LFA's Education Week blog, Transforming Learning, will explore how to transform public education to support student achievement for lifelong success in the global community.
Healthy Kids
Blog Entries
On January 14 and 15, "CNN Presents" aired coverage of Dr. Sanjay Gupta's visit to Southern Middle School in Reading, Pennsylvania. The episode looked at districts in several states, but Reading stood out as a district in dire straits. The video footage from Reading showed mold and mildew, leaking buildings, and rain pouring into a classroom.
The poor indoor environmental quality of this school and many more around the country has a devastating impact on the health and performance of the student and staff who study and work in these buildings every day. Poor indoor environmental quality is linked to asthma, respiratory illness, headaches, and other short and long term health problems. Asthma alone is one of the leading causes of absenteeism in the United States, causing many children to miss school or be tardy each day.
While schools in all communities are in need of some repair, as with many concerns in public education, it is students who live in low-income and minority communities who often suffer the most from ...
With the beginning of a new year, many of us think about exchanging our old bad habits for new good ones. Often, New Year’s resolutions focus on changing how we eat, how much sleep we get, or how active we want to be. In preparation for getting a great start in 2012, the NEA Health Information Network offers its list of the ten top good habits (in no particular order) that schools can adopt to help students and staff be healthier.
- Offer healthier food in school meal programs and from other sources that sell food in the schools. With the twin challenges of hunger and obesity, the types of food served in schools becomes more important than ever. Students need access to healthy food choices so they can make them.
- Expand school breakfast participation. Nationally, only a fraction of the students who participate in free and reduced lunch programs also participate in breakfast. Research shows that kids who eat breakfast function better throughout the day.
- Provide more physical activity before, during, and after school. Kids should get 60 minutes of vigorous physical activity each day, but very few do. Schools can help children be healthier by adding activity to instructional programs, creating exercise breaks, offering active recess programs, and ...
Editor’s Note: This post is from our partners at the NEA Health Information Network (NEA HIN). Each month, we feature a new column on a topic related to school health. Through this effort, we hope to inform the public of important health issues that impact schools and offer educators and parents resources to address them.
Today's post was authored by Édeanna M. Chebbi, Hygiene and Disease Prevention Program Coordinator for the NEA Health Information Network.
Fever. Stuffy head. Sneezing. Runny nose. Sore throat. Does any of this sound familiar? Oh yes, it’s that time of year again! Flu season is just around the corner, and that means the best time to prepare and prevent illness is now!
The flu (influenza) is one of the most commonly spread infectious diseases in the United States. It is responsible for an average of 5 missed work days a year. Flu can impact children and adults alike. And because the severity of illness from the flu depends on each person’s level of immunity, you may be one of the 200,000 Americans who are hospitalized each year from flu related complications.
But there’s good news! The flu is preventable. The number one means of preventing a flu infection is through vaccination. Each year the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and ...
Editor’s Note: Today's post is from our partners at the NEA Health Information Network (NEA HIN). Each month, we feature a new column on a topic related to school health. Through this effort, we hope to inform the public of important health issues that impact schools and offer educators and parents resources to address them.
This post was authored by Jamila Boddie, bNetS@vvy Program Coordinator at the NEA HIN.
Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, Skype and Wordpress. These are terms that have become synonymous around schools, workplaces, homes and even your local supermarket. In a digital world, technology has created new ways for students to learn, teachers to teach, and information to be shared, all at the click of a mouse. However, with these new innovations comes a new challenge for educators and guardians to learn how to keep kids safe online.
Since its inception, bNetS@vvy has been helping tweens better understand the risks and benefits associated with the Internet and educating guardians and educators regarding the power of Internet use. Now bNetS@vvy’s is proud to announce their new and ...
Editor’s Note: Today's post is from our partners at the NEA Health Information Network (NEA HIN). Each month, we feature a new column on a topic related to school health. Through this effort, we hope to inform the public of important health issues that impact schools and offer educators and parents resources to address them.
This post was authored by Lisa L. Sharma, Senior Program Coordinator at the NEA HIN. For additional information about this or other school health issues, contact her at lsharma@nea.org.
Did you know that the simple act of eating school breakfast can play a significant role in shaping students’ academic success?
The research is clear: eating breakfast at school helps children perform better. Studies of school breakfast programs have found that students who eat breakfast at school show improved academic achievement – especially in vocabulary, math and standardized tests – have better attendance records, are less likely to be tardy and have fewer behavioral and psychological problems. What is more, children who regularly eat breakfast are better nourished and are less likely to be overweight or obese.
However, even with the numerous benefits of school breakfast, less than half of children eligible for free or reduced price meals are participating in the School Breakfast Program. Why is this? The most common reasons schools cite for ...
