Day: June 12, 2023

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
Her daughter’s anxiety was spiraling out of control and Jaquetta Johnson couldn’t find help.
Last fall, as the Delaware fourth grader’s acute anxiety kept her from concentrating in class, a doctor gave Johnson a list of children’s therapists. But all were fully booked, some with wait times of six months to a year.
Then Johnson heard about a new health clinic inside a school in her daughter’s school district south of Wilmington. Johnson enrolled her daughter, and soon she was receiving counseling.
“When nobody else would see her,” Johnson said, “she was able to get help at school.”
Nationwide, nearly 2,600 health centers operated out of schools in 2017, the most recent year with available data — more than twice the number that existed two decades earlier. Some 6.3 million students in more than 10,000 schools had access to the centers, according to the School-Based Health Alliance..

After years of disappointing, confusing and uneven results, charter schools are generally getting better at educating students. These schools, which are publicly financed but privately run, still have shortcomings and a large subset of them fail students, particularly those with disabilities. But the latest national study from a Stanford University research group calculates that students, on average, learned more at charter schools between the years of 2014 and 2019 than similar students did at their traditional local public schools. The researchers matched charter school students with a “virtual twin”– a composite student who is otherwise similar to the charter school student but attended traditional public schools – and compared academic progress between the two.
“We find that this improvement is because schools are getting better, not because newer, better schools are opening,” said Margaret Raymond, director of Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which r..