A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
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A new report released by the Harvard School of Public Health assesses the educational and economic benefits of the School Breakfast Program. This work is especially timely as we face a perfect storm of rising hunger and declining budgets.
Hunger has clear costs to education attainment. Hungry students miss school more often. Even when they are in school, their cognitive abilities slacken. Not surprisingly, students who receive breakfast do better academically, enjoy better health and have fewer discipline problems than their peers who go without.
The Harvard report also lays out the economic costs of student hunger: "When schools do not provide breakfast to children, the loss of return on educational investment becomes a hidden tax paid by the local district and community." By eradicating student hunger, the authors estimate, the nation could increase its return on educational investment by billions every year.
Stimulus, indeed. ...
Walter Dean Myers understands second chances. A high school dropout by age 17, he enlisted in the army and worked odd jobs as a young adult. It was his lifelong relationship with books that put him on a path to becoming one of the nation's most celebrated young adult authors. Five Coretta Scott King Awards and two Newbery Honors later, Myers is sharing the lesson of second chances with a new generation of at-risk youth.
Last week, Myers spoke with us about the central themes of his new novel, Dope Sick: personal responsibility and redemption. The novel tells the story of a young man facing the consequences of a drug deal gone wrong who has an opportunity to review and revise his life choices. This story line reflects a belief Myers avowed throughout our interview: We must empower teens to take greater control of their lives.
Dope Sick has become the centerpiece of an effort to do just that. Myers is collaborating with AdLit.org and the NEA on the Second Chance Initiative, which aims to help youth make better choices. As part of this initiative, the novel will be available for free on HarperCollins' website from February 10th through 24th. The initiative also offers Dope Sick reading guides and writing activities along with resources on preventing high school dropout, teen pregnancy and substance abuse.
Underlying this effort is Myers' long-standing faith that reading can offer hope to teens who need it most.
Listen to highlights from our interview with Walter Dean Myers here (16 minutes), or read a transcript below:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: You're releasing your new novel, Dope Sick, very soon. What's the novel about?
MYERS: It's about a young man who has reached a point of crisis in his life. He goes into a building, running from the police, and he meets another young man his own age. The new young man is a somewhat fantastic creature who can call up ...
About this time each year, public schools face a "December dilemma": What to do about the religious content of the holidays? In a new interview, First Amendment scholar Charles Haynes offers some guidance on how public schools and school districts can avoid common pitfalls.
Of course, public schools should not turn their holiday assemblies into the kinds of devotional events one would expect to find in a church. Such assemblies violate the First Amendment. Nor should public schools banish all mention of religion. Attempts to create anodyne, content-free holiday events often anger religious parents and create more problems than they solve.
Instead, Haynes argues, public schools should use their holiday assemblies as opportunities to teach students about a variety of religious holidays. Such assemblies can help schools fulfill their mission to educate students about the diverse religions and cultures represented in their communities and the nation as a whole. Haynes is careful to point out that school districts can avoid all manner of heartache if they fully engage their communities in finding solutions to the December dilemma.
According to Haynes, the stakes of controversies over holiday assemblies are higher than many realize: "These kinds of controversies are really about...what kind of country we are going to be.... It's extremely important that public schools take the lead in helping us understand one another so we can live together as citizens in one country.
Download the entire interview here or listen to five minutes of interview highlights:
...
The Great Expectations School, Dan Brown's harrowing and touching memoir of his first year teaching at an elementary school in the Bronx, has won high praise from heavy hitters in education, including Susan Fuhrman, Randi Weingarten, Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch.
Dan recently took the time to speak with me about the lessons of his experience teaching low-income children who could be by turns loving, enraged, vulnerable, brazen, curious and deeply disaffected. He shared his thoughts on the support new teachers need to function in this environment, specific strategies for serving children in poverty, and policy implications of day-to-day challenges in urban schools.
Hear five minutes of highlights from Dan's account of his first year:
Or, listen to about four and a half minutes of highlights from his discussion of education policy:
...
A growing chorus of voices is calling for federal education policies that support, rather than seek to prescribe, good practice. Groups like the Forum for Education and Democracy, the National Education Association and the "Broader, Bolder Approach" Coalition have published manifestos on the federal role in
education. We at the Learning First Alliance joined that chorus on Monday, when we published our own statement on the federal role.
A common thread in these manifestos is that schools generally do their best work if given the capacity to succeed. Yesterday, I came across two vivid examples of this point. ...
Today, the Learning First Alliance (LFA), which sponsors Public School Insights, released a statement calling for a new federal role in supporting success for all American public school children. Transforming the Federal Role in America's Public Schools offers a framework to help a new president, administration, and Congress align federal policies with the needs of America's more than 50 million public school students.
The statement emphasizes support for students in need, as well as more effective and transparent accountability among key players in the system. The principles also call for greater collaboration among the federal government, states and districts. ...
Every couple of weeks, we give our readers an update on new stories we've published about public schools and school districts that are succeeding against tough odds. Here's our most recent batch:
- A Middle School Aims for a Blue Ribbon in Alabama's Black Belt, 10/3/2008
- An Elementary School is Taking Flight in Queens, 9/25/2008
- Partnership of Expertise and Knowledge is Empowering Teachers in a Virginia School District, 9/17/2008
- A Full-Service Elementary School is healing students and communities in New York, 9/9/2008 ...
A number of blogs have recently picked up the trailer for Whatever it Takes, a documentary about a high-performing urban school in the Bronx. If the 10-minute trailer is any indication, the film will be powerful and inspiring. Still, like many fictional or documentary films that celebrate a set of heroic students and educators working against all odds, the film raises some important questions.
For one, we should be careful not to absolve entire systems--school systems, communities, voters and policymakers--of their shared responsibility towards the nation's most vulnerable children. After all, it takes systemic solutions--advanced through collaboration among leaders, front-line educators, communities and, yes, policymakers--to spread the wealth beyond disconnected islands of excellence. (Indeed, the Learning First Alliance report Beyond Islands of Excellence focuses on lessons on systemic improvement drawn from five successful districts.) ...
Child advocates have worried in recent years that recess has been disappearing from public school calendars as schools focus more heavily on academics--primarily math and reading. Is this concern warranted? According to the National School Boards Association's Center for Public Education, the answer is yes and no.
In its recent analysis of research on the fate of recess, the Center reaches the following conclusion: "To borrow from Mark Twain, reports of recess's death seem to have been grossly exaggerated.... Even so, the pressure on schools to find more instructional time is real, and it seems to be leading many districts to shave minutes from the recess time they provide. In addition, children who attend high-poverty, high-minority, or urban schools are far more likely than their peers in other locations to get no recess at all-a definite 'recess gap' that commands our attention." ...
In case you hadn't noticed at first glance, the soberly-dressed person at right is Richard Simmons. (The hair is admittedly a giveaway.) He donned the suit and the earnest expression yesterday to testify before the House Education and Labor Committee about the need to increase time for physical education in public schools.
According to the Washington Post, the affair was less formal than the photograph suggests: The irrepressible Simmons reportedly kissed onlookers, photographers and even Congressmen as he entered the hearing room, and he lent the hearing the atmosphere of "a support group" where lawmakers traded stories of weight loss. ...
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