Sunday, May 19

Tag: school

Feeling Worried, Unmotivated, The Pandemic Has Teens Disconnected From School
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LIFESTYLE

Feeling Worried, Unmotivated, The Pandemic Has Teens Disconnected From School

Leah M. Lessard, University of Connecticut When the COVID-19 pandemic started, many U.S. teens were more worried about the disruption to their education than the possibility of getting sick. A May 2020 survey of high school students found that they reported academics and work habits to be among their biggest challenges, ahead of mental and physical health. Nearly three-quarters (72%) indicated they were “very much” concerned with how COVID-19 would impact their school year. As a researcher who studies adolescent development, I was interested in whether and how teens’ school stress changed as the pandemic dragged on. So during the fall of 2020, my colleague and I surveyed adolescents about their academic concerns and the changes they noticed in school social dynamics. Our study, publishe...
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How Free School Meals For All Children Can Improve Kids’ Health
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IN OTHER NEWS

How Free School Meals For All Children Can Improve Kids’ Health

Matthew J. Landry, Stanford University Recognizing that millions of U.S. children are at risk of hunger, Maine and California have approved funding to offer free school meals to all students within their state. Meanwhile, a bill proposed in Congress aims to make free school meals a permanent fixture in all states. The Universal School Meals Program Act would provide free healthy meals and snacks to all children in public and nonprofit private schools regardless of income. Currently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed school districts to provide meals free of charge to families during the pandemic. Previously set to expire in September, the policy has been extended through the 2021-2022 school year. This marks the first time in the 75-year history of the National School Lunch...
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Behind Decisions To Deny Black High School Students From Being Recognized As The Top In Their Class Lurks Racism
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EDUCATION

Behind Decisions To Deny Black High School Students From Being Recognized As The Top In Their Class Lurks Racism

Jamel K. Donnor, William & Mary Two Black students – Ikeria Washington and Layla Temple – were named valedictorian and salutatorian at West Point High School in Mississippi in 2021. Shortly afterward, two white parents questioned whether school officials had correctly calculated the top academic honors. Ultimately, the school superintendent named two white students as “co-valedictorian” and “co-salutatorian” on the day of graduation. High school seniors with the highest GPA in their graduating class are chosen to be valedictorians and are often responsible for delivering the graduating speech. Salutatorians, who are high school seniors with the second-highest GPA in their graduating class, often give the opening remarks. The superintendent attributed the mix-up to a new school cou...
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What Summer School Looks Like In 2021 – Bringing Joy Back To The Classroom And Supporting Stressed Kids
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EDUCATION

What Summer School Looks Like In 2021 – Bringing Joy Back To The Classroom And Supporting Stressed Kids

Raphael Travis Jr., Texas State University; Kathleen Lynch, University of Connecticut; Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University; Naomi Polinsky, Northwestern University, and Roberta Golinkoff, University of Delaware Already 62% of parents believe their children are behind in learning, according to a survey conducted by the National PTA and Learning Heroes. The transition from in-person to remote learning in 2020 has disrupted students’ academic work. We’ve assembled a panel of academics to talk about how summer schools should be supporting students this year. Here, five experts explain what summer school does, and why it may look very different this year. Does voluntary summer school work? Kathleen Lynch, assistant professor of learning sciences, University of Connecticut Summer school progr...
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New Study Finds In One Urban School District Nearly 10% Of Youth Identify As Gender-Diverse
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LIFESTYLE

New Study Finds In One Urban School District Nearly 10% Of Youth Identify As Gender-Diverse

It seems that more and more teens are identifying as transgender, gender-fluid or nonbinary. But because linguistic and cultural norms are always evolving, it’s been challenging to pin down an exact number.   CC BY-NC-ND The 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 1.8% of high school students identified as transgender. But my team – made up of pediatricians, adolescent medicine specialists and public health researchers – suspected that this study underrepresented the prevalence of gender-diverse youth. That’s because not all people who are gender-diverse – an umbrella term for those whose gender identity does not fully align with the sex they were assigned at birth – identify as “transgender.” So we put tog...
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What I Saw When I Spent A Year And A Half At A ‘No-Excuses’ Charter School
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EDUCATION

