President Joe Biden will spotlight efforts to combat cratering US student performance since the Covid-19 pandemic, as Republicans work to feature the emotionally charged issue of education in the 2024 campaign.
Biden, who returned on Saturday from a week-long vacation, will mark the time of year when US parents send children back to school with his own trip to Washington's Eliot-Hine Middle School.
The Capitol Hill area school for children aged 11 to 13 is working to boost its predominantly low-income students' arithmetic with a tutoring programme in partnership with George Washington University.
The Biden administration has pushed Congress to hike funding for public schools, including those that hire mental health professionals, through a bipartisan gun safety law last year.
Biden has also been directing more money into after-school programmes, teacher apprenticeships, schools serving low-income students and public-private partnerships that bring tutors into classrooms.
"Since day one, President Biden has worked to help every school open safely for in-person instruction, accelerate academic achievement, and build communities where all students feel they belong," the White House said in a memo on Monday.
Public education is largely funded and run locally in the United States and typically takes a back seat in the presidential campaign to jobs and prices at the gas pump.
But Republicans, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, looking to elevate hot-button issues in the presidential campaign have made children's education a key focus.
This effort has included attempts to restrict trans athletes competing in school sports and campaigning to ban ideologically inflected "woke" books.
Former President Donald Trump and several of his rivals for the Republican nomination have suggested eliminating the federal Department of Education, a step that would require an unlikely act of Congress.
The Covid pandemic caused lengthy school closures, sent teachers fleeing the profession and frayed children's mental health, reasons cited for sharp declines in US reading and mathematics test scores since 2020.
Biden aides, who see this learning decline as a threat to long-term economic growth, hired an academic focused on the issue as an adviser to Biden this month.
Biden, 80, is seeking another four-year term in the 2024 election. The largest US labour union, the National Education Association, a group of public school teachers numbering 3 million, endorsed him just a day after he announced his re-election bid.
Republicans are closely tied to efforts to steer more public education funding to parochial institutions and independently run charter schools.
Meanwhile, Biden condemned a racist attack in which a white man shot and killed three Black people at a Jacksonville store on Saturday - the same day the country reflected on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.
"Even as we continue searching for answers, we must say clearly and forcefully that white supremacy has no place in America," Biden said on Sunday in a statement. "We must refuse to live in a country where Black families going to the store or Black students going to school live in fear of being gunned down because of the colour of their skin."
Law enforcement, Biden said, are treating the shooting as a possible hate crime and act of domestic terrorism. They're also opening a federal civil rights investigation.
"Hate must have no safe harbor," Biden added. "Silence is complicity and we must not remain silent."
His comments came a day after a white man shot to death three Black people inside a Dollar General store in Jacksonville.
The shooting happened just before 2 pm, less than 1.6 km from Edward Waters University, a small historically Black university. The shooter, who had also posted racist writings, later killed himself. - Reuters
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