Year: 2023

Ever since schools reopened and resumed in-person instruction, districts have been trying to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. The Biden Administration has urged schools to use tutoring. Many schools have purchased an online version that gives students 24/7 access to tutors. Typically, communication is through text chat, similar to communicating with customer service on a website. Students never see their tutors or hear their voices.
Researchers estimate that billions have been spent on these online tutoring services, but so far, there’s no good evidence that they are helping many students catch up. And many students need extra help. According to the most recent test scores from spring 2023, 50% more students are below grade level than before the pandemic; even higher achieving students remain months behind where they should be.
Low uptake
The main problem is that on-demand tutoring relies on students to seek extra help. Very few do. Some school systems have rep..

Last year, Brandi Pitts’ kindergarten students were struggling with a software program meant to help them with math. The tool was supposed to enable teachers to tailor their instruction to individual students’ learning needs, but even the kids with strong math skills weren’t doing well.
At a training session this summer, Pitts, a teacher at Oakdale Elementary in Sandy, Utah, learned why: The program works best when teachers supervise kids rather than sending them off to do exercises on their own. Her school had received free software licenses through a state-funded project, but she’d initially missed the formal instruction on how to use the program because she was out sick.
“A lot of times with education, we have to figure things out on our own,” she said. “But having that training, I’m so much more encouraged that I can improve my teaching.”
School systems spend tens of billions of dollars each year on ed tech products, but much of that money is wasted. Educators, who are rarely ..

When three fifth-graders in Washington state sat down to make a podcast, they didn’t have to look far to find a good topic.
“Wildfires are a problem and they’re dangerous,” they say in their podcast from Chautauqua Elementary School, on Vashon Island. “But there’s ways to prevent them, so respect wildfire safety precautions and do your best to prevent these fires.”
This entry from Roz Hinds, Jia Khurana and Sadie Pritsky was among more than 100 podcasts this year in NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge that touched on a topic that’s increasingly important to young people: climate change. Over and over again, student journalists tried making sense of extreme weather events that are becoming more common or more intense: flash floods, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires.
Here are four student podcasts that offer a glimpse into the minds of students and what they have to say about climate-related news in their communities — and what they hope to do about it.
Behind the Scenes of the Mosquito Fi..

On a Thursday night inside a NASA hangar in Mountain View, Calif., a group of teenage girls cluster around two large tables strewn with wires, hex wrenches and laptops. As they work, a machine rises in their midst — a black aluminum frame loaded with advanced tech like high-powered brushless motors and 3D vision systems. Say hello to the Space Cookies, aka FIRST Robotics Competition Team 1868, a Girl Scout troop that builds tournament robots.
Right now, over 3,300 high school and community teams like the Space Cookies are assembling around the world in anticipation of the upcoming season of the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition. This giant non-profit/sport league started in 1989 as a local program to inspire New Hampshire teens in engineering and technology fields. It has grown to encompass more than 83,000 high schoolers in 31 countries.
Through the fall, students meet outside the school day to develop skills in areas like compone..

Excerpted from How to Talk to Kids About Anything: Tips, Scripts, Stories, and Steps to Make Even the Toughest Conversations Easier by Robyn Silverman. (c) 2023 by Dr. Robyn Silverman. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.
While we may wish our kids could be happy all the time, as it turns out, they wouldn’t be healthy if they were. Studies show that those who experience emodiversity, a range and abundance of both negative and positive emotions, are happier and healthier than those who remain numb or tend to fixate on any one emotion for a long period of time. Additionally, in environments that place a premium on expressing only positive emotions, those who experience negative feelings tend to falter. As Susan David, PhD, psychologist and bestselling author of Emotional Agility says in her TED Talk, “Tough emotions are part of our contract with life. You don’t get to have a meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place wi..

The stats on school staffing might seem like a violation of the laws of supply and demand.
In the past decade, the population of elementary, middle and high school students in Massachusetts dropped by 42,000 while the number of school employees grew by 18,000. In Connecticut, public school enrollment fell 7% while staffing rose 8%. Even in states with growing populations, school staff has been increasing far faster than students. Texas, for example, educates 367,000 more students, a 7% increase over the past decade, but the number of employees has surged by more than 107,000, a 16% jump. Staffing is up 20% in Washington state, but the number of students has risen by less than 3%.
“When kids go to school right now there are more adults in the building of all types than there were in 2013 and more than when I was a kid,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, where she has been tracking the divergence between students and staff at the nation’s pub..

Carlos Sanchez of McAllen, Texas, took out an enormous amount of federal student loan debt to make sure his children could attend college.
“As my third child makes her way through her senior year in college, I now have what amounts to about $160,000 in parent PLUS loans,” Sanchez, 63, told NPR. He likely won’t have them paid off (or qualify for debt forgiveness) until he’s in his 80s, “which is an extraordinary journey for me,” he said, given that he’s approaching retirement.
“I’m just hoping to see if there is some relief.”
For Sanchez and millions of other parents and caregivers, that relief could come through a loophole in federal law — a loophole that could help them access a more forgiving payment plan and ultimately shed debts that might otherwise follow them for the rest of their lives.
That is, if they know about it. Few do.
The U.S. Department of Education won’t discuss this loophole. And if a borrower calls their loan servicer and asks about it, the call center worker wi..

With AI tools becoming increasingly accessible and advanced, many teachers are worried about how to catch cheaters. Less attention, however, is paid to how teachers themselves can use AI tools to streamline lesson planning, generate classroom materials and personalize instruction. “With some of these tasks that we can use AI for, one would hope it would help alleviate some of the burnout teachers feel,” said Allison Bacon, the instructional technology coordinator at Ossining Union Free School District in New York. “We don’t need to be so perfect. [We can] use a tool that’ll pick up the things that we know how to do, but we don’t have the time.” She joked about how AI tools are like a personal assistant. “I’m looking at it as a tool to do my legwork,” said Bacon.
Bacon cautioned that the companies that create AI tools may not be attuned to student privacy laws like FERPA or COPPA, so teachers should reach out to decision makers in their school district to ensure they are following gui..

Parents, does this scenario sound familiar to you?
You’re at the grocery store and your four-year-old starts screaming because they want you to buy them candy. For a myriad of reasons — they’re crying and distressed, you’re exhausted and embarrassed — you surrender to their demands.
This is what overindulgent parenting can look like, says Lauren Silvers, a child psychologist based in Washington state who specializes in children with social and behavioral problems. It’s when you give in to your child’s whims and desires because you don’t want to see them frustrated or uncomfortable, or want to avoid conflict.
This can be harmful to a child’s development if it becomes routine, says Silvers. “There are lots of negative outcomes associated with overindulgence, anything from over-dependence on others and being unable to learn necessary life lessons.”
Research has shown that this kind of parenting is associated with children who have low self-control, social anxiety such as fear of missi..

There’s little consensus over the best way to teach children and teens about sexuality in this country and research provides scant guidance. Educational programs that directly target sexual behaviors and attitudes frequently fail to show reductions in unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted infections.
The political debate over sex ed, meanwhile, is taking place against a perplexing public health backdrop. The teen pregnancy rate has plummeted over the past 30 years, while epidemics of sexually transmitted infections among younger Americans are showing no signs of slowing. The reasons for these divergent trends are unclear.
State data, by contrast, can sometimes look deceptively stark and clear. Consider Arkansas and Massachusetts. Arkansas, which requires abstinence to be emphasized in sex ed classes, has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in the country (30 out of 1,000 females ages 15 to 19). Massachusetts requires that sex ed be culturally appropriate and unbiased, withou..