What I Saw When I Spent A Year And A Half At A ‘No-Excuses’ Charter School

Charter schools are 30 years old as of 2021, and the contentious debate about their merits and place in American society continues. To better understand what happens at charter schools – and as a sociologist who focuses on education – I spent a year and a half at a particular type of urban charter school that takes a “no-excuses” approach toward education. My research was conducted from 2012 through 2013, but these practices are still prevalent in charter schools today. The no-excuses model is one of the most celebrated and most controversial education reform models for raising student achievement among Black and Latino students. Charters, which are public schools of choice that are independently managed, show comparable achievement to traditional public schools, but no-excuses charters ...
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Efforts To Recruit More Diverse Faculties In Business School Are Failing
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EDUCATION

Efforts To Recruit More Diverse Faculties In Business School Are Failing

Despite the increasing diversity among America’s college students, business school professors remain overwhelmingly white. In U.S. business schools, Black and Hispanic individuals make up 23.2% of students, yet only 6.7% of the faculty. As a researcher with a long-standing interest in the reasons business schools lack diverse faculty, I – along with marketing professor Sonja Martin Poole – set out to examine how business schools select their faculty. We did this by talking to 21 Black and Hispanic professors who have served on search committees at business schools throughout the U.S. We discovered four major reasons professors of color often get screened out of the process. 1. Race is unmentionable Search committees rarely have open conversations about race as they search to diversify ...
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Data Shows, Kids With A Desk And A Quiet Place To Study Do Better In School
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EDUCATION

Data Shows, Kids With A Desk And A Quiet Place To Study Do Better In School

Ask what students need to learn at home, and the answer often involves access to Wi-Fi or a digital device. For example, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 sets aside US$7.1 billion to support access to high-speed internet for schools and libraries. What often gets overlooked is whether kids have a desk at home or a quiet place to study. As researchers who focus on education policy and how students perform on standardized tests, we decided to take a closer look – on a global scale – at the degree to which students have desks at home and whether that’s linked to how well they do in school. To do this we turned to the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study, also known as TIMSS, an international assessment administered every four years by the International Association for the Evaluation ...
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Reducing School Absenteeism, Breakfast After The Bell Programs
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EDUCATION

Reducing School Absenteeism, Breakfast After The Bell Programs

The big idea Making a healthy breakfast available to students not only can help alleviate hunger and improve concentration at school; it also appears to encourage regular attendance, according to new research I co-authored. In a study published in February 2021, my co-author and I explored how the rollout of Breakfast After the Bell programs at high-poverty schools in Colorado and Nevada have been linked to reductions in the number of students who were chronically absent. The programs extend free morning meals to learners unable to get into school before classes start. Our study looked at levels of absenteeism in the last year before Breakfast After the Bell was introduced in the states – the 2013-2014 academic year – and two years after. In both states, high-poverty schools, where 70% o...
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School Finance Laws Limit How Money Is Spent But Wind Farms Bring Windfalls For Rural Schools
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EDUCATION

School Finance Laws Limit How Money Is Spent But Wind Farms Bring Windfalls For Rural Schools

On the website for the local school district in Blackwell – a town of just over 300 people in rural Texas – school Superintendent Abe Gott says: “We believe that no matter your dreams, you can achieve them from Blackwell, Texas.” Texas has collected and spent more money on wind energy than any other state. Daxis/flickr, CC BY-ND To back that up, the Blackwell Consolidated Independent School District provides a postsecondary scholarship of up to US$36,000 for graduates from the district’s single high school. So far 140 students have benefited from scholarships, according to Gott. The money that makes this possible came from a $35 million deal the school district brokered with a wind farm company in 2005, part of the massive growth of that sector in Nolan County and Texas. The spread of w...
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