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Category Archives: School Reform
Mindfulness and the Low Income Brain Drain
Mindfulness and meditation emerge as one tool in schools’ slow grapple with the psychological and neurobiological consequences of poverty in student lives. Continue reading
Yes, Betsy DeVos, Public Schools Do Make Gains
In this new climate where educators anticipate a Betsy DeVos assault on public schools, it is well to publicize success stories in the public school arena Continue reading
I Am A Teachers’ Union Man (With An Asterisk)
Against a decline of unions in general, scant evidence exists for charges from free market types that teachers unions are a chief hindrance to school reform. But there is room for teachers’ unions to be more effective school change agents. Continue reading
After All These Years, Separate Still Looks Unequal
Resegration of American neighborhoods leaves kids of color disproportionately exposed to the challenges of growing up in homogeneously poor neighborhoods and going to inferior schools. Comparisons to their poor white counterparts show the latter more likely to live in economically mixed neighborhoods with correspondingly better schools. Will one day we hear renewed calls to desegregation of schools and communities? Continue reading
Posted in School Reform, Schools and Culture, Schools and Politics
Tagged African American graduation rate, Black Lives Matter, cognitive emotional development, desegregation, detrack, heterogeneous grouping, high poverty neighborhoods, low income kids of color, poor white students, resegregation, separate but unequal
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Betsy DeVos, the Force Behind Detroit School Chaos
With apparently good intentions to help kids trapped in “low wattage” schools, Betsy DeVos, a champion of charters and school choice, by leverage of her family’s financial and political clout, has engineered changes in Michigan schools that have lowered their standing, and undercut the viability of Detroit schools. She has been tapped as Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education. Continue reading
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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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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schooldog 