schoolinfosystem.org
Let Grow: From the Policy Studies Institute work on “children’s independent mobility” in Britain comes this: 1971: *Approximately half of children’s journeys were made on foot *80% of 7- and 8-year-old children got to school unaccompanied by an adult . 1990: • 30% of children under ten years old are allowed to travel alone to […]
David Dagan: Sitting in a classroom one day in September, a police officer studied a passage from James Baldwin’s 1966 essay on policing in Harlem, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” and read a few lines out loud: “Some school children overturned a fruit stand in Harlem. This would have been a mere childish prank if […]
Salim Furth: Old Town Road traces a choppy, swerving path that marks the southern edge of Trumbull, Connecticut. It is shaded by maples and oaks that frame the sensible New England homes of an affluent suburb. Across the double yellow lines of Old Town Road are similar homes in the city of Bridgeport, one of […]
Nick Bilton: Many people imagine 19th-century antebellum America as a frontier fantasia: men with handlebar mustaches sitting in dusty saloons, kicking back moonshine whiskey, as a piano player picks out tunes in the background. In reality, though, life was a little more sordid: Americans spent their time after work in fully legal heroin dens; in […]
Graham Cluley: German parents are being told to destroy smartwatches they have bought for their children after the country’s telecoms regulator put a blanket ban in place to prevent sale of the devices, amid growing privacy concerns. Jochen Homann, president of the Federal Network Agency, told BBC News that the so-called smartwatches, typically aimed at […]
Melia Robinson: Max Ventilla, a Google executive who left the search giant to launch AltSchool in 2013, wooed parents with his vision to bring traditional models of elementary education into the digital age. AltSchool has raised $175 million from Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and others, and the startup is closing a Series C […]
Meg Jay: Does early hardship in life keep children from becoming successful adults? It’s an urgent question for parents and educators, who worry that children growing up in difficult circumstances will fail to reach their full potential, or worse, sink into despair and dysfunction. Social scientists have shown that these risks are real, but they […]
Bonnie Grossen: Project Follow Through (FT) remains today the world’s largest educational experiment. It began in 1967 as part of President Johnson’s ambitious War on Poverty and continued until the summer of 1995, having cost about a billion dollars. Over the first 10 years more than 22 sponsors worked with over 180 sites at a […]
Paul Taylor: Most of you will have taken part in the Marshmallow Challenge or a variant of it. It’s the team exercise where you get a load of spaghetti, some tape, a marshmallow, a piece of string, and 18 minutes to build the tallest freestanding structure. Peter Skillman, who devised it, found something fascinating when […]
Alan Borsuk: Private schools, most of them religious, using vouchers. The total for voucher students this year (28,702) is up a few hundred from a year ago and is edging toward a quarter of all the Milwaukee kids who receive a publicly-funded education. What a huge change from a generation ago, when the number was […]
One City Early Learning Centers: A high quality preschool education, from birth to age 5, should be available and accessible to every child in the United States of America. Please join us on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 from 11:30am to 1:00pm for lunch and an important presentation and dialogue. We would like to get your […]
Sheelah: When David Stinson finished high school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1977, the first thing he did was get a job building houses. After a few years, though, the business slowed. Stinson was then twenty-four, with two children to support. He needed something stable. As he explained over lunch recently, that meant finding a […]
One City Early Learning, via a kind Kaleem Caire email: A high quality preschool education, from birth to age 5, should be available and accessible to every child in the United States of America. Please join us on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 from 11:30am to 1:00pm for lunch and an important presentation and dialogue. We […]
Ben Dempsey: Massachusetts education officials have been investigating a growing number of educators for alleged misconduct — including sexual assaults, substance abuse, and criminal activities — which has resulted in the reprimand, suspension, or revocation of 371 licenses over the past five years, according to a state report released this week. Nearly one-third of the […]
Robert Shrimsley: Like middle-aged men through the ages, I have long worried about the character of the country’s youth while privately hoping my own spawn would be the exception. Sadly, events at home have now provided incontrovertible proof that this generation is veering badly off track. Our saga began last Thursday, when the girl underwent […]
Lauren Migaki:: The schools in Puerto Rico are facing massive challenges. All the public schools are without electricity, and more than half don’t have water. More than 100 are still functioning as shelters. But Puerto Rico’s secretary of education, Julia Keleher, tells us that the schools that are open are serving as connection points for […]
