Month: August 2023

Before the overdose, Griffin Hoffmann was a sophomore, about to lead his Portland, Ore., high school’s tennis team. Sienna Vaughn was a junior in Plano, Texas, who participated in Girl Scouts and cheerleading. Laird Ramirez was 17 years old living near Charlotte and competing on his high school’s wrestling team. He was rarely seen without his skateboard.
The teens thought they were taking prescription pills for pain and relaxation, drugs like Valium or Percocet, that they bought from friends or from social media. But the pills they took were counterfeits – they hadn’t come from a pharmacy and it turned out they contained fentanyl, a potent, often deadly, synthetic opioid. Just 2 milligrams can kill you.
Griffin, Sienna and Laird’s deaths are part of a grim crisis happening all across the country. Their stories, taken from local news reports, are among the dozens NPR reviewed, and they illustrate a new challenge for schools this fall.
“[Fentanyl’s] infiltration into schools is certai..

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It’s a common scenario – one that plays out in schools and homes all the time. A child hurts another child, physically or emotionally. Grownups are called in to arbitrate. The adult tells one – or perhaps all – of the kids to say, “I’m sorry.” Those two words are uttered, and all is supposed to be well. But the resolution is often lopsided. “When you just do that quick apology, you feel better, you move on,” said fifth grade teacher Rayna Freedman. “But oftentimes the other person is still left with a bucket of feelings.” She remembers that from her own childhood, and she sees it all the time in her classroom at Jordan Jackson Elementary School in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
That’s why, for the last few years, she’s been teaching her students how to give more meaningful apologies. During these lessons, the fifth graders practice not only saying “I’m sorry,” but acknowledging why their actions were wrong, offering to repair harm, and promising not to r..

Eric Hitchner teaches English on the fourth floor of a 111-year-old high school in Philadelphia. Come September, his classroom will be packed with a new crop of teenagers, but one thing will be the same: the lack of air conditioning.
It can get so hot in his room, he says, “no one wants to even move, let alone do some strenuous thinking.”
He knows firsthand that even when the outside temperatures cool down, his classroom often doesn’t. Last September, when it was in the low 70s in Philadelphia, it was 86 degrees inside.
His SmartBoard, an interactive teaching device that the school district bought with COVID relief money, tells him the exact temperature and humidity level. He’s clocked it as high as 93 degrees.
“Those things are not inexpensive,” he says. “I would have allocated that money for air conditioning. But nobody asked me.”
Hitchner teaches in one of the estimated 36,000 public schools nationwide without adequate air conditioning. As temperatures keep rising around much o..

Kids around the country are still suffering academically from the pandemic. But more than three years after schools shut down, it’s hard to understand exactly how much ground students have lost and which children now need the most attention.
Three new reports offer some insights. All three were produced by for-profit companies that sell assessments to schools. Unlike annual state tests, these interim assessments are administered at least twice a year and help track student progress, or learning, during the year. These companies may have a business motive in sounding an alarm to sell more of their product, but the reports are produced by well-regarded education statisticians.
The big picture is that kids at every grade are still behind where they would have been without the pandemic. All three reports look at student achievement in the spring of 2019, before the pandemic, and compare it to the spring of 2023. A typical sixth grader, for example, in the spring of 2023 was generally sco..

Adapted with permission from Roderick, T. (2023). Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education, (pp. 13–20). Harvard Education Press.
For the culminating project of their multidisciplinary course on climate justice, seniors at the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School in New York City (known as WHEELS) worked in groups of four to choose a climate justice issue and create a seven-minute video. One student, introducing his group’s video, said that the students had disagreed over which issue to focus on. One favored pollution; another, garbage and littering; and a third, drug addiction. “Through good listening and negotiation,” he stated proudly, “we were able to solve our conflict with a win-win-win agreement.” They decided to address all three — a decision that forced them to explore connections among these three major problems in the neighborhood.
Their neighborhood in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan is surrounded by highways that pollute the ..

