What if you sank a lot of money into a Pre-K program to try to close achievement gaps and instead you ended up with the same gaps and increased discipline problems? Does that seem like something out of a dystopian novel? Unfortunately, it’s not. A recent study from Vanderbilt University examined the effect of a […]
Let talk about something lighter. New York City Schools announced in February that school lunches on Fridays would be vegan. The stated goal of this new program, which already offered Meatless Mondays and Meatless Fridays, was to offer kids healthier options that they might not otherwise have access to. The new Mayor, Eric Williams, follows […]
In response to the recent, tragic shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, one proposition keeps bubbling up among legislators who strongly support 2nd amendment rights: We can better stop school shootings if teachers carry guns. This isn’t going to be an indictment of the 2nd amendment or a treatise on gun control, but I […]
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte published a study in 2016 examining how a pair of urban charter school systems populated with economically disadvantaged students of color were able to realize both high achievement and low discipline rates that the surrounding public schools couldn’t even begin to replicate. High achievement here means 100% graduation […]
New Mexico completely revamped its state social studies standards in an effort to promote better inclusion and to bring topics like racism to the forefront for its students. Predictably, there was blowback from this decision. That’s nothing new, but I thought it might be interesting to walk through the major objections. They are: Some Hispanic […]
Restorative Practices go by many names — Restorative Justice, Restorative Approaches — but whatever the name, the goal of such practices is to reduce exclusionary discipline in schools, particularly for students of color and students with disabilities. This is a big and messy problem with a lot of moving parts, which I am going to […]
In Part I, we spilled the beans: no equity audit — or any audit — is empirically effective on its face. Effectiveness lies entirely in the quality of the recommendations and how faithfully they are implemented. Even the best recommendations grounded in hard research are useless if they sit gathering dust in a desk drawer […]
Is there empirical research demonstrating the efficacy of equity audits? This question was posed to me a couple of months ago and being a bit of a research nerd, I decided to see what was out there in the realms of published studies that might confirm or refute the efficacy of conducting an equity audit. […]
A poll conducted by the NEA in January of 2022 found that more than half of all teachers surveyed said they will leave teaching earlier than they had originally planned. That’s already serious enough, but the percentages are even higher among Black (62%) and Hispanic/Latino (59%) educators, who are already underrepresented in the teaching profession. […]
Here’s a fascinating article from the Washington Post on the trend toward “community schools,” which takes a unique approach to addressing some of the problems that plague student academic success. The article begins by mentioning and dismissing the trend toward charter schools, pointing out that these have been around for a couple decades now and […]