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Search Results for: We have the children

Commentary on K-12 Parental Rights and legacy Governance; “we have the children”

Darlene Click: As the saying goes, you catch flack when you’re over target. Disney execs boast about secret queer agendas, teachers boast on social media how they will defy parents and, now, that bastion of inane Leftwing propaganda, Salon states parental rights are harming kids. Across the country, students are struggling to regain a sense of normalcy as they cope with the […]

“We have the children”

So said a former Madison School District Administrator some years ago. Rod Dreher on recent taxpayer supported federal government actions: I remind you that this very US government policy document actually states that there are “no scientifically sound” reasons to doubt whether hormones and surgery for minors is harmful, and to say, therefore, that children […]

“We have the children”, redux

Under this bill, faculty and staff will be punished if they don’t comply with the preferred pronouns of students as early as kindergarten. However, they ARE permitted to hide a child’s gender dysmorphia from their own parents. pic.twitter.com/Jsw8IHmcvr — Justine Brooke Murray (@Justine_Brooke) August 10, 2021

“We have the children”

William Jacobson: I expect that news cycle will continue because Solas was just sued by the Rhode Island branches of the largest teachers union in the country, the National Education Association, trying to prevent South Kingstown from providing Solas with information she has requsted, including communcations involving the union or its members. You can read […]

“What we haven’t received, for two decades, is a comprehensive update from the government on the number of children who are sexually abused in public schools”

Matt Walsh: It was all the way back in 2004 that the Department of Education released a report finding that, between kindergarten and 12th grade, 9.6% of students nationwide were subjected to sexual misconduct by a school employee. That’s one in ten students, totaling more than 5 million child victims in the system at any given time. […]

“We have made things happen for children.”

AJ Bayatpour As MPS (Milwaukee Public Schools) asks taxpayers for $252 million in April, I asked Supt. Keith Posley about national testing data (NAEP) that show Milwaukee 4th graders have been scoring worse than the average big city district for more than a decade. —- and: For reference, 10 points is about the equivalent for […]

From sleeping in separate beds to their children to transporting them in prams, Western parents have some unusual ideas about how to raise them.

Kelly Oakes: “Is he in his own room yet?” is a question new parents often field once they emerge from the haze of life with a newborn. But sleeping apart from our babies is a relatively recent development – and not one that extends around the globe. In other cultures sharing a room, and sometimes […]

A thought-provoking experiment showed what happens when children don’t have the internet for a whole day

brightside Child psychologist Yekaterina Murashova describes an unusual experiment in her book showing what happened when a group of teenagers were deprived of access to the internet and modern technology for a single day. We think it’s well worth checking out — you can consider the implications for yourself. Children and teenagers aged between 12 […]

Over my 25 years as a teacher turned university professor and administrator, I have watched countless numbers of students enter and leave college – most are well prepared to harness the realities of life after leaving the college cocoon while others are less well equipped. Freshmen arrive on college campuses with different levels of academic preparation; different aptitudes and proclivities; and different goals and agendas for their first substantial attempt at making it on their own. Parents, while you still have some modicum of influence over your children’s decision-making, please: Do all you can to ensure that they do not pursue fields of study that offer very few prospects for gainful employment after graduation. Even if your children decide during their college matriculation to apply to graduate school, they need to pursue undergraduate majors that will yield solid prospects for employment. Graduate school plans change, and you want to avoid their boomeranging back to your house. I have seen, for example, a scant few nursing, engineering, mathematics or science education, accounting, and finance majors without multiple job offers after graduation. I have seen tons of psychology, sociology, English (and I was one!), and political science majors end their university matriculation jobless. The goal must not be singularly focused on getting accepted into college; the goal is graduating from college prepared for the next stage of life. Therefore, post-graduation planning must start with the admissions process, not as an afterthought while sending out graduation invitations.

Dr Joyce Stallworth: Over my 25 years as a teacher turned university professor and administrator, I have watched countless numbers of students enter and leave college – most are well prepared to harness the realities of life after leaving the college cocoon while others are less well equipped. Freshmen arrive on college campuses with different […]

Give childhood back to children: if we want our offspring to have happy, productive and moral lives, we must allow more time for play, not less

Peter Gray:

I’m a research bio-psychologist with a PhD, so I’ve done lots of school. I’m a pretty good problem-solver, in my work and in the rest of my life, but that has little to do with the schooling I’ve had. I studied algebra, trig, calculus and various other maths in school, but I can’t recall ever facing a problem – even in my scientific research – that required those skills. What maths I’ve used was highly specialised and, as with most scientists, I learnt it on the job.
The real problems I’ve faced in life include physical ones (such as how to operate a newfangled machine at work or unblock the toilet at home), social ones (how to get that perfect woman to be interested in me), moral ones (whether to give a passing grade to a student, for effort, though he failed all the tests), and emotional ones (coping with grief when my first wife died or keeping my head when I fell through the ice while pond skating). Most problems in life cannot be solved with formulae or memorised answers of the type learnt in school. They require the judgement, wisdom and creative ability that come from life experiences. For children, those experiences are embedded in play.

