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If you’re hungry, chances are that you won’t be focused on your meeting, paying attention to a seminar or truly engaged in anything you’re trying to do. The same happens for children in school. Being hungry affects their capacity to focus in the classroom (as noted by, for example, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress).

There are numerous reasons students may come to school hungry: Tight family budgets, limited morning time to prepare a nutritious meal, or a child being physically incapable of eating immediately after waking up. Research shows that school breakfast programs can address these circumstances. And through innovative programs such as Breakfast in the Classroom, schools and districts are ensuring that no child slips through the crack and has to spend the school day hungry. ...

By Nora L. Howley, Manager of Programs, NEA Health Information Network

We’ve all heard it said, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” But too many children in the United States are starting school each day without breakfast.  As NEA President Dennis Van Roekel pointed out last week on the Huffington Post: “If we're honest with ourselves, the faces of hunger are everywhere -- in every area, every city and every demographic. The 2012 edition of the 'Kids Count' report, one of the most widely quoted surveys on the condition of children in the U.S., indicates that child poverty is mounting. This is not just an issue of an extra donut or bagel. This is chronic hunger affecting millions of children every day, and the consequences are staggering.” Hungry children cannot learn, they cannot concentrate, and they certainly can’t achieve at the levels they would otherwise.

Educators everywhere know this problem all too well. A new poll from Share Our Strength found that three out of five educators report students coming to school hungry and the majority of those say that the problem is getting worse. 

Expanding participation in school breakfast is one of the most important and ...

Change is hard – something that those in the education community may know better than most. Whether it is changing a school culture, a child’s life prospects, policymakers’ thoughts on accountability, or voters’ minds on a bond referendum, educators are constantly on the lookout for evidence that they are succeeding as change agents. Sometimes that evidence seems scarce, particularly at a national level, as policymakers push education in ways we don’t always like and rhetoric indicates that we are to blame for a great number of society’s problems.

So as I read through the results of the 44^th annual Phi Delta Kappa (PDK)/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, I was on the lookout for evidence that we are succeeding in changing the conversation around public schools in this nation. And I was pleased to see that (while not always in the direction I personally would advocate) American’s views on public education are evolving.

The Biggest Problem Facing Schools

The first question asked on the poll each year is an open-ended one: What do you think are the biggest problems that the public schools of your community must ...

As teachers prepare lessons and materials for the fast-approaching 2013 school year, it is an opportune time to highlight the value of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) as a tool for the nation’s educators. Learning Forward explains PLCs as:  “Learning communities [consisting of education professionals that] convene regularly and frequently during the workday to engage in collaborative professional learning to strengthen their practice and increase student results.” PLCs are not a new phenomenon, but they are gaining increased attention as the national conversation around education focuses on improving teacher quality through effective professional development. ...

A couple months ago, I wrote about a new assessment designed to address one of the ever-present challenges in teacher preparation: How do you ensure that those entering the classroom can teach effectively starting their first day as the teacher of record?

Now called the edTPA (formerly the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA)), the assessment was developed by Stanford University in collaboration with teachers and teacher educators (higher education involvement was coordinated by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education) to set a new standard for determining teacher readiness. It requires teacher candidates demonstrate the skills necessary to meet the daily challenges of classroom teaching, including but not limited to:

• Planning around student learning standards
• Designing instruction for students based on their specific needs
• Teaching a series of lessons and adapting them to
  ...

This weekend I started reading David McCullough’s most recent book, The Greater Journey, which chronicles the experiences of some of the United States’ most accomplished writers and thinkers on their visits to Paris in the early part of the nineteenth century.  I’m still at the very beginning of what promises to be a fascinating book; however, I’m enjoying the description of the initial culture shock these prominent Americans had when they arrived in Paris and learned that most of the French knew very little about the United States and didn’t even speak English!  

