As the school year moved forward, the fundraising committee planned a gala at the French Embassy. And the PTA planned a separate, Spring Carnival.

There’s a lawsuit going on between Harvard and some Asian American students who say the admissions process discriminates against them.

A school in rural Ohio has decided to arm some of its staff, and is practicing how to use the school's new guns in case of an emergency. Reporter Lisa Pollak talks to Ira about how they came to the decision, and what they learned at that training.

Reporter Steve Kolowich goes to the University of Nebraska where one new recruit to Turning Point goes out on campus to sign people up for her club. And that one act immediately devolves into a political battle of epic proportions.

In 2012, the fever broke, and the Albertville city council stopped targeting Latino residents. The mayor says he and the council are taking a cue from the public schools.

Back in the late 1960s, a wealthy tobacco heiress saw that integration was happening all around the country—except at prep schools in the South. So she set out to find the best Black students in neighborhood public schools—in hopes of teaching the white prep-school students to be less bigoted. Mosi Secret tells the story of how the first two Black students to integrate Virginia Episcopal School succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

Mosi Secret’s story continues. We find out about a Black student who struggled at VES.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is from Grand Rapids, Michigan. So is This American Life producer Susan Burton.

Ira speaks with New York Times Magazine Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones about her years reporting on education and the various kinds of school reforms administrators have tried to close the achievementgap that never seem to work. Nikole says there's one reform that people have pretty much given upon, despite a lot of evidence that it works – school integration.

Chana Joffe-Walt tells what happened when a group of public school students in the Bronx went to visit an elite private school three miles away.

When it comes to disciplining young people, teachers are winging it. We ask middle school teachers all over the country to walk us through how they get a kid to take his hat off.

Before the war in the East Ramapo, New York school district, there was a truce. Local school officials made a deal with their Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbors: we'll leave you alone to teach your children in private yeshivas as you see fit as long as you allow our public school budget to pass.

Chana Joffe-Walt tells the story of a teenager named Michael. Like a lot of teenagers Michael decides to follow his dreams — and that to follow his dreams, he’s going to need to make a total change.

Ira talks to 15 year old Jada who, when she was in third grade, moved from Akron Public Schools in Ohio, to the nearby Copley-Fairlawn schools in the suburbs. After two years, Jada was kicked out by administrators who discovered that her mother was using Jada's grandfather's address in Copley, instead of her own in Akron.

Students all over are starting college this month, and some of them still have a nagging question: what, exactly, got me in? An admissions officer talks about the most wrongheaded things applicants try. And Michael Lewis has the incredible story of how a stolen library book got one man into his dream school.