During the pandemic, schools across the country turned themselves inside out, holding classes outdoors to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. And now that vaccination is driving down transmission rates, school administrators are eager to get students back in the classroom.

Now that more than half of Americans have received at least one COVID vaccine, this is a milestone we should all celebrate. The Biden administration is marking the moment with a partial rollback of masks. It’s the easing of these restrictions that may encourage more people to seek the vaccine.

Compassion isn’t the first word on the tip of anyone’s tongue when discussing U.S. immigration policy. But in tapping Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez to head U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, President Biden has wisely selected a veteran lawman who knows when to be tough and when to be humane.

Overregulation of housing — from restrictive zoning laws to onerous building codes — is implicated in a great many of America’s problems. A lot of people who have studied the issue, from varying political viewpoints, have reached that same understanding. If the negative effects are getting clearer, though, the path ahead isn’t.

The fatal shooting of a homeless, mentally ill Escondido man with nearly 200 arrests on his record last Wednesday raises many familiar questions, starting with, Why does America have a history of accepting that it is OK for a police officer to kill someone for aberrant behavior? Why are police officers expected to know how to deal with those who have mental health issues? And how can people with chronic mental health problems be more readily compelled to accept professional treatment?

What happens when you put three Democrats and three Republicans in a room? Nothing. They might shout and grandstand, but the odds are small that there’ll be substantive progress on important issues or, in the case of the Federal Election Commission, enforcement of the nation’s election laws. Congress might not be able to mend the bitter partisanship that rends the nation, but it at least could fix this important agency.

President Joe Biden’s proper labeling as genocide the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire more than a century ago fulfills a long-overdue historical duty that his White House predecessors have cowardly avoided.

On Monday, the Supreme Court grappled with a genuinely tough First Amendment issue: Should California be able to make charities that speak on matters of public concern disclose to the state the names of their big donors? The issue reveals something about the way that conservatives and liberals currently differ on free speech issues.

The 2008 crash tested financial globalization. In 2020, the chaos of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic led many to question the world’s dependence on complex global supply chains. These last few months, however, as vaccination programs have taken off in some parts of the world and stalled in others, have raised even deeper doubts about globalization and the capitalist system. Unless governments act soon, capitalism itself could face a crisis of credibility.

The Biden administration should avoid the Trump-era mistake of reducing the entirety of the U.S.-Mexico relationship to the single issue of immigration. The administration has made Vice President Kamala Harris its point person at the southern border, and she has been engaging with Mexico and Central American nations to embrace a regional approach to migration, which is laudable. But starting with her May 7 meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced over the weekend, the vice president should broaden the scope of her Mexico agenda to cover the complex array of economic, environmental, security, energy and rule-of-law issues that define U.S.-Mexico dealings.

In a development that gun control advocates have been fearing, the Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a case that could establish a Second Amendment right to carry a handgun in public, endangering laws in California and elsewhere that allow local and state governments to limit gun-carrying permits to people who establish a specific self-defense concern.

A president’s first 100 days are an arbitrary benchmark, a point of measurement journalists are fond of because it allows us to draw comparisons between the current officeholder and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the last chief executive whose first three months were truly momentous.

The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has long been an advocate of government transparency. We have also defended individual privacy. With his Senate Bill 663, Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, put these values at odds. His bill would let targets of recall campaigns find out who signed recall petitions and also let targets try to get signers to remove their signatures — a change from how election officials alone have access to petition signers’ names to validate their signatures now. Newman says the change would allow recall targets to respond to false or misleading allegations against them.

The Food and Drug Administration faces a Thursday deadline to decide whether to allow menthol cigarettes to remain on the market. To discourage children from starting smoking and to help adults quit, it should ban them. It should also ban menthol and all other flavors except tobacco from e-cigarettes.

The U.S. Supreme Court, which in a landmark 2012 decision made it harder to send juveniles to prison for life without parole, reversed course Thursday by holding that judges may impose such a sentence without determining that the offender is “permanently incorrigible.” The 6-3 decision came in the case of Brett Jones, who was 15 when he stabbed his grandfather to death in Mississippi.

Now, of course, comes the hard part.

America’s deeply flawed health care delivery system ranks near or at the bottom when objectively compared to peers in Britain, France, Canada and Australia. Extraordinarily high per capita cost, the inaccessibility of affordable preventive care and other chronic maladies make the case for big changes here, even after Obamacare has ushered in some modest improvements.