So why haven’t we ensured that all children get a rigorous, supportive education? Fear Factor: Teaching Without Training

Lisa Hansel, via a kind reader’s email:

So why haven’t we ensured that all children get a rigorous, supportive education?
This is a question I ask myself and others all the time. I think it’s more productive than merely asking “How can we?” Those who ask how without also asking why haven’t tend to waste significant amounts of time and resources “discovering” things that some already knew.
Okay, so I’ve partly answer the why question right there. Much better answers can be found in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, and Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
But still, those answers are not complete.
Right now, Kate Walsh and her team with the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) are adding to our collective wisdom–and potentially to our collective ability to act.
NCTQ is just a couple months away from releasing its review of teacher preparation programs. The results may not be shocking, but they are terrifying. Walsh provides a preview in the current issue of Education Next. In that preview, she reminds us of a study from several years ago that offers an insiders’ look at teacher preparation:

The most revealing insight into what teacher educators believe to be wrong or right about the field is a lengthy 2006 volume published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Studying Teacher Education. It contains contributions from 15 prominent deans and education professors and was intended to provide “balanced, thorough, and unapologetically honest descriptions of the state of research on particular topics in teacher education.” It lives up to that billing. First, the volume demonstrates the paucity of credible research that would support the current practices of traditional teacher education, across all of its many functions, including foundations courses, arts and sciences courses, field experiences, and pedagogical approaches, as well as how current practice prepares candidates to teach diverse populations and special education students. More intriguing, however, is the contributors’ examination of the dramatic evolution of the mission of teacher education over the last 50 years, in ways that have certainly been poorly understood by anyone outside the profession.
Studying Teacher Education explains the disconnect between what teacher educators believe is the right way to prepare a new teacher and the unhappy K-12 schools on the receiving end of that effort. It happens that the job of teacher educators is not to train the next generation of teachers but to prepare them.

Huh? Really? How exactly does one prepare without training? Walsh goes on to explain that. But the only way to prepare yourself to comprehend the teacher educators’ reasoning is to pretend like “prepare them” actually means “brainwash them into believing that in order to be a good teacher, you have to make everything up yourself.” Back to Walsh:

Harking back perhaps to teacher education’s 19th-century ecclesiastical origins, its mission has shifted away from the medical model of training doctors to professional formation. The function of teacher education is to launch the candidate on a lifelong path of learning, distinct from knowing, as actual knowledge is perceived as too fluid to be achievable. In the course of a teacher’s preparation, prejudices and errant assumptions must be confronted and expunged, with particular emphasis on those related to race, class, language, and culture. This improbable feat, not unlike the transformation of Pinocchio from puppet to real boy, is accomplished as candidates reveal their feelings and attitudes through abundant in-class dialogue and by keeping a journal. From these activities is born each teacher’s unique philosophy of teaching and learning.
There is also a strong social-justice component to teacher education, with teachers cast as “activists committed to diminishing the inequities of American society.” That vision of a teacher is seen by a considerable fraction of teacher educators (although not all) as more important than preparing a teacher to be an effective instructor.

Kate Walsh:

