Month: June 2023

Adapted with permission from Hess, F. M. (2023). The Great School Rethink (p. 11-15). Harvard Education Press.
The easiest thing in the world to do is talk about improvement. It’s vastly tougher to actually do it. But, if you’re busy doing it without thinking long and hard about what you’re doing and why, mammoth efforts can yield meager gains. As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once put it, “In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
I’ll try to put this more plainly. Think of a scrum of little kids building a sandcastle at the ocean’s edge. They can shovel, scoop, hustle, and hurry, only to see their project be repeatedly washed away.
Don’t get me wrong. Hard work matters. Careful execution matters. Elbow grease matters. But, if we think about that sandcastle, the big problem is that the kids are building it in the wrong spot. If they paused and moved 20 feet up the beach, the exact same effor..

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..

Going into his last tennis match of the school year, high school senior Lorris Nzouakeu knew he might get knocked out in straight sets. He was scheduled for one of the first matches of the day during the regionals competition in western Maryland, against a student from another school who’d won the championship last year.
“So it wasn’t really looking good at the start,” he laughs. “My goal was definitely to continue rallies and maintain pace and also just have fun.”
“Fun” is sometimes hard to find in high school sports. Gunning for college athletic scholarships, many students and families go all in – focusing on one sport and even one position from elementary school. It’s also big business – the whole youth sports industry is worth $19 billion dollars, more than the NFL.
For a lot of kids of all ages, sports are not working for them. Less than half of kids play sports at all, and those that do only stick with it for about three years and quit by age 11. That’s a whole lot of kids mis..

This opinion column about climate solutions in higher ed was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Climate change is here, now, lapping at the walls of higher education — quite literally.
Nathalie Saladrigas is an undergraduate at Miami Dade College, where her off-campus housing regularly floods. “You can’t even leave your car in the parking lot because it will get flooded — I mean up to your knees flooded,” she told me.
And 1,400 miles northeast, the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has also flooded, thanks to Hurricane Ida, a 2021 storm strengthened by climate change that cut across the continent all the way from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast. Maurie McInnis, president of SUNY-Stony Brook, vividly remembers the stresses of that fall semester’s opening. “A big rainstorm, and all of a sudden we had to find beds for 400 students,..

On a hot afternoon last summer, Riverside Indian School drew a crowd from all over Oklahoma. Elders and family members drove hours to pile into the residential school’s gymnasium. They filled the space with rows of chairs and stuffed the bleachers up to the rafters, but when the meeting was called to order, everyone was silent.
Facing the busloads of tribal citizens were U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland. They traveled from Washington to listen for as long as people wanted to speak. The subject at hand? The very place they were sitting.
The gym now shines with new equipment and has a wall dedicated to the “Tribes of Riverside.” A symbol of the new Riverside, one with a majority Native staff and an emphasis on cultural practices. But for many of the people here, Riverside Indian School was once a waking nightmare.
One of the first to speak was an 85-year-old man with short salt-and-pepper hair who used a walker to steady himself. Donald ..

It’s late September, and your teenage daughter won’t stop moaning about soccer. A natural athlete, she has always been one of the best on the field. But the sport feels different now that she’s in high school; she’s not scoring like she used to and hasn’t connected with the coach. Whether she has plateaued as a player, her teammates have stepped it up, or she’s simply tired of the sport, the game doesn’t bring her the joy it once did. It’s mid-season and she’s aching to quit. What should you do?
Annie Duke is a retired professional poker player and an expert on decision making, and she has some thoughts. In her new book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Duke explores our hangups about quitting and debunks the idea that blind allegiance to a particular course of action is heroic or wise. Figuring out when to give up one pursuit and take on another is an essential but neglected skill that adults would do well to learn – and then teach to their teenagers.
“Quit is a four-le..

It’s often hard to express exactly why certain teachers make such a difference in our lives. Some push us to work harder than we thought we could. Others give us good advice and support us through setbacks. Students describe how a caring teacher helped them “stay out of trouble” or gave them “direction in life.” What we cherish often has nothing to do with the biology or Bronze Age history we learned in the classroom.
For the lucky among us who have formed connections with a teacher, a school counselor or a coach, their value can seem immeasurable. That has not deterred a trio of researchers from trying to quantify that influence.
“Many of us have had a teacher in our lives that just went above and beyond and was more than a classroom teacher,” said Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University and one of the researchers on a draft working paper circulated in May 2023 by the National Bureau of Economic Research that has not been peer reviewed. “..

We’ve all seen the headlines – about book bans, school board shoutfests and new laws to limit how teachers can talk about gender identity or racism. America is deeply divided, and those fissures are ripping through classrooms – with teachers trapped straddling the chasms.
But are parents, teachers and the public feeling as divided as the headlines make it seem?
A pair of new, nationally-representative NPR/Ipsos polls reveals division, to be sure: A majority of Republican parents worry broadly about what children are being taught, compared to a minority of Democratic parents. There’s also division within the Republican Party around how to address that worry and whether banning books or restricting teachers is appropriate.
But there’s a surprising consensus among the general public too: a sweeping respect for teachers and broad agreement that they’re overworked and should be better paid.
One poll, of the general public, included 1,316 respondents with an oversampling of K-12 parents ..

If you haven’t heard about the Black girl who won the first national spelling bee in the U.S. 115 years ago, you’re not alone: even many in her family didn’t know about Marie C. Bolden’s feat until after she died, decades later.
“It’s astounding to me” that she never talked about winning a gold medal in front of thousands of people, Bolden’s grandson, Mark Brown, told NPR.
But back in 1908, Bolden’s victory made national news and upended racist stereotypes, less than 50 years after the Civil War. The 14-year-old did it by being perfect, spelling 500 words flawlessly to lead her hometown team, Cleveland, Ohio, to victory in the city’s then-new Hippodrome Theater.
“She never talked about this award, this amazing accomplishment,” Brown said. “But even Booker T. Washington mentioned [it] in his speeches.”
Bolden’s win was a national sensation Boleden’s win was dramatic and unprecedented: Cleveland’s team was trailing in a field that included teams from New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Erie,..