Chris Rickert:: It seemed appropriate to look at the Madison School District first, given that on Tuesday, two Madison School Board members, Anna Moffit and Nicki Vander Meulen, took to Facebook in support of Johnson’s Fitchburg grievance. Invoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that “history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this […]
Emma Thelwell Almost two-thirds of schoolchildren would not mind if social media had never been invented, research suggests. A survey of almost 5,000 students, mainly aged between 14 and 16, found a growing backlash against social media – with even more pupils (71%) admitting to taking digital detoxes to escape it. Benenden, an independent girls […]
Meghan McArdle: Every year, investment firm T. Rowe Price does an annual survey called “Parents, Kids and Money.” This year, the report offered some disturbing news: Parents of all boys were more likely to be saving for college than parents of all girls. This kind of antediluvian attitude is alarming in this day and age, […]
Star Tribune: Alternatives to traditional public schools — namely open enrollment and charter programs — have taken hold in Minnesota in a big way. They’re so popular that nearly 1 in 6 of the state’s 850,000-plus school-age children opt out of their neighborhood schools. According to a recent Star Tribune series and data analysis called […]
Sarabeth Berman: The village had such a large, congested school because, in surrounding villages, the schools had been closed. For two decades, the number of children in the countryside had been dropping because of the one-child policy and urban migration, so the government had shuttered empty schools and created overstuffed campuses like the one at […]
Sally Adee: We’re getting stupider – and our ageing population may be to blame. Since around 1975, average IQ scores seem to have been falling. Some have attributed this to the evolutionary effect of smarter women tending to have fewer children. But new evidence suggests population-wide intelligence could in fact be sinking because people now […]
T. William Fair: Once upon a time it may have been unheard of for the head of an urban league dedicated to the improvement of lives for African-American children to partner with a Republican to work on school reform. As part of one of his education reform efforts, Florida governor Jeb Bush convinced me to […]
Andrew O’Hehir: Moskowitz is a powerful and unrepentant example of the oft-derided species “neoliberal,” signifying a belief in market-driven solutions, public-private partnerships and some degree of government downsizing and deregulation. (Most of her New York political battles have involved attempts to limit or shackle the immensely powerful teachers’ unions.) A longtime ally of former New […]
Walter Williams: That the problems of today’s black Americans are a result of a legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, and poverty has achieved an axiomatic status, thought to be self-evident and beyond question. This is what academics and the civil rights establishment have taught. But as with so much of what’s claimed by leftists, there […]
Inga Kiderra: An international team of researchers reports that when children are praised for being smart not only are they quicker to give up in the face of obstacles they are also more likely to be dishonest and cheat. Kids as young as age 3 appear to behave differently when told “You are so smart” […]
We hope that our commitments set forth here will inspire you to make a similar commitment to do the job you were each elected to do. We look forward to seeing you commit to a focus on ensuring that ALL Nashville children have the ability to attend great public schools. We look forward to the […]
Marc Sternberg: On Thursday, a million New York City children will return to school. Educators have long been concerned about a “summer slide” — the learning loss that often occurs when students are out of school for two months. It’s a serious problem. But it’s not just students who can slide backward during these months. […]
Kristin Hoppa Burnett said this is the first time a baby has been relinquished at a Waco fire station in his tenure. He said other firefighters could not remember another infant left at a Waco fire station. But the firefighters’ focus was on the health and well-being of the child and mother. ‘One of our […]
Shannon Gilchrist Fake addresses, leased apartments that go unused, long-distance commutes to drop kids off at school bus stops: Some parents go to great lengths to enroll their children in a desirable school district, or to keep them there once they have to move away. Often, those are the same school districts that work hard […]
Sally Weale: Lawyers acting for families who claim their children have been illegally excluded from St Olave’s grammar school are considering launching proceedings against a number of other London schools after being contacted by parents. The news comes as a former St Olave’s governor complained about a lack of transparency in the governance of the […]
Arian Campo-Flores: For years, Misti Boackle had watched several cities break away from the Jefferson County school district that includes this Birmingham suburb, each forming what she considers superior school systems. So in 2012, she joined other residents to do the same for Gardendale. “I felt it was the best thing for our family and […]
Ram Cherry, John Friedman, Emmanuel Sara, Nicholas Turner and Danny Yagan: We characterize intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top […]
