Month: June 2023

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
The nation’s top colleges are likely to enroll fewer Black, Latino, and Native American students after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that colleges and universities essentially cannot consider race as a factor in the admissions process.
The ruling severely restricts colleges’ ability to use affirmative action to create more racially diverse campuses, and will likely curtail broader efforts to fight for racial equity in higher education.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s race-conscious admissions programs had violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, which bars discrimination, because they “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”
“Elimina..

© 2023 by Crystal Frommert, excerpted from the book When Calling Parents Isn’t Your Calling: A Teacher’s Guide to Communicating with Parents. Used with permission of the publisher, Road to Awesome, LLC.
Sometimes, it’s not the parent who is being difficult, but rather the request itself is difficult. While we want to work with parents to meet the needs of the student, some requests are not always best for their child’s educational experience. The following questions have been asked of my colleagues and myself many times from parents. After each request is a suggestion for how to say no firmly but kindly. I have phrased these requests in a cheeky way for humor’s sake. Most of the time these requests are a bit ridiculous, but there are times that these requests are valid due to health, family situations, or other extreme circumstances. Because fair doesn’t mean equal, you can certainly give a student more time on an assignment or another exception because of a family crisis but not give..

Karli Myers had her son, Luke, in November, while working as a high school English teacher outside Tulsa, Okla. Her district didn’t offer parental leave, so she used sick leave to get more than two months at home with Luke – sick leave she spent years collecting, with a baby in mind.
“So we accrue 10 sick days a year, so I essentially never took a sick day in seven years of teaching to be able to account for all of this,” Myers said.
According to a survey by the National Council on Teacher Quality, less than one fifth of the nation’s largest school districts offer paid parental leave for teachers. And only a handful of states guarantee it, including Delaware, Oregon and Georgia.
In many places, that leaves a teacher who wants to have a baby with few options: take limited unpaid leave, save up sick leave, hope for colleagues to share their sick leave, pay for their own substitute teacher, or try to time the birth for summer break.
But timing a pregnancy isn’t an exact science. Jenni..

With school on break, along with all the homework, tests and early start times that come with it, parents often assume that young people’s stress and anxiety will take a pause as well. However, that’s not always the case, especially as the novelty of summer dwindles. Without the daily structure of school and extracurricular activities, kids may struggle with boredom or restlessness. “Summer for many of us can feel like this nebulous thing because it is just this endless free time. Additionally, the pressure to make the most of the summer break and fear of missing out on experiences can contribute to feelings of anxiety. That ambiguity spikes a lot of fear and concern,” said Miriam Stevenson, who is an executive director at Care Solace, a company that helps schools connect families with mental health services. Previously she worked as the director of student services for health and wellness in the Palo Alto Unified School District.
Stevenson said that while Care Solace receives fewer s..

Georgianna McKenny’s award-winning podcast begins, fittingly, with a blaring alarm.
It’s an alarm clock, waking her 17-year-old cousin, Mariah, as she navigates a morning, back in January, when living in Jackson, Miss., meant waking up without access to clean water.
No showers, no drinkable water out of the tap, and, for a few days, no school.
McKenny is the newly-announced high-school winner of NPR’s fifth-annual Student Podcast Challenge. In a year with more than 3,300 entries – from middle- and high-schoolers in 48 states as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico – McKenny and her winning entry tell the story of the toll Jackson’s water crisis has taken on the city’s students.
“I don’t listen to podcasts” Georgianna McKenny attends school two and a half hours northeast of Jackson, in Columbus – at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, a prestigious, public boarding school for academically talented high-schoolers from all over the state.
In the school’s sun-fill..

School shootings, social media, beauty standards and fast-changing fashion trends – say that five times fast.
Adolescence has always been tough, but the acceleration of modern forces makes it more stressful than ever. In the words of two San Francisco best friends – the middle school winners of this year’s NPR Student Podcast Challenge – welcome to Middle School Now.
In a classroom at Presidio Middle School, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, 13-year-olds Erika Young and Norah Weiner sat down to tell us about their podcast. It is one of two Grand Prize winners chosen by our judges from more than 3,300 submissions from 48 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
The two friends just finished the seventh grade, but haven’t been separated yet — they have seen each other every day since school let out. Norah shows up to our interview wearing boots that she borrowed from Erika for the special occasion. Their giddy laughter fills the empty school, their energy fueled..

Back when my daughter was a toddler, I would make a joke about my phone: “It’s a drug for her,” I’d say to my husband. “You can’t even show it to her without causing a tantrum.”
She had the same reaction to cupcakes and ice cream at birthday parties. And as she grew older, another craving set in: cartoons on my computer.
Every night, when it was time to turn off the screen and get ready for bed, I would hear an endless stream of “But Mamas.” “But Mama, just five more minutes. But Mama, after this one show … but Mama … but Mama … but Mama.”
Given these intense reactions to screens and sweets, I assumed that my daughter loves them. Like, really loves them. I assumed that they brought her immense joy and pleasure. And thus, I felt really guilty about taking these pleasures away from her. (To be honest, I feel the same way about my own “addictions,” like checking social media and email more than a hundred times a day. I do that because they give me pleasure, right?)
But what if those a..

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
When Wyatt Bassow and Ava Buxton missed classes one morning this spring to see democracy in action in Tennessee, they witnessed history that they acknowledged probably wouldn’t be fully taught at their high school less than a mile away.
Justin Pearson, one of two young Democratic lawmakers who were dramatically expelled from office just a week earlier by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, was taking his oath of office again that day outside the state Capitol in Nashville after being voted back in by officials in Shelby County.
A few days earlier, Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville had been reinstated after a similar vote by his city’s council.
Both men had been ousted from the legislature for staging a protest on the House floor urging gun reforms after a mass school shooting in Nashville. The votes temporarily robbed some 140,000 Tennesseans in the state’s two large..

What is the best way to teach? Some educators like to deliver clear explanations to students. Others favor discussions or group work. Project-based learning is trendy. But a June 2023 study from England could override all these debates: the most effective use of class time may depend on the subject.
The researchers found that students who spent more time in class solving practice problems on their own and taking quizzes and tests tended to have higher scores in math. It was just the opposite in English class. Teachers who allocated more class time to discussions and group work ended up with higher scorers in that subject.
“There does seem to be a difference between language and math in the best use of time in class,” said Eric Taylor, an economist who studies education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and one of the study’s authors. “I think that is contradictory to what some people would expect and believe.”
Indeed, the way that the 250 secondary school teachers in this..

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
Thousands of aspiring teachers are graduating from educator prep programs each year unprepared to teach children how to read, or worse, armed with debunked strategies that can actually make it harder for kids to become proficient readers.
That’s one of the most “sobering” findings of a new national report released Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit that uses data to evaluate teacher prep programs.
But there is some good news: Several states, like Colorado and Arizona, have made significant strides in recent years in how they train teachers to teach reading, following statewide efforts to boost early literacy.
“On the whole — when it comes to teaching teachers how to teach children to read aligned to the science of reading — I’m optimistic,” said Heather Peske, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “And we have a lot of work to do.”..