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Author Archives: schooldog
People Power and the Rebound of Low Income Kids
Hands on school experience has joined with neuroscience and social science to prescribe quality relationships in the school lives of struggling low income students. Continue reading
Posted in At Risk Students, School Reform
Tagged behavior problems suspension attendance, executive brain development, human relationships wayward kids, low income child frontal cortex, low income child frontal lobe, plasticity brain, quality relationships low income students, students belonging agency competence, support stressed parents
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History Lessons and Poor White Kids
This voyage into the world of the white underclass begins with a challenge to American myth. The colonies did not simply, as the school books tell, embrace the new European immigrants all on equal terms. Continue reading
Charters Revisited: It’s a Broad Spectrum Out There or, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Charter horror stories in Newark and Detroit mask a Stanford CREDO report that finds charters outperforming traditional public schools in many areas of the country. That same CREDO report however is critiqued as statistically flawed; in truth charters may benefit kids of better organized low income families, but their selection processes leave the more intractable of the poor languishing in low performing urban schools. Continue reading
Posted in Charter Schools, School Reform
Tagged charter debate, charter success, charters pull funding, CREDO report, Detroit charter schools, kids of poverty, low-income students, market solutions for school failure, Massachusetts charter schools, organized low income families, public schools flounder fiscally, substandard public schools
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Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): Will the States Address the Role of Poverty in School Reform?
ESSA, the new federal education act, puts more authority in the hands of the states. Will the role and conditions of poverty be addressed in kids’ learning? Will old mistakes continue? Are well vetted approaches such as Richard DuFour’s Professional Learning Communities going to be enough? Continue reading
Posted in At Risk Students, School Reform
Tagged development frontal cortex kids, Every Student Succeeds Act poverty, kids poverty unprepared school, legacy No Child Left Behind, low performing schools, quality early childhood education, Richard DuFour, role of poverty school reform, stresses of poverty, support new mothers, testing results evaluate teachers
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Do We Miss the Forest for the Trees? What Vital School Reform and Change for Kids is Percolating Under the Radar?
Does the economic and social vitality in abundant evidence in locales across the country, but beneath the national radar, parallel equally vital school and kid centered programming that so far has failed to register in national educational statistics? Maybe so. Continue reading
Posted in At Risk Students, School Reform
Tagged black graduate matriculate, early childhood education, economic social vitality, innovative curricula, lead levels affect development, low income readiness school, mentors low income students, poverty predations, school relationships, shift social contract, skill emotional development
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More Reflections on Change by a Veteran Teacher Still Going After Many Years of School Reform
The increased motor activity level in my sister in law Ticia’s classrooms over forty years of teaching seems to signal an increase in kids with disabilities, Attention Deficit Disorder with or without Hyperactivity the most obviously.
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Posted in School Reform
Tagged changes school climate, effects poverty school progress, Florida class size, instructional aides classroom assist, low income school, online resources workshops curricula, reflections change veteran teacher years school reform, South Florida No Child Left Behind, support services for special education, teacher micromanaged, technology kids' learning, testing disturbing questions learning
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Many Years of School Reform: A Veteran Teacher Reflects on Changes in Kids and the Classroom
The attention span of young kids in particular has shortened, both in the intellectual and physical sense, over the duration of Ticia’s career. Roughly 50% of kids need to be moving all the time – feet, bodies, hands, fingers — whereas at the beginning of Ticia’s working life compulsive movement described perhaps only one or two out of a class of 30. This is one category of school measurement where boys have continued to reign supreme. Continue reading
See the Kids of Color
Summary: Paintings of young people by Kehinde Wiley are an opportunity to move beyond racial stereotypes and into contemplation of real lives. Continue reading
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