Nowhere is the chasm between the two visions of teacher education–training versus formation–clearer than in the demise of the traditional methods course. The public, and policymakers who require such courses in regulations governing teacher education, may assume that when a teacher takes a methods course, it is to learn the best methods for teaching certain subject matter. That view, we are told in the AERA volume, is for the most part an anachronism. The current view, state professors Renee T. Clift and Patricia Brady, is that “A methods course is seldom defined as a class that transmits information about methods of instruction and ends with a final exam. [They] are seen as complex sites in which instructors work simultaneously with prospective teachers on beliefs, teaching practices and creation of identities–their students’ and their own.”
The statement reveals just how far afield teacher education has traveled from its training purposes. It is hard not to suspect that the ambiguity in such language as the “creation of identities” is purposeful, because if a class fails to meet such objectives, no one would be the wiser.
The shift away from training to formation has had one immediate and indisputable outcome: the onus of a teacher’s training has shifted from the teacher educators to the teacher candidates. What remains of the teacher educator’s purpose is only to build the “capacity” of the candidate to be able to make seasoned professional judgments. Figuring out what actually to do falls entirely on the candidate.
Here is the guidance provided to student teachers at a large public university in New York:
In addition to establishing the norm for your level, you must, after determining your year-end goals, break down all that you will teach into manageable lessons. While so much of this is something you learn on the job, a great measure of it must be inside you, or you must be able to find it in a resource. This means that if you do not know the content of a grade level, or if you do not know how to prepare a lesson plan, or if you do not know how to do whatever is expected of you, it is your responsibility to find out how to do these things. Your university preparation is not intended to address every conceivable aspect of teaching.
Do not be surprised if your Cooperating Teacher is helpful but suggests you find out the “how to” on your own. Your Cooperating Teacher knows the value of owning your way into your teaching style.

Related: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.
Wisconsin has recently taken a first baby step toward teacher content knowledge requirements (something Massachusetts and Minnesota have done for years) via the adoption of MTEL-90. Much more on teacher content knowledge requirements, here.
Content knowledge requirements for teachers past & present.

Has Liz Truss tried looking after six toddlers? I have I scored myself six kids to test-drive the minister’s theory that adults should be allowed to look after more children

Zoe Williams:

The Conservative MP Liz Truss, like so many in public policy, has noticed that childcare is unaffordable – families in the UK spend nearly a third of their income on it; more than anyone else in the world.
Truss is unique, I think, in identifying the problem as over-regulation – specifically, she thinks the current adult-to-child ratios are too stringent. In her plan, one adult would be able to care for six two-year-olds (at the moment it’s four). This would force up wages (apparently), and professionalise the role of childcare – which process, incidentally, would be shored up by new requirements, including C grades in maths and English GCSEs.
Opinion gathered along party lines – rightwing thinktanks and blogs hailed this as Truss’s “moment”; lefties said she was barking. Ah, the smell of Napisan in the morning, I love it. But did anybody test-drive her theory for her, even in its planning stage? I do not think they did.

If Schools Were Like ‘American Idol’ . . . Unless we measure success by how children perform, we’ll have higher standards for pop stars than public schools.

Rupert Murdoch:

Over the past few years, I have often complained about a hidebound culture that prevents many newspapers from responding to the challenges of new technology. There is, however, another hidebound American institution that is also finding it difficult to respond to new challenges: our big-city schools.
Today, for example, the United States is home to more than 2,000 dysfunctional high schools. They represent less than 15% of American high schools yet account for about half of our dropouts. When you break this down, you find that these institutions produce 81% of all Native American dropouts, 73% of all African-American dropouts, and 66% of all Hispanic dropouts.
At our grade schools, two-thirds of all eighth-graders score below proficient in math and reading. The average African-American or Latino 9-year-old is three grades behind in these subjects. Behind the grim statistics is the real story: lost opportunities, crushed dreams, and shattered lives. In plain English, we trap the children who need an education most in failure factories.

Our School Board Needs a Budget: No Budget Yet We Have a Cut List that Harms Underprivileged Children’s Education and Divides Parent Groups

The inside, unsigned cover page of MMSD’s non-budget cut list that tells the public that the administration is protecting math and reading for young children. For $12,000+ per student, the administration will teach our kids to read and to do math – what happened to science and social studies? What happened to educating the whole […]

Young people usually become less radical with time. Are we seeing an exception?

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein: Young people typically start out on the political left but become more conservative as they get older. Baby boomers who once marched against the Vietnam war got jobs, got married and had children. Now their grandchildren see them as tethered to Fox News. Today’s young Americans are following the first […]

The relationship between word reading ability and spelling ability

Rebecca Treiman, Jacqueline Hulslander, Erik G. Willcutt, Bruce F. Pennington & Richard K. Olson: The goal of the present study was to test theories about the extent to which individual differences in word reading align with those in spelling and the extent to which other cognitive and linguistic skills play different roles in word reading […]

Powerless teachers are letting violent pupils run riot

Gillian Bowditch: Far from dispelling violence, it positively encourages it. By the time you have waded through the document, your gorge will have risen to the point where you could cheerfully strangle the authors with the same ferocity with which they mangle the English language. “Support schools to implement a spectrum of relationships and behaviour […]

