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Last week WAMU ran a segment on charter school closings in Washington, DC, that bothered me. Not because poorly performing (in terms of academics or finances) charter schools were closed (I firmly believe that low-performing charter schools should close), and not only because of the process by which the schools were closed (too late in the year for students to get into either the DCPS lottery for out of neighborhood schools or the lotteries of many other charters, and with little communication with the families of students attending the schools), but because of some of the language used to talk about the situation, specifically the word “placement.”

As the result of three charter schools closing and two eliminating their high school programs, nearly 750 students needed to find new schools. Several have had a great deal of difficulty in doing so. According to reporter Kavitha Cardoza, about 50% of students were without “placements” just ten days before the start of the school year. 64 of the 128 students impacted by the ...

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In this interview, New York Times best-selling author Ken Davis discusses his book, Don’t Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition, and describes the significance of rigorous history in public education.

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 ...

Kenneth C. Davis is a New York Times best-selling author who has written about a myriad of significant popular issues—from American History, to geography, to literature, to the Bible, to mythology. His books, for both adults and children, provide an accessible and entertaining guide to these topics. For this interview, we focus on the latest revised edition of his book, Don’t Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition—which is now out in hard cover from HarperCollins. He contrasts this book with what he considers boring approaches in most history textbooks, and emphasizes that Americans are highly interested in history when it’s relayed in an engaging, realistic way.

Public School Insights: Why did you decide to write this book?

Kenneth Davis: To make history as interesting and exciting as I always thought it was! The book looks at 500 years of American History, from the voyages of Columbus, right up to the year 2000. I wrote the ...

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. ...

Today Phi Delta Kappa International (PDK) and Gallup released the results of their 43^rd annual poll of the public’s attitudes towards public schools. The poll, a representative survey across all segments of the population of telephone-owning households, makes for a fascinating read.

Something I always find interesting in these polls are the discrepancies. These discrepancies appear both within the poll itself and when comparing the results to broader conversations on education. For example, last year I wrote that the poll showed “[t]he American public is not necessarily having the same conversation as policymakers when it comes to education,” since the poll found that the public did not always agree with the decisions policymakers were making regarding our public schools.

This year, one could argue that the American public is not having the same conversation as the media when it comes to education. 71% of respondents have trust and confidence in the men and women teaching in America’s public schools – and 69% gave the teachers in their communities a grade of A or B. Yet 68% of respondents hear more bad stories than good about teachers in ...

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the “Big Ideas Retreat” hosted by the Knowledge Alliance at the Aspen Institute conference center in Wye, Maryland.  The theme for this year’s retreat was Opportunities in the New Normal – Leveraging Knowledge to Move Forward.  In addition to their members, Jim Kohlmoss and his staff at the Knowledge Alliance assembled an exciting group of education thought-leaders, researchers, and practitioners.  In addition to the opportunity to interact with such an interesting and knowledgeable group of professionals, the program also showcased successful educators sharing their experience providing rich educational environments in a time of shrinking resources.  A sampling of what I heard that particularly resonated. ...

A recent Salon article by Natasha Lennard discusses the central role of women’s issues in the current Wisconsin political saga, including this week’s recall elections.  For six months, since Governor Scott Walker sought to strip public workers of collective bargaining rights—among other measures curbing public worker benefits and reducing the state’s expenditures, workers and their advocates have voiced vehement protest, culminating in the recall elections for some of the representatives who supported Walker’s policies. Women’s rights have been central to the debate over teachers’ unions in Wisconsin since the beginning, since Walker targeted teachers and nurses—professions in which the vast majority of workers are women. He exempted the male-dominated (and Republican-leaning) fields of firefighters and police. It’s unclear whether Walker was consciously trying to target women, but, regardless, that is the effect of his policies. ...

Social media in education is a touchy issue, for some good reasons. In utilizing social media, schools, educators and students take certain risks. Consider the consequences when bullying on sites like Facebook creates a distraction at school – or is conducted on school-owned equipment. And think about the (extremely rare) cases in which a social media site contributes to an inappropriate relationship between a teacher and a student (the state of Missouri is so concerned about this potential it has enacted a law that says contact between these parties must be in the public, not private, sphere – in other words, “teachers can set up public Facebook pages or Twitter accounts but can’t reach out to their students as friends or followers, or vice versa”).

There are educational consequences, too. For example, recent research suggests that middle school, high school and college students who are active on Facebook get lower grades, display more narcissistic tendencies, and are more prone to anxiety and depression than students that aren’t.

So why would we promote the use of social media in education?

Last week I attended the first #140edu event, a conference that allowed stakeholders from students to teachers to company owners share their thoughts on “The State of Education NOW” – specifically, the effects of the real-time web on education. And I heard a number of great reasons why social media should be incorporated into a school culture.

Conference co-host Chris Lehmann (@chrislehmann, for those of you on Twitter), principal of Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy, pointed out that social media gives students the power to be “in and of their world,” – for example, the ability to ...

For some time I’ve been pondering how those of us who work to strengthen public K-12 education could spend less energy attacking each other (i.e. the “reformers” vs the “establishment”) and more time on problem-solving in a way that would help us serve all students regardless of economic/social/family situation to find success in a complex world.  Of course one thing that would be helpful is if we could collectively acknowledge that a student’s out-of-school situation DOES have a profound impact on school performance—not to use that acknowledgement as an excuse, but rather to factor it into the efforts we design to ensure school success.  ...