Category: Education

Many major cities around the country, from New York and New Orleans to Denver and Los Angeles, have changed how children are assigned to public schools over the past 20 years and now allow families to send their children to a school outside of their neighborhood zone. Known as public school choice or open enrollment, this policy gives children in poor neighborhoods a chance at a better education. Many supporters hoped it could also be a way to desegregate schools even as residential neighborhoods remain racially divided.
However, a new study of public school choice in Charlotte, North Carolina, finds a deeply troubling consequence to this well-intended policy: increased crime.
Three university economists studied the criminal justice records of 10,000 boys who were in fifth grade between 2005 and 2008. Thousands wanted to go to highly regarded middle schools, some of which were in nearby suburbs of the large Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. Seats were allocated through a lotter..

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
Ashley Kannan, an eighth grade history teacher at Oak Park Elementary School in District 97, had long thought about piloting a Black studies course. He even created a lesson plan during the summer of 2020. Then, a conversation with a student convinced him to take the leap.
The student liked his lectures, she told him, but thought the history class that Kannan normally teaches was boring.
That inspired Kannan to run with the course that fall. Students in his Black Studies course learn about topics such as the Black church, the Great Migration — when Black Americans migrated from the South to the North for jobs and other opportunities — and Black political figures such as Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist from Mississippi.
Not long after he started to teach the class during the 2020-21 school year, Kannan said, he noticed his students were more engaged with the material.
“..

Excerpted from “Generation Sleepless” (Penguin, 2022) by Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright.
Little kids and teenagers model their behaviors (often subconsciously) after their parents, so if your phone is an appendage and your attention is continually drawn to it, this behavior pattern is more likely to be adopted by your kids. When you practice basic boundaries and good screen habits, this also rubs off on the whole family. Not only that, it signifies to your teen that your own sleep and well-being are a priority.
Parents have room for improvement in this arena: the majority of parents say they sleep with a mobile device next to their bed, and about 1 in 4 say they wake up to check their phone in the night. If you ask children about their parents’ screen behaviors, many will express disdain for the phone and say their mom or dad is always on it, and it’s hard to get their attention. Half of adolescents say their parent or caregiver is distracted by their cell phone when they’re trying..

This story was originally published by Parenting Translator. Sign up for the newsletter and follow Parenting Translator on Instagram. An audio version of this post can be heard here.
“Ms. Rachel” has become a household name for nearly every parent with a baby or toddler. Her YouTube channel, Songs for Littles – Toddler Learning Videos, has over 3 million subscribers and her videos have hundreds of millions of views. The woman behind Ms. Rachel is Rachel Griffin Accurso, a preschool teacher and mother living in New York City. Her husband is a Broadway composer who helps to produce her YouTube channel. As she explained in a recent interview on the Today show, she started the YouTube channel because her son did not speak his first word until nearly 3 years old and she could not find a television show that targeted language development to help him.
Her YouTube channel description claims that her videos “help children learn to talk, learn letters, numbers, colors, animal sounds and more..

Education researchers have been urging schools to invest their $120 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds in tutoring. What researchers have in mind is an extremely intensive type of tutoring, often called “high dosage” tutoring, which takes place daily or almost every day. It has produced remarkable results for students in almost 100 studies, but these programs are difficult for schools to launch and operate.
They involve hiring and training tutors and coming up with tailored lesson plans for each child. Outside organizations can help provide tutors and lessons, but schools still need to overhaul schedules to make time for tutoring, find physical space where tutors can meet with students, and safely allow a stream of adults to flow in and out of school buildings all day long. Tutoring programs with research evidence behind them are also expensive, at least $1,000 per student. Some exceed $4,000.
One organization has designed a different tutoring model, which gives very short ..

Years ago, when I was still coaching high school cross country, a teenage girl skipped up to me after practice with a warning: Don’t count on her to race all the time. If her nerves got too intense before races, she might have to bow out in advance. “I have anxiety!” she explained with a nervous grin.
I recalled this episode while reading psychologist and author Lisa Damour’s refreshing new book, “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents.” Damour’s voice is forceful but comforting, and she uses it here to drive home her central point: Achieving mental health does not mean a life without unhappiness, anguish, anger, worry or self-doubt. Rather, these painful emotional states are an unavoidable feature of being human, especially for young people buzzing with hormones and adjusting to operatic moods prompted by recent rewiring of their brains. To best help their developing teenagers, parents should work to build their self-esteem and th..

For De’Ana Forbes, it started with crayons, teddy bears, her baby sister and a baseboard-turned-chalkboard in Danville, Virginia.
Though today she’s a social studies teacher at Freedom High, a predominantly Black and brown public school in Woodbridge, Virginia, Forbes has been educating for as long as she can remember.
“Ever since I was 5 I felt like there was something that was in me to teach,” she says. “And not just to impart knowledge, but to nurture, to encourage, to support.”
According to Forbes, that nature is essential to navigating this month as a Black educator.
Black History Month poses a challenge to some.
The tradition–a contemporary evolution of Carter G. Woodson’s “Negro History Week”–could be seen as an opportunity to spotlight the solemn tale of Black American struggles. As such, February could lead way to a hurried, 28-day scramble to discuss all that’s happened to Black folks in America, from the transatlantic slave trade, to the Jim Crow South, to the Civil Rig..

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting 9-8-8.
The statistics are sobering. In the past year, nearly 1 in 3 teen girls reports seriously considering suicide. One in 5 teens identifying as LGBTQ+ say they attempted suicide in that time. Between 2009 and 2019, depression rates doubled for all teens. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The question is: Why now?
“Our brains, our bodies, and our society have been evolving together to shape human development for millennia… Within the last twenty years, the advent of portable technology and social media platforms is changing what took 60,000 years to evolve,” Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association (APA), told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. “We are just beginning to understand how this may impact youth development.”
Prinstein’s 22-page testimony, along with dozens of useful footnotes, offers some muc..

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
Before taking Arabic language classes at Denver’s North High School, Rachel Saghbazarian had to communicate with her grandmother in Lebanon using what she called broken English. Her father often had to serve as interpreter – and too many times, thoughts were lost in translation.
Now, a year after starting the classes taught by Mohamed Moghazy, Rachel hopes to be able to revisit conversations asking her grandmother — in Arabic this time — what it was like to relocate to Lebanon after fleeing her war-torn home of Armenia.
“I have been able to speak to my grandma a little more,” said Rachel, a 15-year-old sophomore. “She’s getting older and I’m not going to be able to talk to her forever.”
Rachel is one of about 30 students at North High School who have taken Moghazy’s Arabic language and language arts classes since they started last year. They include students like Rachel (the daug..

Students’ race and ethnicity affect their chances of earning a college degree, according to several new reports on higher education released in January and February 2023. However, the picture that emerges depends on the lens you use. College degrees are increasing among all racial and ethnic groups, but white and Asian Americans are far more likely to hold a college degree or earn one than Black, Hispanic or Native Americans.
Earning a college degree involves two steps: starting college and finishing college. Before the pandemic, white, Black and Hispanic Americans were enrolling in college at about the same rates, especially when unemployment was high and jobs were hard to find. (Asian Americans enrolled in college at much higher rates.) The bigger distinction is that once a student has started college, the likelihood of making it through the coursework and tuition payments and ultimately earning a degree varies so much by race and ethnicity.
First, let’s begin with enrollment. Th..