The two words, “these kids,” frustrate Superintendent Carla Santorno more than any other phrase. It's used by some educators as a kind of secret code and a flimsy excuse for academic failure among marginalized students, she says.
School violence and teacher strikes dominated education news during 2018. But last year also saw empowered students voicing their frustrations: Youth activism surged around gun control, safer schools, immigration, voting and LGBTQ issues.
The K12 transportation landscape is getting increasingly complex, as districts wrestle with issues ranging from school choice and questions of equity to how to subsidize mass transit for urban students. In some districts, services that employ parents as drivers have rolled in to fill the gap. In Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkan has proposed making year-round, […]
How do you ensure students who excel at math remain engaged? Heidi Williams intended to solve that challenge by starting an after-school coding club while she was a gifted-and-talented teacher at Bayside Middle School near Milwaukee. Instead of using pen and paper, her students created an interactive children’s book on Scratch, the MIT Media Lab […]
Every year, nearly 40 percent of food produced in America is thrown into the trash. That trend extends to the 5 billion lunches served in U.S. public schools each year, amounting to an estimated $1.2 billion of annual lunchroom waste, according to USDA data and findings from a two-year study of Boston middle schools. The […]
One education researcher calls it “the academic death penalty”: A grade of zero on a 100-point scale, a mark that spells disaster for a student’s class average. “It’s such an extreme score in a percentage grading system” says Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Kentucky. “To recover from that […]
The challenge of finding curriculum materials in languages other than English is especially complex for districts embracing a growing trend: dual-language immersion programs, in which native English speakers join English language learners in studying academic subjects in two languages. Nine years ago, Utah launched an ambitious effort to enroll thousands of students in dual-language immersion, […]
Telemedicine, in which a remote doctor or physician’s assistant provides health care via the internet, has caught on in the business world and is now making its way into public schools. Five of the Title 1 buildings in Maryland’s Howard County Public Schools offer telemedicine for students, says Sharon Hobson, a registered nurse who coordinates […]
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.
When only 13 percent of sophomores at the Grandview School District in Washington passed the state math exams six years ago, administrators decided to develop their own curriculum. For instance, leaders had concluded the textbooks they purchased didn’t adequately teach fractions and integers, leading to gaps in student learning. Grandview spent about $200,000 to hire […]
