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.
Safe Great Places
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 ...
Have you checked out our collection of public school success stories lately?
Since December 2007, we at the Learning First Alliance have posted more than 150 stories about what is working in our public schools. Some come from our member and partner organizations. Others have been submitted by educators, parents and other community members proud of what is going on in their local public school.
Criteria for inclusion are relatively simple: A story must show that a public school or district (or even state) recognized a challenge, addressed it, and had some results. Often those results come in the form of standardized test scores, reduced dropout rates or increased graduation rates. Other times they recognize positive changes to student behavior, classroom grades, student health, or parental engagement.
In the spirit of the “best of” lists that tend to circulate this time of year, here are the top five of these stories from 2011*, as determined by you, our audience (as indicated by our trusty Google Analytics tracking system). Enjoy!
5. Cleveland Program to Close Achievement Gap Shows Proof of Success
A Cleveland Metropolitan School District program provides personal attention and assistance to low-achieving black eighth grade males who are deemed most likely to drop out of school.
4. Alabama’s Graduation Coaches
Thanks in part to an initiative showing the success of school-level “graduation coaches," Alabama is ...
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 ...
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. ...
Fall’s arrival heralds the start of school and classroom teachers are excited to welcome back their students for another year of learning. At the same time, they are faced with the reality that students seem to know less than they did last spring. On average, all students lose ground and begin the year a month behind where they performed in the spring. One study suggests that two-thirds of the achievement gap for low-income students entering ninth grade can be attributed to summer learning loss. The gap is particularly pronounced in reading, where low-income students lose ground, as opposed to high-income students who maintain or gain ground.
The achievement gap is a widely recognized reality in American public education. It is troubling, persistent, and continues to elude remedy. When a potential solution arises, it is difficult to maintain realistic expectations, and that is exactly what must be done when it comes to summer learning programs. We can take heart that evidence from studies to evaluations shows the promise of such programs in reducing the achievement gap that separates low-income and minority youth from their more privileged peers. ...
Education news coming out of Texas lately seems to depict a large-scale comedy of errors. There are misplaced funding priorities (here, here and here) and hard-fought battles to include mainstream science curriculum. Texas is the lone (star) state to pull out of a significant education council that collaborates on state-directed (optional) common standards, and it does not ascribe to the trend to more specifically delineate student racial demographic information for data and research purposes. But at least the most recent debacle may provide a silver(ado) lining: according to Edweek, in explaining the need for the new Supportive School Discipline Initiative, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the numbers from a recent study finding that 60 percent of Texas school children are suspended or expelled between 7th grade and graduation “are a kind of wake up call,” and that “it’s obvious we can do better.”
In short, the initiative is a joint undertaking by the Departments of Justice and Education, and it targets curbing school discipline policies that push students into ...
The Washington Post recently featured an article by Donna St. George that discusses the trend to reevaluate zero tolerance approaches in school discipline. Zero-tolerance policies enacting severe punishments for offenses related to weapons, drugs, and behavioral issues caught on among schools in the early 1990s—aided by federal legislation through the Gun-Free Schools Act that requires students who bring guns to school be expelled, and intensified after the school shooting at Columbine High School. The article summarizes that “over the years, ‘zero-tolerance’ has described discipline policies that impose automatic consequences for offenses, regardless of context. The term also has come to refer to severe punishments for relatively minor infractions.”
Though this approach is still commonly implemented, there is evidence that it can be ineffectual, misapplied, and even counter-productive, leading a growing number of educators and elected officials to scale back on implementation. A University of Virginia education professor (Dewey Cornell) interviewed for the article claims that suspension and expulsion—common punishments in zero-tolerance policies—do not improve student behavior or ...
Recently, NPR did a special series on violence among youth in Chicago. Schools and students all over the country—especially in urban areas—deal with the everyday-threat of violence. Clearly, this omnipresent factor can take a huge toll on public schools.
Mayor-elect of Rahm Emanuel says the violence in the city is unacceptable, and he has promised to hire a thousand new police officers as part of his crime policy. One article quotes him stating, "My goal for the four years, and the measurement of my progress, will be whether that child can be thinking of their studies, and not their safety."
Already the city—relying on schools and police—is implementing intensive efforts to try to combat what some consider an epidemic of youth violence in Chicago—efforts that may provide good models for other cities and school districts facing these problems. ...
Today, President Obama, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services are hosting a Conference on Bullying Prevention. The conference will have student, parent, and teacher attendees, and it will discuss bullying in communities across the country.
Bullying is clearly a major problem in many schools and districts, and LFA members have a sizable collection of helpful materials explaining various issues pertinent to bullying, providing instruction on identifying and dealing with bullying, and considering other issues like bully legislation and bullying implications on school violence.
Below is a sample of some of these materials:
For an overview on bullying:
- National Education Association’s (NEA) Bully Free: It Starts With Me Campaign (with links to articles and tips)
- National Parent Teacher Association's (PTA) Connect for Respect initiative (with links to articles and tips)
- American Association of School Administrators' (AASA) Special Edition on Bullying at School and Online initiative (with
...
As National School Counseling Week draws to a close, it seems fitting to reflect on the state of the profession in our nation.
School counselors are highly trained individuals who help students improve their academic achievement, their personal and social development and their career planning. Their services help students resolve emotional and behavioral issues, often improving the climate of a school. And they help students develop a clearer focus or sense of direction, which can improve student achievement. Research over the past several decades shows the positive impact of school counselors.
But for all the evidence, the work of school counselors can be underappreciated and is rarely acknowledged in discussions of school improvement. And in times of tough budgets, it is often the school counselor (or other support staff) whose role is cut.
As Valerie Strauss pointed out back in January, school counselors in America are expected to help an extremely large number of students. It is recommended that there be one school counselor for every 250 students. In 2008, nationwide there was one counselor for every 457 students – and that was before school budgets were slashed. In California there were 814 students per counselor. In Arizona, Minnesota and Utah there were more than 700 students per ...
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!