Chris Rickert: I’m guessing there are a lot of parents of black students in Madison who would be happy to have greater access to a Madison public school that works well for their children, rather than wait for the “best” to maybe come along some day. Instead, while Madison has made closing the racial achievement […]
Bill Knight and Mark Lambie: He is, quite simply, the tiniest of warriors. Santos Escobar, a beautiful and engaging little boy who has yet to even reach his second birthday, recently underwent surgery at El Paso Children’s Hospital — a surgery to a skull that was fused, a skull that would not grow as the […]
Jonathan Taplin The effects of the darker side of tech culture reach well beyond the Valley. It starts with an unwillingness to control fake news and pervasive sexism that no doubt contributes to the gender pay gap. But it will soon involve the heart of Google’s business: surveillance capitalism. The trope that “if you are […]
Will Flanders: Unfortunately, the public schools have not responded as well to increased competition. Aided by politicians like Representative Taylor, public schools leaders have chosen to not to embrace competition but to seek protection from it, fighting the growth of better educational alternatives at every turn. While creating an incentive to improve, school choice has […]
Madison Teacher and Parent Jen Greenwald: I have worked as a teacher in the Madison Metropolitan School District since 1997. I have raised my two biracial daughters in and out of Madison public schools. And, like many of the people who support Isthmus Montessori, I would like to see radical change in our district. A […]
Velia Hawkins: Parents, you know we’ve got all kinds of problems to worry about. But feeling judged for the kind of school we choose for our children shouldn’t be one of them. Just last week I had an issue that sucked up my time and attention for the better part of the week. It was […]
Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to successfully complete a college-level English composition class, according […]
Citizen Stewart The NAACP report finally acknowledges the education nightmare many parents and their children face in our public education system. For far too long, low-income and working-class Black families have been ill-served by a system that, from the very beginning, was never created with the interest of Black children in mind. We also agree […]
Bigbadbonds.com: You may not realize it, but you (taxpayers) pay for every district election. So, when McFarland Unified put on a ballot measure in November 2016, it cost you money that may have otherwise gone to educate your children. The same goes for yesterday’s election. You paid for it. You also paid for the parasites, […]
Wendy Berliner: When Maryam Mirzakhani died at the tragically early age of 40 this month, the news stories talked of her as a genius. The only woman to win the Fields Medal – the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize – and a Stanford professor since the age of 31, this Iranian-born academic had been […]
Kai Strittmatter: It is actually very simple, the professor in Beijing says. “There are two kinds of people in the world: good people and bad people. Now imagine a world in which the good ones are rewarded and the bad ones punished”. A world in which those who respect their parents, avoid jaywalking, and pay […]
Neil Heinen: Baskerville is hoping to have 10,000 signees. “What they’re saying are two things,” says Baskerville, “one … from all political perspectives, we agree on these two stretch targets. And we want you, governor, gubernatorial candidates, school superintendents, to make these goals.” Baskerville has a scorecard, something he considers crucial, which will be updated […]
Jason Allen: I’ve heard it all before… and hearing it now still doesn’t change the idea that racism has been exploited to block educational reform. Here’s why I say this. I’m a long time support and member of the NAACP. I believe in the mission, the legacy and those committed, on the ground workers. I […]
Joe Kent: But Jobs blamed teachers unions for getting in the way of good teachers getting better pay. “It’s not a meritocracy,” said Jobs. “It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what’s happened. And teachers can’t teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.” He noted that one solution […]
The Economist IN 1953 B.F. Skinner visited his daughter’s maths class. The Harvard psychologist found every pupil learning the same topic in the same way at the same speed. A few days later he built his first “teaching machine”, which let children tackle questions at their own pace. By the mid-1960s similar gizmos were being […]
Peter Cunningham: No institution in America has done more to perpetuate segregation than public schools. Until 1954, segregated schools were legal in America and it was the standard practice in much of the South. Less recognized, but equally pernicious, is the structural segregation all across America, where zoned school systems maintain racial and economic segregation. […]
Karen Rivedal: But board members Mary Burke and TJ Mertz offered cautions, urging the administration to be sure every possible building efficiency has been achieved before going to the voters again and every proposed project in any referendum under the plan truly advances the district’s central mission of providing a good education. “My guess is […]
John Schneider: Consider the impact on policy. If the nation’s schools are generally doing well, it doesn’t make much sense to disrupt them. But if they are in a state of decline, disruption takes on an entirely new meaning. Seizing on the presumed failures of the education system, reform advocates have pushed hard for contentious […]
