Tag Archives: school reform

At Risk Kids: Keeping Them in the Game

Summary: Building of relationships with at risk kids and seeing their misbehavior as an expression of difficulties in their history can short circuit suspension and retain them as part of the school community. This people intensive approach requires deepened funding. … Continue reading

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School Reform Begins at Conception

Summary: Emerging research on “fetal origins of disease” poses a challenge to school reform and public policy. In this era of rapid changes in social consciousness, a man with African American heritage is president, and gay and lesbian folk are … Continue reading

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At Risk Students and School Reform: Will High Expectations Be Enough?

Summary: An impressive turnaround in enrollment, academic atmosphere, and graduation rate at Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School apparently stems from a decision a few years ago to establish an International Baccalaureate program at the school. While high expectations of student … Continue reading

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Schools and Politics: The Feds, the Locals, and School Reform

Summary: As with institutional racism, as with health care, in educational quality the federal government often is the court of necessary remedy where local leadership fails to guarantee equal protection to the disenfranchised. In the recent Conservative Political Action Conference … Continue reading

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School Reform: College Counseling is “Elementary”

Summary: College counseling for low income students plays to a largely absent audience if interventions have not been going on since elementary school. I looked across the room of fifty or sixty seniors with a pride that had little to … Continue reading

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School Reform and the Suspension Trap; Charters Learn the Lesson

Summary: High profile charters in New Orleans learn the lesson good public high schools have known for a while. Suspension often has to take a back seat to more nuanced and humanly intensive interventions in the lives of the kids … Continue reading

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Charter Schools: The Search for the Golden Mean

Summary: After lagging behind other parts of the country in establishing charter schools, the state of Washington is poised to enter the arena after enabling legislation was passed via a recent initiative. An article in the Seattle Times which explores … Continue reading

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School Bureaucracy: Behind the Walkout at Garfield High

Summary: The common practice in school districts that adjusts student-teacher ratios a month into school retards the learning process, distracts teachers and counselors from more important work, and in the end simply harms students, some more than others. The practice … Continue reading

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School Reform: Where Less May be More in the Refinement of Teaching

Summary: Teachers in countries that surpass the US in student test scores spend half or less the time in direct instruction than do American teachers. Regular collegial consultation and feedback, for novice and veteran alike, is part of how that … Continue reading

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Progress In School Reform: What Is The Picture We See?

Summary: While by some measures the school reform movement has come up with little but goose eggs in the national aggregate, a more nuanced approach to school change makes clear that improvements do occur in substantial ways, in a cultural … Continue reading

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