school (25)
By Jessica Kelmon, Associate Editor
Making math fun can be a tall order. With kids complaining that math is boooooooring (and parents often exacerbating the problem by openly agreeing), it’s a tough, underappreciated job. So where’s an enterprising, hardworking teacher to turn for resources?
One third grade teacher at a DC charter school turned to a...
By Leslie Crawford, Senior Editor
Two days after the Ohio high school shooting that left three children dead, a colleague told me her seven-year-old daughter had come home from school and mentioned her class had had a drill; the children were told a fictitious story about a robbery in the neighborhood and that they needed to know how to respond in...
Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor
There's a lot of bad education news out there, so I decided to pass on a little good news for a change. It's a novel approach to get kids into college — and help them stay there. The approach is deceptively simple: it sends kids to college in peer groups, called posses, that provide community and m...
by Carol Lloyd
Executive Editor
Any hour now the New York Times is supposed to publish the "value-added" data on 12,000 New York City public school teachers following a court ruling yesterday ordering the Department of Education to release the scores.
In the world of education politics, there's not much everyone agrees on. The...
By Leslie Crawford, Senior Editor
It was such a bold and out there thing to do. When James Dierke became principal of San Francisco’s Vistication Valley Middle School 13 years ago, he found a population of students whose lives were besieged by extreme urban ills: poverty, drug and gang violence, regular shootings (in the school year 2002-2003, t...
Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor
Not long ago I wrote about the differences in physical fitness programs — and fitness outcomes — at a wealthy suburban school and an inner-city school (both in the Bay Area). As reported in The Bay Citizen, kids at Sycamore Valley Elementary School, who train regularly with "physical fitness experts"...
By Jessica Kelmon, Associate Editor
I've always been amused by the response to Babycenter's mega-popular poll "Do you think your child is academically gifted?" Of the nearly 50,000 parents who’ve voted, 71 percent claim to have a gifted child. And another 19 percent say they aren’t sure – but their little smartypants probably is, t...
Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor
My 15-year-old son has a high tolerance for horror and violence. He loves action movies — the rougher and scarier the better — and, like a lot of kids, he's intrigued by evil. In middle school, he read everything he could find about Hitler and Stalin, and he's fascinated by the psychology of serial kil...
By Jessica Kelmon, Associate Editor
How are charter schools different, you ask? They are public schools that get district money on a per-pupil basis but operate outside of district oversight. That means charter schools can design school policies that are distinctly different from traditional public schools. But what does that really mean?
It means...
By Carol Lloyd
Executive Editor
As the news about Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles has gone from utterly depraved to even worse, there's been plenty of soul searching. How could so much have gone wrong without raising red flags? First, there was the arrest of one teacher accused of years of engaging bizarre sexually...