Robert Pondisco: We are ruining America, notes dour New York Times columnist David Brooks, suddenly and considerably alarmed by a standard feature of American life, if not human nature—the tendency of the privileged and powerful to guard jealously every advantage they have been handed or earned. Brooks takes up his pen to offer a stinging […]
Rep Tim Ryan (Ohio): Salad bars are one of the easiest ways for schools to meet nutrition standards. They empower students to try new fruits and vegetables and have been shown to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables. Combined, these efforts create the conditions for students to learn that carrots can be a substitute […]
Maryanne Demasi,Robert H Lustig and Aseem Malhotra Emerging evidence shows that insulin resistance is the most important predictor of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Aggressive lowering of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) has been the cornerstone of preventative cardiology for decades. Statins are widely used as the go-to solution for the prevention of heart disease […]
Nico Dosenbach: As a society, we could do a lot more for the safety of our children if we focused on accident prevention instead of being consumed by irrational fears. I am a child neurologist and neuroscientist, as well as the parent of a 4-year-old and a 19-month-old. My research and patient care revolve around […]
Tyler Cowen:The pioneer in robot education so far is, not surprisingly, Singapore. The city-state has begun experiments with robotic aides at the kindergarten level, mostly as instructor aides and for reading stories and also teaching social interactions. In the U.K., researchers have developed a robot to help autistic children better learn how to interact with […]
契約結婚: By abandoning the norm of marriage we end up with fewer children. This ultimately leads to economic crisis, as fewer workers translates to reduced growth and not enough tax revenue to support social welfare systems. Governments may try to mitigate this by taking in immigrants to replace natives who refuse to have children, but […]
Diane Ravitch Blog, via a kind reader: “The TEACHERS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE will never enter our schools through the dismantling process of deregulating the profession and intentionally lowering standards. The standards were put in place to guarantee a level of expertise. “In summary, “WE DON”T HAVE AN EMERGENCY THAT REQUIRES DUMBING DOWN THE PROFESSION OF […]
Molly Beck:: “The governor supports the K-12 education budget he introduced to the Legislature five months ago,” spokesman Tom Evenson said when asked if Walker would support the proposal. “It provides a $649 million increase in funding for our schools, bringing funding for K-12 to an all-time high. After visiting nearly 50 public schools this […]
Stephen Schroeder: Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to see your child’s bus on a map, know if it is running late, get an ETA estimate of its arrival, get notifications if it is behind schedule, and get alerted in case of emergency? How about even being able to see that your child […]
It’s interesting to consider recent Madison School Board/Administration decisions in light of David Brooks’ 7/11/2017 column: Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances […]
Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh: Most books on public education in any country do not favor workforce preparation for all students in place of optional high school curricula or student-selected post-secondary goals. Nor have parents in the USA lauded Common Core’s effects on their children’s learning or the K-8 curriculum. Indeed, few observers see anything […]
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email: In 2009, 328 black students started 9th grade in Madison’s public high schools. By June 2013, only 177 (54%) of these students graduated with a diploma. Only 14 of these graduates were considered “ready” to succeed in college level reading upon completion of the ACT college entrance exam. That’s […]
Wisconsin Supreme Court: ¶27 Applying these principles, we conclude that CAMRC was a committee created by rule under Wis. Stat. § 19.82(1). First, it qualifies as a “committee” for purposes of the open meetings law because it had a defined membership of 17 individuals upon whom was conferred the authority, as a body, to review […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: Citing anecdotal evidence of a shortage of fully licensed teachers for available positions, DPI has issued an emergency rule that would allow many in-state and out-of-state individuals to become licensed and act as teachers-of-record in the classroom without passing the Foundations of Reading Test (FORT). The work-around to […]
Bradford, Fuller & Stewart: Education reform is at a crossroads in this country. And it seems the issue of parent choice — who should have it, how much of it there should be, and for what schools — will determine the direction many reformers will take. While some may have difficulty defining where they stand […]
Jeni Tennison: My eldest daughter is now in secondary school and, while she enjoys and is good at Maths, what she really loves studying is History and English. Watching the critical thinking and analysis skills that she is learning and using for those subjects, I have started to wonder if we should be approaching data […]