McCullough points out that the French people’s initial introduction to the United States and its citizens came in 1835 when Baron Alexis de Tocqueville published his first edition of Democracy in America on his return from an extended stay in the US.  In his publication, de Tocqueville described the nature of American politics; the evils of slavery; and American’s love of money.  But the passage that has stuck with me is de Tocqueville’s assertion that from the beginning “the originality of American civilization was most clearly apparent in the provisions made for public education.”

This profound observation by de Tocqueville almost two hundred years ago frames the current debate on resource allocation and the future of both public schooling and our democratic way of life in a fresh context.  While the United States once again garnered the most ...

President Obama recently established an education initiative for African American students. The goal: Provide them greater access “to a complete and competitive education from the time they're born through the time they get a career.”

There is little doubt that the timing of such an announcement coincides with November’s election,  yet to suggest that such an initiative is merely politically symbolic is a defeatist assessment. A renewed focus on the achievement gap between black and white students, indeed between white students and many minority groups, is an opportunity for the education community to push for greater investment in the work they’ve been doing for years to produce better outcomes for students of color. ...

Last week The New Teacher Project (TNTP) released a report entitled The Irreplaceables-Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools which continues the theme espoused in their previous report The Widget Effect, that public school districts treat all teachers the same and hold them to low expectations, particularly in urban districts, with disastrous results for students.  To be clear, neither I nor any of my colleagues in the Learning First Alliance (LFA) believe that low expectations for teacher performance should be tolerated nor do we believe that current practices and policies should be perpetuated if they contribute to supporting mediocrity in the classroom.  However, we do believe that most teachers who are appropriately supported by strong instructional leadership and collaborative school culture can improve their practice in a way that benefits the students they serve. 

Without digging into the data used to identify those teachers labeled “irreplaceable” and those labeled “struggling” in the report or the variables that exist within the districts and schools surveyed, I find the remedies to retaining the “irreplaceables” less than new or eye-opening.  The report’s findings essentially said that teachers whose students achieved well (i.e. irreplaceables) in well managed schools stayed in their jobs longer….big surprise.  The key supports provided by ...

Editor’s Note: Our guest blogger today is Tim Magner, Executive Director of the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (P21).

Despite many education experts, business leaders, and higher education professionals joining the bandwagon to implement and highlight 21^st century skills and helping define the now 10-year old 21^st century skills movement, there’s been an important missing element: Research in the arena of 21^st century skills to date has been scarce. With the release of the National Research Council's report Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century, we now have additional confirmation to support both the abundant opinion research and anecdotal evidence we have used over the years to advocate the importance and value of an education that includes both knowledge and skills. 

P21 commends the National Research Council (NRC) and the sponsors of the report for producing the most comprehensive research-based articulation of the case for 21st Century skills to date. The caliber and breadth of the research community brought together on this effort speaks to not only its importance in the future of our education system, but to the impact these findings will have across the K-12 education spectrum.  This report represents a historic validation of what the 21^st century skills education community has worked hard to ...

Editor's Note: This post first appeared on the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills’ blog in July 2012. Reposted with permission.

As both a former classroom teacher and long-time nonprofit executive, I'm well aware of the importance of creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication (the Four C's) to success in both the classroom and the workplace. So I've been a strong supporter of imbedding the acquisition of those skills into formal education even before the inception of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) and the creation of the impressive tools that have resulted from the P21 work. Also, I've been impressed with the thoughtful (and collaborative) work that's gone into the creation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for mathematics and English language arts that pull together the wisdom of practitioners and researchers in the education field to establish goals and benchmarks for what students should know and be able to do in order to be successful in the 21st century world of work and citizenship. And, all sixteen member organizations in the Learning First Alliance share that commitment to providing rigor and relevance to all of the students we serve.

With that in mind, I've been mystified by some of the resistance to implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which to date have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia, based on two complaints: (1) that the CCSS are a "top down" over reach of the Federal government and (2) that the adoption of these standards and the common assessments that are being developed to measure student progress will lead teachers to "teach to the test", thus ...