Evelyn Lansing, a senior at Hopewell Valley Central High School in Pennington, N.J., brushed purple glaze onto her clay tile as the school year came to an end in June.
Lansing and her classmates had spent weeks researching the impacts of human-caused climate change on their communities and their own lives. Their bas-relief tiles and the three-dimensional images sculpted onto them represented something each of them learned.
Lansing’s tile featured a blueberry branch – a nod to the rich agricultural heritage of New Jersey, which has earned it the nickname “the garden state.”
“A lot of those things that we are used to seeing aren’t going to be able to be grown here with the continuing climate change,” said Lansing, who comes from a family that grows their own food.
New Jersey – a state with roughly 130-miles of coastline – is already confronting multiple climate realities, from more frequent flooding and extreme heat to air pollution from wildfire smoke in Canada.
In New Jersey class..

When journalist Jennifer Wallace learned about the 2019 Varsity Blues scandal, in which fancy, well-to-do parents paid a sketchy consultant to cheat their children into elite colleges, she didn’t buy the conventional wisdom about the story. Were they all just shallow snobs desperate to preserve their flimsy status? A mother herself, living in a community where nearly everyone, parent and child alike, fretted about college admissions — and flogged themselves to secure a spot at a top school — she believed something deeper was at work. Somehow, families had absorbed the message that a kid’s only hope for a decent life was to grind it out as a child and pray that the gods of higher education would bless their applications.
Wallace explores the roots and effects of this problem in her new book, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — And What We Can Do About It. Pressure isn’t limited to children of the well-off, Wallace explains. She reports that as many as one-third of h..

Many education researchers have warned that summer school doesn’t have a strong track record of helping students catch up academically. That’s because it’s hard to convince families to show up. In the wake of the pandemic, school leaders spent billions more on it anyway. In a 2022 national survey, 70% of school districts said they had launched new summer programs or expanded existing ones. Los Angeles Unified District superintendent Alberto Carvalho called summer school “critical” to addressing learning loss.
But now, in a scientific version of “We told you so,” a group of 14 researchers from Harvard University, the American Institutes for Research and the assessment company NWEA found miniscule gains in math and no improvement in reading at all after scrutinizing how much 2022 summer school helped children in eight large school districts around the nation. A separate study in Tennessee, also looking back at the summer of 2022, found the same tiny learning gains in math but none in re..

For 10 days this August, some 150 high schoolers from across the U.S. are descending on a sleepaway camp in Southern Illinois to discuss the fate of the planet — and what they can do about it.
The summer program is run by the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led campaign to halt climate change. Its goal is to teach students the skills they will need to launch an effort this fall using schools as a lever for slowing greenhouse gas emissions and accelerating the green energy transition.
Known as the Green New Deal for Schools, the plan calls for making school buildings greener and safer, advancing high-quality, interdisciplinary climate change lessons, developing disaster plans for schools, providing free lunch for all students and creating pathways to green jobs.
“The Green New Deal for Schools is so important right now in the U.S., where our school buildings are crumbling, where our students are not being adequately prepared to face the realities of the climate crisis, where there are vast..

Copyright © 2023 Deborah Offner. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission by Taylor & Francis Group from Offner, D. (2023), Educators as First Responders: A Teacher’s Guide to Adolescent Development and Mental Health, Grades 6-12 (pages 6-11). New York: Routledge.
For most adolescents, their world is school-centric. School is where tweens and teens spend most of their time. It’s where their work (learning) is. It’s where their peers are and where their relationships happen. It’s also where their parents aren’t, so school is where they begin to shape their individual identities and, with any luck, begin to figure out for themselves how to deal with life’s demands and problems.
Starting around age eleven or twelve, students are increasingly aware of their own strengths and weaknesses — academically, athletically, artistically, socially and physically. They naturally compare themselves to others and look to their peers for approval and acceptance.
Complicating this process is the..