Okay, this is just too cool.[Scientists] have reported first empirical evidence for the use of beauty as truth and they have provided an explanation for this phenomenon, based on the processing fluency theory of beau...
The Ethics of the Pedagogy / Social Policy Split
Is it ethical for national education organizations to focus on improving pedagogy and not on basic social and material inequalities that impact on learning?For an example, I've looked to the The International Reading Association (IRA), but almost any education association would do.From their website:The International Reading Association (IRA) is a professional membership organization that promotes high levels of literacy for all by improving the quality of reading instruction, disseminating research and information about reading, and encouraging a lifetime reading habit.If my earlier post about...
On schools, there are no quick fixes
crossposted from Daily KosWhether a school is small or large, the essential questions in education cannot be ignored: What should students learn? How should they be taught? Are classes too large, especially for struggling students? Are teachers well-prepared in the subjects they teach? Do teachers have the resources they need? Do students arrive in school ready to learn? Until we answer these questions, the size of schools is not a relevant issue.Forbes Magazine may not be on the regular reading list of most people here. It is certainly not on mine. And it is not where I would expect to find...
'Cascading Effect' Of Childhood Experiences May Explain Serious Teen Violence
Adverse experiences early in life can lead to minor childhood behavior problems, which can grow into serious acts of teen violence, according to new research. This "cascading effect" of repeated negative incidents and behaviors is the focus of an article in the journal Child Development. . . .The researchers tracked 754 children from preschool through adulthood and documented that children who have social and academic problems in elementary school are more likely to have parents who withdraw from them over time. That opens the door for them to make friends with adolescents exhibiting deviant behaviors...
A “Crisis Point” for Service Learning?
Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE, blogged the other day about the recently released report “Community Service and Service-Learning in America’s Schools” by the Corporation for National & Community Service. The report shows, among other things, the decline in the practice of service-learning in K-12 schools from 32% in 1999 to 24% today. Peter commented that:It's my sense that the movement for service-learning has reached a crisis point. It isn't included in federal education law; it isn't a priority in an era of concern about reading and math; the federal funding has been cut (in real terms)...
New student-led program aims at dropouts
Faced with nearly half of Chicago Public Schools freshmen dropping out before they graduate, education leaders plan to announce Thursday a student-led program to help struggling students at eight high schools. The initiative is the brainchild of a group of students that looked at the problem during the last year and calls for setting up individual plans to keep students in school, setting up retreats to help them stay focused on graduating and having students review curriculum to make it more meaningful. It comes after more than 52 Chicago high school...
Number of U.S. Hungry Kids Jumped 50% Last Year
Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year’s sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture Department reported Monday. The department’s annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than double the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998....
Non-Election Edition: The Death of a School
Via Progressive Historians, "Open Campus"Jane Cooper Elementary sits gutted in one of the worst parts of one of the most impoverished and dangerous cities in the richest nation in the world. In the late 1990s, Mayor Dennis Archer's office identified this neighborhood as having "more children, more people living in poverty, a greater proportion of high school dropouts, and a larger percentage of violent juvenile offenses than the city as a whole." Which, in Detroit, is saying quite a b...
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