In 2001, The Learning First Alliance wrote a report titled “Every Child Learning: Safe and Supportive Schools – A Summary,” which advocated for systemic approaches to supporting positive behavior in our nation’s schools. The Alliance argued for school-wide approaches to improving school climate, safety and discipline: “In a safe and supportive learning community, civility, order, and decorum are the norms and antisocial behaviors such as bullying and taunting are clearly unacceptable.” Ten years later, schools across the nation continually contend with the harsh and terrifying realities of bullying and the sad reality is that we still have a long way to go when it comes to ensuring a safe and supportive environment for our nation’s children. Fortunately, recent attention to the issue suggests that we are all beginning to take important steps in the right direction. ...
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (September 18, 2011), featured a cover story entitled “The Character Test”, suggesting that our kids’ success, and happiness, may depend less on perfect performance than on learning how to deal with failure. The two schools profiled were Riverdale, one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools, and KIPP Infinity Middle School, a member of the KIPP network of public charter schools in New York City. The common factor in each of these schools is a headmaster or charter school superintendent whose leadership is focused on providing an educational experience for the students he serves that encompasses more than academic rigor and achievement. Their strategies are based on the work of Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose scholarly publication, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, documents 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The importance of these strengths does not come from their relationship to any system of ethics or moral laws but from their practical benefit: cultivating these strengths represent a reliable path to “the good life,” a life that is not just happy but also meaningful and fulfilling. ...
...
On the one side of the current fight stands the “no excuses” crew, personified by Michelle Rhee, the broom-wielding ex-superintendent of the Washington D.C. schools. To them, and to the producers of “Waiting for Superman,” retrograde unions and bloated bureaucracies are biggest impediments to reform. Turn the schools over to the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school network, make every teacher as well-pedigreed as those recruited by Teach for America and our education problems will be solved. Diane Ravitch was once a dues-paying member of this group. She switched sides—detailed in her recent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System—and since has been on the warpath, staunchly defending the contributions of teachers unions and the quality of public school teachers. From the outset this fight has been nasty, and with the recent publication of Steven Brill’s Class Warfare it has turned downright vicious. Brill makes a big
Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is David L. Kirp, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future (2011).
Schools are just beginning to open their doors, but the education food fights are already underway. I’m not thinking about kids in the cafeteria but adults wielding books and blogs. Amid this tomfoolery among the grownups the critical needs of children are going ignored.
On the one side of the current fight stands the “no excuses” crew, personified by Michelle Rhee, the broom-wielding ex-superintendent of the Washington D.C. schools. To them, and to the producers of “Waiting for Superman,” retrograde unions and bloated bureaucracies are biggest impediments to reform. Turn the schools over to the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school network, make every teacher as well-pedigreed as those recruited by Teach for America and our education problems will be solved. Diane Ravitch was once a dues-paying member of this group. She switched sides—detailed in her recent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System—and since has been on the warpath, staunchly defending the contributions of teachers unions and the quality of public school teachers. From the outset this fight has been nasty, and with the recent publication of Steven Brill’s Class Warfare it has turned downright vicious. Brill makes a big 
deal of the fact that Ravitch is earning a bundle by (shock, shock!) being handsomely paid to give speeches to organizations that share her beliefs; Ravitch, saying that Brill has got his facts wrong, is threatening a defamation suit. Oy!
What gets lost amid all this “he said, she said” squabbling are the needs of kids. Little attention is getting paid to what’s important, not only to
Editor’s Note: August marks the start of a new partnership between the Learning First Alliance and the NEA Health Information Network. Each month, we will feature a new column on a topic related to school health. Through this effort, we hope to inform the public of important health issues that impact schools and offer educators and parents resources to address them.
Today's post was authored by Édeanna M. Chebbi, Hygiene and Disease Prevention Program Coordinator for the NEA Health Information Network.
For many students the back to school bustle includes a review of vaccine requirements. Immunizations are an important and necessary item on the school preparation check list and school entry requirements ensure that students remain up-to-date. But what about the grown-ups?
Students and staff who receive the recommended vaccinations for their age not only protect themselves from deadly diseases, they also protect the unimmunized students and adults around them. The larger the number of those vaccinated, the greater the protection for the entire community.
Adults working in schools may not be required to maintain recommended adult vaccines and those who are in need of booster vaccines leave the remainder of ...
Lately there have been unsettling reports about increases in children living in poverty in the U.S. For one, a recent article out of Boston features an emergency room survey that found doctors in the city are seeing more hungry and underweight young children in the emergency room than any time in more than a decade. The survey revealed a sharp increase in the percentage of families with children who reported not having enough food each month (going from 18% in 2007 to 28% in 2010), and a 58% increase in the number of severely underweight babies under the age of one. An expert in the article points out that this level of malnourishment “is similar to what is more typically seen in developing countries.” The article relays that pediatricians in other cities like Baltimore, Little Rock, and Minneapolis are also reporting increases in malnourished children. ...
SIGN UP
Sign up for our e-newsletter on public school success.
A VISION FOR GREAT SCHOOLS
On this website, educators, parents and policymakers from coast to coast are sharing what's already working in public schools--and sparking a national conversation about how to make it work for children in every school. Join the conversation!
