One month before the beginning of the 2017-18 school year, Turlock USD was still short five speech-language pathologists. The salary offered by the Central California district was high by area standards, but even so, the positions remained unfilled. In fact, no one had even applied. Alice Solis, Turlock’s director of special education, struggled to hire […]
Throughout the U.S., the movement to privatize education is advancing, in state legislatures and local school districts, and it is a relentless force. Education reformers are on a mission to replace under-performing public schools with charter schools and other private alternatives. Most of the public schools reformers are targeting are located in urban and rural […]
Every school district has that “last stop school” where the so-called “bad kids” end up. In California’s Morongo USD that school is Black Rock High School, remotely situated in the Mojave Desert. The school serves a population of students who are often struggling academically and living in households with poverty, drug use and neglect. A […]
When Polk County Public Schools started its wellness program back in the late 1980s, the district hoped to get employees moving with weekend fun runs and weight-loss challenges. “Everybody thought it was fluff” says Debbie Zimmerman, who today manages the wellness program for the 96,000-student school district in Central Florida. “How are you going to […]
High school students in the tiny Magazine School District in Arkansas receive three hours of sex education a year in grades 9 through 12—an approach that Superintendent Brett Bunch acknowledges is inadequate.
Social emotional learning helps students learn the coping skills critical for dealing with themselves, other people and their schoolwork. While SEL has become more mainstream over the past few years, you have been researching it since the mid-1970s. What piqued your early interest? In those years, we did a lot of work with at-risk populations. […]
Yoga in one Georgia district is under fire. In March, Bullard Elementary School in Kennesaw made national headlines when parents opposed yoga in school—being used to relieve stress and increase focus among students—because they said it promotes a Far East religion. After a public meeting, Principal Patrice Moore made changes. In a letter to parents, […]
More than 5 million American children face a rarely discussed educational challenge that has profound impact: seeing a parent spend time in prison. One in four black children in 2014 had a parent behind bars by the time they were 14 years old—more than double the rate for black children born in 1978, according to […]
The results of a national survey of more than 1,500 high school students call into question the effectiveness of staff responses to bullying. The survey conducted last October by our Embrace Civility in the Digital Age project provides helpful insights into causes of hurtful behavior, but shows that a majority of students hold positive values. […]
By all accounts, Marysville School District in Michigan is a high-success, high-performance district. While the average state graduation rate hovers at about 78 percent, Marysville graduates 95 percent of its students. It’s a point of pride that students exit Marysville—a suburban community located 55 miles northeast of Detroit—prepared to meet the rigorous demands of higher […]
