Teachers can help instill hopefulness in students by teaching them about social justice, according to National Board Certified Teacher Sydney Chaffee, the 2017 National Teacher of the Year. In this blog post, she writes about a lesson in which her students wrote emails to the US State Department with feedback on its online teaching resources about Christopher Columbus.

Social and emotional learning programs should meet the needs of local communities, according to a report by The Aspen Institute's National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. The report also suggests that educators model SEL skills.

A new National Science Foundation report shows a 5.5% decline in the number of international graduate students attending US colleges and universities from fall 2016 to 2017, along with a 2.2% drop in international undergraduate students during the same period. Factors contributing to the declines include the political and social climate in the country as well as competition from other countries, university officials say.

The National Institute of Justice has awarded a $300,000 grant to researchers at Illinois State University to continue developing a mass spectrometer. Police could use the device to identify dangerous substances by measuring the mass of certain molecules in the materials.

Three New York state school districts are sharing a $322,000 National Education Association grant to revamp its teacher-mentoring program as well as add training on racial and social justice issues. Researchers from the University of Albany will help develop, support and evaluate the effectiveness of the pilot program.