July 12, 2016
By: Brenna Lamprey
Source: edutopia.org Project Au-Some began as an effort to build empathy and social skills between a fifth-grade classroom and preschool children with special needs — and it quickly turned into more than we could ever have imagined. Accepting the Challenge At the beginning of the school year, preschool special education teacher Beth Reilly came […]
July 7, 2016
By: Drew Petrimoulx
Source: arkansasmatters.com In a meeting room at the State Capitol, parents told seemingly hopeless stories. “She just cries, and no one can figure out why she’s crying,” Dollie Spencer said of her granddaughter. They are the guardians of special needs children. Trilisa Marshall from Monticello came to tell the committee about her […]
July 7, 2016
By: Brian Fanney
Source: arkansasonline.com A legislative task force is set to recommend changes to improve special education in Arkansas, but the estimated cost of some of the fixes, competing priorities and talk of a tax cut from Gov. Asa Hutchinson will factor into what is ultimately adopted, a state senator said. Beginning in August […]
July 7, 2016
By: Laura Faith Kebede
Source: chalkbeat.org In a sea of data on hundreds of students about attendance, test scores, grades and behavior, teachers and administrators can be challenged to identify a student early on who may not graduate. They used to crunch those numbers by hand, taking time from other responsibilities and leaving gaps in […]
July 7, 2016
By: Emma Brown
Source: washingtonpost.com The nation’s new federal education law makes room for states to design and try out new and better ways to measure what kids know, because just about everyone agrees on this: Standardized tests as currently delivered in U.S. public schools leave something to be desired. The law, known as the Every Student Succeeds Act, allows seven […]
July 7, 2016
By: Dwight Carter
Source: edsurge.com Outside of school, most people apply learning across disciplines, scenarios, and experiences. For a majority of our lives as students, we are taught in a system that creates blocks of time for learning specific content, much like the factory model of production. However, learning should be life and there is […]
July 6, 2016
By: Nicholas Garcia
Source: chalkbeat.org When it comes to this country’s greatest debates about public education — standards, testing, technology — Pearson is in the middle of it all. The British company is the world’s largest textbook publisher, a testing giant, and increasingly a player in digital curriculum. Established in 1844, Pearson has cemented itself […]
July 6, 2016
By: Richard Kahlenberg
Source: theatlantic.com Fifty years ago—on July 2, 1966—the federal government published “Equality of Educational Opportunity,”a landmark study by the Johns Hopkins University sociologist James Coleman that gave support for a novel idea about education: that schools should integrate based on the socioeconomic status of students. A dozen years earlier, the U.S. Supreme […]
July 6, 2016
By: Moriah
Source: washingtonpost.com School districts in the Washington area and across the country are adopting grading practices that make it more difficult for students to flunk classes, that give students opportunities to retake exams or turn in late work, and that discourage or prohibit teachers from giving out zeroes. The policies have stirred debates […]
July 6, 2016
By: Elissa Nadworny
Source: npr.org When Lily Shum was little, she dreaded speaking up in class. It wasn’t because she didn’t have anything interesting to say, or because she wasn’t paying attention or didn’t know the answer. She was just quiet. “Every single report card that I ever had says, ‘Lily needs to talk more. […]