Category: Education

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,..

One of the most hotly contested teaching practices concerns a single minute of math class.
Should teachers pull out their stopwatches and administer one-page worksheets in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division? Speed drills are such a routine part of the weekly rhythms of many math classrooms that they’re often called Mad Minute Mondays. Critics say these timed drills aren’t useful and instead provoke math anxiety in many children. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics urges teachers to “avoid” timed tests. But advocates insist that these tests, which last one to five minutes, help children memorize math facts, freeing up their brains to tackle more challenging math problems.
This long-running debate captured my attention again because a group of more than a dozen education researchers, who founded an organization they call the “Science of Math,” declared that the stopwatch skeptics are wrong. The researchers built an entire webpage to set the record straight..

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
In a classroom on Chicago’s West Side one morning last November, Teresa Przybyslawski sat side by side with a soft-spoken sixth grader. She read a script off her computer screen while he peered at his own tablet.
“On your screen, you will see some addition problems,” read Przybyslawski. “I want you to do as many of them as you can in one minute.”
She glanced at the sixth grader, John. His back was taut, his face tense.
Down the hall, the boy’s classmates at Brunson Math and Science Specialty School, a high-poverty elementary school, geared up to tackle dividing fractions. But here, alongside Przybyslawski, one of the district’s new interventionists tasked with helping students who fell behind during the pandemic, John was about to work on math normally taught in first grade.
“Are you ready? Three. Two. One.”
Numbers flashed on John’s screen: “2 + 7. 5 + 10. 10 + 4.”
At the sta..

Meet Xenia, a junior at Northwestern University, who leans into math and science, runs dutifully in her spare time and tends toward introversion. Now meet her fraternal twin, Madeleine, a double major in English and Philosophy at Johns Hopkins, who prefers reading and writing over sports and as a child was dubbed the school’s mayor by her father after he noticed her making the rounds in the cafeteria during a second-grade parent/child lunch. The girls get along, their personality differences allowing each to carve out an independent identity and buffering both from excessive rivalry.
Another way these twins differ? When they were in high school, Xenia spurned all social media, the only girl in her grade, she thought, without Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Houseparty and all other social media sites on her phone. “I was never interested in it,” she told me. Madeleine, on the other hand, while not a devotee, relied on Snapchat to keep in touch with distant friends and used Inst..