De Anza Academy of Technology and the Arts is a high-achieving magnet school with project-based and collaborative-learning environments and makerspaces. A few years ago, however, De Anza, part of Ventura USD in California, was a low-achieving middle school with declining enrollment and at risk of closure. De Anza decided to become a 1-to-1 technology school […]
Gone are the days when a mechanic can pop the hood of a car, take a look around and figure out what to do. Today's auto shop graduates use diagnostic software to determine a vehicle's problem, and then must explain the solution coherently, in a way that all customers will understand. Vocational education used to […]
Steven Yates has a message for would-be school librarians. "If you're coming to this because you like to read and you want to manage a collection of books, then you showed up about 30 years too late to the profession" says Yates, a former high school librarian who teaches in the school library media certification […]
Districts devote nearly 80 percent of their budgets to personnel costs—leaving little wiggle room for administrators tasked with maintaining fiscal responsibility and boosting the quality of education in a time of nearly stagnant funding. John Hutchison, chief financial and operations officer at Olathe Public Schools in Kansas, began budgetary planning for the 2017-18 school year […]
Fast disappearing from schools are internet "lock and block" policies that keep students off social media and restrict them to carefully curated websites. Even with sophisticated filters and firewalls, today's learners carry all the access in the world in their back pockets. "We're past trying to stay ahead of the digital native" says Morgen Larsen, […]
Five years ago, Windsor Locks Public Schools in northern Connecticut was designated an Alliance District, meaning it was one of the 30 lowest-performing academic districts in the state and needed help. The good news was that the designation came with funding to improve instruction, inspiring district leadership to go in a new direction—doing away with […]
When it comes to boosting the nutritional and academic value of school meals, Janet Poppendieck certainly offers food for thought. A nationally recognized scholar and activist whose work focuses on poverty, hunger and food assistance in the United States, Poppendieck is the author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California […]
In the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, education was designed to produce students who could follow directions, read simple sentences, and solve basic math problems in order to prepare them for factory work. Thinking critically and solving complicated problems wasn't necessary for most jobs. As we've moved from that era into the digital age, we've […]
A Georgia school system partnered with local manufacturers to create German-style apprentice programs that teach skills through project-based learning. A district on Florida's west coast expanded manufacturing internships with help from small businesses. And in Tennessee, high school students are developing high-tech skills and earning college credit at a Volkswagen automobile factory. School districts are […]
"Why can't Johnny read?" It's the question Rudolph Flesch asked in 1955 with his seminal book by that name. Unfortunately, it's still being asked today. Mark Seidenberg has studied the behavioral, computational and neural bases of reading and language for over 30 years, and he believes he knows the answer. In his new book Language […]