Matthew Cobb Whether we like it or not, the Dor Yeshorim database and other similar initiatives, such as genetic tests for sickle-cell anemia, which largely affects African-Americans, are enabling us to deliberately change the frequency of certain human genes in the population. This is the technical definition of eugenics and might seem shocking, since eugenics […]
Pratik Chougule: American childhood has taken an authoritarian turn. An array of trends in American society are conspiring to produce unprecedented levels of supervision and control over children’s lives. Tracing the effects of childrearing on broad social outcomes is an exercise in speculation. But if social scientists are correct to posit a connection between childrearing […]
Reuters: About a hundred protesters clashed on Wednesday with police in downtown Beijing after authorities abruptly reassigned their children to a school in a rough neighborhood, a rare display of public anger in the Chinese capital. Large protests are rare in heavily-guarded and affluent Beijing, but the reassignment plan comes at a time when educational […]
Liana Loewus, via Will Fitzhugh:: [FIRST: make sure students read nothing, so they will have nothing to write about. SECOND: focus on skills, so they will not care about what they are writing. THIRD: repeat until they hate writing and remain unable to do it well—WF] ============== Students have a lot of free-writing in journals. […]
Robin Lake, via a kind email: When my son attended our neighborhood public elementary school, he hid under a desk every day. His teacher regularly yelled at the mostly low-income students and typically ignored him – under that desk, he was out of sight, out of mind. He tested as profoundly gifted, but a constellation […]
Jennifer Wang: Last November, the citizens of Madison supported a referendum to offset the drastic budget cuts forced upon our schools in recent years. The Madison Metropolitan School District has let class sizes expand for the past few years to cope with funding shortfalls. In this first budget cycle after the referendum, I ask the […]
Natasha Singer: In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals $100,000 “innovation grants” and encouraging them to behave more like start-up founders and less like bureaucrats. In Maryland, Texas, Virginia and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, is championing a popular math-teaching program where Netflix-like algorithms […]
One City Learning, via a kind Kaleem Caire email: Tonight, One City Early Learning Centers, a high quality preschool located in the heart of South Madison, is hosting its first graduation ceremony and community barbecue, in honor of its first cohort of children to transition from its preschool to local kindergartens in the city. Nine […]
Denis Campbell: Four of the five most popular forms of social media harm young people’s mental health, with Instagram the most damaging, according to research by two health organisations. Instagram has the most negative impact on young people’s mental wellbeing, a survey of almost 1,500 14- to 24-year-olds found, and the health groups accused it […]
Leighton Akio Woodhouse: IMMIGRATIONS AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT imprisons more than 10,000 parents of American citizens in California each year, according to a report released today by Human Rights Watch. The report, entitled “I Still Need You,” analyzes the impact of immigration enforcement policy on immigrant families in California and finds that parents with U.S. citizen […]
Natasha Singer: CHICAGO — The sixth graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here with a classic red brick facade, know the Google drill. In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a […]
Anna Aizer and Janet Currie: Using a unique dataset linking preschool blood lead levels (BLLs), birth, school, and detention data for 120,000 children born 1990-2004 in Rhode Island, we estimate the impact of lead on behavior: school suspensions and juvenile detention. We develop two instrumental variables approaches to deal with potential confounding from omitted variables […]
Washington Post: CRITICS OF school choice could not contain their glee over a new study on the District’s school voucher program showing that students attending private schools did not perform as well on standardized tests as their public school counterparts. It is pretty rich that those who have railed against using test scores to hold […]
Robert Pondiscio: Slowly, slowly, a small but persuasive body of work is emerging which raises curriculum to an object of pressing concern for educators, and expresses long overdue appreciation for the idea that the instructional materials we put in front of children actually matter to student outcomes. A welcome addition to this emerging corpus is […]
Amber Walker: Marie thought the “one-size-fits-all” model of public schools would not work for their kids. “I wanted them to be able to explore their individuality and find out what they really love to do,” she said. “Schools tend to tell you what you are not good at and then make you work harder at […]
Josh Mitchell: Millions of U.S. parents have taken out loans from the government to help their children pay for college. Now a crushing bill is coming due. Hundreds of thousands have tumbled into delinquency and default. In the process, many have delayed retirement, put off health expenses and lost portions of Social Security checks and […]
Katherine Osnos Sanford: Mae has a red backpack that I ordered shortly before she started school. Her two brothers have similar backpacks, also in bright colors, each embroidered with their initials. I love the sight of my children’s backpacks hanging together on the hooks by our back door. It makes me feel that things are […]
