmaker when it premiered 35 years ago in 1990. 

Problem-solving is practiced and preached at Bradleyville, a small school district tucked among rolling rural hills in south-central Missouri. When faced

The state’s school voucher program has exhibited “a myriad of accountability problems” and caused a funding shortfall for public schools, a state audit released this week shows. The audit, encompassing the 2024-2025 school year, was presented this week to lawmakers, who are spending the weeks leading up to the legislative session learning the woes of […]

Senate Democrats said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's plan will 'undercut some of the most effective tools for addressing inequities in home connectivity.'

FCC chair Brendan Carr is on a crusade to Trumpify the airwaves.

The scandal that briefly made Brendan Carr a household name this fall was an outlier several times over. For one thing, FCC chairmen rarely make news. More than that, Carr usually knows better than to draw too much attention to himself. A seasoned bureaucrat, he has a knack for pulling the strings of power in ways that escape public scrutiny. But when he issued a mob-style threat over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue that Republicans didn’t like—“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”—he made the Trump administration’s appetite for censorship unignorable.

Most of the administration’s efforts to manipulate the media up to that point had retained at least a patina of deniability. Here, by contrast, was an uncomplicated threat of government interference—one that prompted Disney, ABC’s parent company, to fall in line by suspending Kimmel’s show. This was too much even for some of the Trump administration’s biggest cheerleaders; Senator Ted Cruz called Carr’s comments “dangerous as hell.” After a few days of public outcry, Kimmel was back on the air.

The whole episode was an unusual misstep by a skilled Washington operator. The hallmark of Carr’s tenure as chair of the Federal Communications Commission has been the exploitation of bureaucratic procedure to consolidate ownership of communications infrastructure in Trump-friendly hands, while keeping those actions out of both the court of public opinion and the literal courts.

To liberals, this is an obvious attempt to rig the media. To conservatives, however, it is a long-overdue unrigging. Why should the national networks devote airtime every night to liberal comedians who incessantly mock Republicans?

“For those that benefited from a two-tier system of justice, today’s even handed treatment feels like discrimination,” Carr posted on X in March, paraphrasing the economist Thomas Sowell. The left, in other words, got so used to controlling the media that it doesn’t even notice the bias.

“The public airwaves belong to the public, and yet for the past 40 or 50 years, they have been used and abused as a propaganda tool for one party’s political agenda,” Daniel Suhr, the president of the Center for American Rights, a conservative litigation nonprofit, told me. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re watching NBC, ABC, CBS, or PBS; you’re going to get the same left-wing viewpoints permeating both the news and the entertainment shows.”

BOSTON – With temperatures dropping, the New England Aquarium has announced that it is already treating hundreds of hypothermic sea turtles washing up on state beaches.  Since November 7…

In the Orkney Islands, where megalithic monuments remain a fundamental part of the landscape, archeologists have been uncovering remarkable ruins, Alex Ross reports.

The Trump administration demanded UCLA pay $1.2 billion to restore frozen research funding and ensure eligibility for future funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus.

Opponents of the changes say Congress explicitly located some of these offices inside the Education Department, and the White House cannot legally move their work without Congress' approval.

Thanks to Charlie Brown TV specials, we know that holidays are supposed to have some kind of “true meaning.” Thanksgiving is the fat bird of holidays all stuffed with history, art, tradition, and celebration. But if it has a meaning—you can find it in hand turkeys made from a single handprint. That’s the true meaning of Thanksgiving.

The tradition of tracing a child’s handprint is older than Charlie Brown, even older than the pilgrims. The handprint art found in prehistoric caves is estimated to be 40,000 to 45,000 years old. The oldest may be 64,000 years old. No one knows how many cave handprints exist in caves scattered around the world.

Thankfully, humanity can trace the handprint art of the Paleolithic era through thousands of years directly to the traditional Thanksgiving art of drawing hand turkeys.

Antoine Haywood, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Journalism assistant professor, has been selected by UF to participate in the 2025-26 Southeastern Conference (SEC) Faculty Travel Program. He will receive funding to support his research and teaching collaboration with Dr. Jabari Evans from the University of South Carolina’s College of Information and Communications. 

Over the past half century, Ken Burns has become America’s storyteller. His documentaries provide a history of the nation through biographies, sports, music, and other subjects. His most recent film, “The American Revolution,” which was supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, premiered in November on PBS. He spoke about it with Pew recently in his barn office in New Hampshire.

Merriam-Webster, the country’s oldest dictionary publisher which is headquartered in Springfield, just released an updated Collegiate edition with 5,000 new entries.