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Updated 1/31/12

In the State of the Union, President Obama made several references to education, reiterating its importance to his administration and to a healthy economy. 

While k-12 education was not a primary focus of the speech, he did touch directly on a few major education issues. He pointed out that nearly all states have raised their academic standards in recent years. He also made one very specific policy proposal: He called on all states to keep students in school until they either graduate from high school or turn 18.

In addition, the President emphasized the importance of good teachers. As he put it:

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.

What did the education community have to say about this speech?

Gayle Manchin, president of the National Association of State Boards of Education, was pleased that ...

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Elementary school principals and teachers often lack resources to effectively combat instances of bullying that disrupt the learning environment. A recent report provides resources to help educators maintain a supportive atmosphere.

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 ...

The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library. Materials are added at the rate of 10,000 per day and the Copyright Office has a card catalogue with more than45 million card entries. It contains 838 miles of bookshelves and holds a collection of more than 147 million items. The Library is open to the public and its resources are available on-site in Washington D.C to anyone older than 16 with government issued identification. The American Memory Project – an effort to digitalize a large portion of the Library’s collection – has more than  9 million items available electronically, for free, to anyone with access to the internet. ...

Earlier today a press release for a study in the January 2012 issue of Sociology of Education caught my eye: Study Suggests Junk Food in Schools Doesn’t Cause Weight Gain Among Children.

According to the press release (I’m not a subscriber of the journal, so I didn’t have access to the full text of the study), “While the percentage of obese children in the United States tripled between the early 1970s and the late 2000s, a new study suggests that—at least for middle school students—weight gain has nothing to do with the candy, soda, chips, and other junk food they can purchase at school.”

To me, this makes a lot of sense. As one of the study’s authors, Pennsylvania State University Professor Jennifer Van Hook, points out, “Schools only represent a small portion of children’s food environment.”

But something in the release disturbed me: Van Hook’s comments that, in light of the focus in the media on the money that ...

1/19/12 Update: NEA Today has the latest on the situation in Chester Upland.

Educators in Pennsylvania’s Chester Upland School District were forced to make that very difficult decision recently, when the district announced that without an infusion of new cash from the state, it would not be able to make payroll starting January 18.

But members of the Chester Upland Education Association and the Chester Upland Education Support Personnel Association are doing all they can to keep schools running as long as possible. These educators and education support personnel have passed a resolution vowing to stay on the job for as long as they are individually able, even if the district fails to pay them in the near future.

Why? Commitment to students. As elementary school teacher Sara Feguson said in The Philadelphia Inquirer, ...

Making international comparisons about education systems was all the rage in 2011. Rhetoric suggested that America’s education system is performing so poorly that we as a nation have lost our competitive edge, and that the world’s emerging economies are out-educating us, which will result in the further decline of our nation.

I’m not sure if that rhetoric will stop in 2012, but it is time we move beyond it. How can we do that?

First off, in talking about our education system, we need to acknowledge that, as Dan Domenech (executive director of the American Association of School Administrators and chair of the Learning First Alliance Board of Directors) points out, it is actually the best that it has ever been. Graduation rates, college attendance rates and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are at their highest levels ever. Domenech also points out that when educators and education leaders travel internationally, they find that “overseas colleagues refer to our school system as the gold standard” and “parents in every corner of the world want to send their children to American schools.” ...

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An "Opportunity Zone," in the Vancouver Public Schools District ensured a strategic focus on family and community engagement, high quality instruction and flexible learning environments. Outcomes indicate students are reaping the results.

Getting families engaged in their children's education, using social media, turning around struggling schools, the morale of our nation's premiere teachers, and progress (or lack thereof) in efforts to improve the nation's major federal education legislation...This year, our most-viewed posts covered these topics, and much more. Here are our ten most-read posts of 2011 (as indicated by our trusty Google Analytics tracking system). Enjoy!

10. New Models for Family Engagement

9. Seeing the Future for Public Education

8. The Importance of Trust and Morale in School Turnarounds ...

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 ...