The New Media Consortium (NMC), together with the Consortium for School Networking (COSN), released its annual K12 Horizon Report, which can be very useful for educators contemplating how much they have accomplished or where to go next with their technology initiative. The full report can be accessed here.Although the 2015 K12 Horizon report largely speaks […]
Meria Carstarphen is a team player—literally. She has played football in the hot summer sun alongside varsity players at Atlanta Public Schools. The district superintendent also gives her personal cell phone number to staff and students alike. They can text her or call her—any time. In addition, they follow each other on Twitter. Meria Carstarphen […]
Educators generally agree that we are testing too much. On the heels of No Child Left Behind, we've had 15 years of often misguided national and state accountability policies that have only just been rolled back. Driven by a robust parental "opt out" movement, Congress' latest action puts more authority back with the states. But […]
When the Office of Special Education Programs revised its accountability operation in 2014 to shift the balance from a system focused on compliance to one that emphasizes results, we wondered how it would impact us at the local level. Would this Results Driven Accountability framework be just another set of requirements to implement, or would […]
While detention remains a staple of student discipline across the country, many school leaders are looking at ways to modify the practice, or even replace it, with approaches that may be more effective in actually reducing bad behavior. Classic detention, where bored students sit silently and unproductively in classrooms after school, has limited value as […]
Urban districts struggling with budget cuts can increasingly look to foundations, nonprofits and private companies for support in driving district success efforts—from enhancing instruction to expanding healthcare to boosting college preparation. "Collaboration across sectors is necessary to solve problems whose root causes are complex and multifaceted, and which need extensive, coordinated resources from many different […]
Burdened by demands to show outcomes and achievement, early education classrooms are often reduced to scripted lessons and meaningless craft work that imparts little learning. In her book The Importance of Being Little (Viking, 2016), Erika Christakis shows how the ever-increasing pressure to deliver has caused teachers to inadvertently stifle children's natural sense of wonder […]
From testing problem-solving skills in the survivalist block-building adventure Minecraft to reinforcing science concepts in SimCityEDU, educators are integrating games in the classroom at an increasingly rapid rate. Game-Based Learning occurs when students play a game with defined learning outcomes. In this special section, District Administration analyzes exactly what qualifies as Game-Based Learning, and identifies […]
Parents and educators hailed FERPA, COPPA and the Student Privacy Pledge as significant steps toward securing student data. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that Google, a prominent player in edtech, is already violating those measures. In December, the foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco, filed a complaint with the Federal […]
While national graduation rates hit an all-time high of 82 percent in 2014, the trend for students with disabilities remained flat at nearly 63 percent, according to the most recent data. In Georgia, Nevada and Mississippi, students with disabilities graduated from high school at half the rate of their non-disabled peers. Students with disabilities who […]