Kate Taylor: A look at the history of District 3, which stretches along the West Side of Manhattan from 59th to 122nd Street, shows how administrators’ decisions, combined with the choices of parents and the forces of gentrification, have shaped the current state of its schools, which, in one of the most politically liberal parts […]
Dan Dempsey: Since the creation of “New Math” in the 1950s and delivery via the SMSG (School Mathematics Study Group) textbooks, the USA’s progressive math education establishments have believed that conceptual understanding is the holy grail of math instruction. Supposedly, once a child has conceptual understanding, math skills will be easier to acquire. Yet after […]
Los Angeles Daily News: A new labor-backed study charges that California charter schools are opening schools where they aren’t needed, but parents – not special interests or governmental bodies – should be the final judges. The report from In the Public Interest criticizes charters for opening in areas where there is existing classroom space in […]
Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca and Jimmy Narang: We estimated rates of “absolute income mobility”—the fraction of children who earn more than their parents—by combining data from U.S. Census and Current Population Survey cross sections with panel data from de-identified tax records. We found that rates of absolute mobility have […]
Frida Alim, Nate Cardozo, Gennie Gebhart, Karen Gullo, and Amul Kalia: Case Study: A California Parent Caught Off-Guard by Chromebooks Katherine W. was seven years old, in the third grade, when her teacher first issued Google Chromebooks to the class. Katherine’s father, Jeff, was concerned. Jeff feared that Chromebooks and G Suite for Education use […]
John Nichols: The DeVos interventions are not about improving public education; they are about pushing a political agenda that is rooted in ideological obsessions rather than an understanding of how to improve schools. As the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights noted with regard to DeVos: “She has never been an educator or worked […]
The Economist: LAST year some images went viral on the internet in China. They showed children descending an 800-metre (2,600-foot) rock face on rickety ladders made of vines, wood and rusty metal. Their destination: school. The photographer was told by a local official that “seven or eight” people had died after losing their grip. Yet […]
Catherine Brown, Scott Sargrad, and Meg Benner: In 2014, parents of students at Horace Mann Elementary School in Northwest Washington, D.C., spent over $470,000 of their own money to support the school’s programs.1 With just under 290 students enrolled for the 2013-14 school year, this means that, in addition to public funding, Horace Mann spent […]
Susan Dynarski: Public schools are increasingly filled with black and Hispanic students, but the children identified as “gifted” in those schools are overwhelmingly white and Asian. The numbers are startling. Black third graders are half as likely as whites to be included in programs for the gifted, and the deficit is nearly as large for […]
Laura waters: In less than two weeks Newark voters will elect three new members of their Board of Education and the stakes have never been higher. After twenty-two years of state control, city representatives will once again oversee every aspect of New Jersey’s largest and most politically-convoluted school district. As if this set of circumstances […]
Dan Oko: In Texas, shifting demographics are largely to blame for this detachment from nature. We’re predominantly urban now and our cities have swelled with newcomers; fewer and fewer Texans have roots that trace back to the ranching and farming families that once quite literally shaped our state as they worked the land. And then […]
Dana Goldstein: Of all the inequalities between rich and poor public schools, one of the more glaring divides is PTA fund-raising, which in schools with well-heeled parents can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or more. Several years ago, the Santa Monica-Malibu school board came up with a solution: Pool most donations from […]
Alan Borsuk: The view through the windows of the student cafeteria at St. Francis High School is terrific. You look across S. Lake Drive to an expanse of Lake Michigan. People pay large sums of money for homes with views like this. That’s not why parents choose the school for their children. There’s the academic […]
Donna De La Cruz: But that is changing as evidence builds that taking brief activity breaks during the day helps children learn and be more attentive in class, and a growing number of programs designed to promote movement are being adopted in schools. “We need to recognize that children are movement-based,” said Brian Gatens, the […]
Matthew Frankel, via a kind email: Friends – As we only try to curate and update you on some of the most informative stories regarding this NJ LIFO Lawsuit – I did want to flag these three items for your files: 1.) Here is a moving testimonial interview today showcasing one of the Newark parents […]
Vivett Dukes: Today is day two of of the three-day New York State English Language Arts Exam and in my ten-plus years of proctoring and scoring these exams, it never ceases to amaze me when, just a few minutes into the tests, students’ eyes start to glaze over and their bladders and throats go into […]