My father’s ‘system’ for raising eght children

David McGrath  States back then provided roadside picnic tables, so we’d have lunch next to the highway, eating liver sausage and mustard sandwiches out of Mom’s picnic basket, bracing for the deafening whine of each speeding car that would pass and blow away whatever paper plate was not weighted down. Toward evening, we kept eyes […]

Poor kids have a right to Shakespeare, Bach, Plato

Joanne Jacobs summary: There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension. Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract […]

This report-Make Our Children Healthy Again: Assessment— is a call to action

MAHA Commission It presents the stark reality of American children’s declining health, backed by compelling data and long-term trends. More importantly, it seeks to unpack the potential dietary, behavioral, medical, and environmental drivers behind this crisis. By examining the root causes of deteriorating child health, this assessment establishes a clear, evidence- based foundation for the […]

Politicians used to care how much students learn. Now, to find a defense of educational excellence, we have to look beyond politics.

Dana Goldstein: What happened to learning as a national priority? For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy. At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, […]

Decline of cash credited for drop in NHS surgery for children swallowing objects

Denis Campbell: Cashless societies may be a sad fact of modern life for those with a nostalgic attachment to the pound in their pocket, but doctors have discovered one unexpected benefit of the decline of coins. Far fewer children are having surgery after swallowing small items that could choke or kill them, and the scarcity […]

Four Tax Tips I Tell My Children—When They’ll Listen

: . As parents, we often have goals for our children: We want them to get a good education, learn to swim and ride a bike, and become good workers, partners, friends and savers. Beyond these “musts,” many of us try to share our particular expertise with them. The mother of one of my childhood […]

Why so many children in America have ADHD

The Economist Few things agitate Robert F. Kennedy junior, America’s new health secretary, more than the rate of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) among American children. And for good reason: one in nine children aged 3-17 years has been diagnosed with ADHD, two to three times the rate in other Western countries. On February 13th, Mr Kennedy’s […]

Why Children’s Books?

Katherine Rundell: In​ 1803, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sat in his astronomer’s study in Keswick, and wrote in his notebook his central Principle of Criticism: never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former – we know it a […]

Top scholar says evidence for special education inclusion is ‘fundamentally flawed’

Jill Barshay: A prominent professor of special education is about to ignite a fierce debate over a tenet of his field, that students with disabilities should be educated as much as possible alongside their peers in general education classrooms, a strategy known as inclusion.  In a paper that reviews more than 50 years of research, […]

Analysis of 50 years of research argues that there isn’t strong evidence for the academic advantages of placing children with disabilities in general education classrooms

Jill Barshay: In a paper that reviews more than 50 years of research, Douglas Fuchs of Vanderbilt University and the American Institutes for Research, along with two other researchers, argues that the academic benefits of including students with disabilities in general education classrooms are not settled science despite the fact that numerous studies have found […]

“Sure hope the wealthy raise a few more smart kids!”

Douglas Belkin: A lawsuit alleging universities colluded to determine students’ financial-aid packages provides a glimpse into the ways top schools assess children of privilege differently from the rest of the applicant pool. At Georgetown University, a former president selected students for a special admission list by consulting their parents’ donation history, not their transcript, according […]

New reading laws sweep the nation following Sold a Story

Christopher Peak: For decades, schools all over the country taught reading based on a theory cognitive scientists had debunked by the 1990s. Despite research showing it made it harder for some kids to learn, the concept was widely accepted by most educators — until recent reporting by APM Reports. Now, state legislators and other policymakers are trying to change […]

“These kids are not in a mood to tolerate NE weirdness anymore”

kale Zelden: I’ve taught at a New England prep school for nearly 20 years. Families have been laser focused on top tier colleges, most of which are up here. Except for a very few exceptional candidates, this has changed. Dramatically. There is another “great migration” happening, as a steady flow of middle and upper middle-class […]

“These new standards mean that eighth-grade teachers will not need to have taken English, French, geography, history or math at the university level”

via Anna Stokke: Distressing changes Re: Teachers need subject expertise (Think Tank, Nov. 12) I’m writing, as a parent and as an educator, in support of my colleague Anna Stokke’s Monday op-ed. Having spent two decades teaching post-secondary students in Manitoba, I am distressed, to say the least, to hear about the revisions to Manitoba’s […]

US government report says fluoride at twice the recommended limit is linked to lower IQ in kids

Mike Stobbe: The long-awaited report released Wednesday comes from the National Toxicology Program, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. It summarizes a review of studies, conducted in Canada, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, and Mexico, that concludes that drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter is consistently associated with lower IQs […]

First Game-Based Digital Therapeutic to Improve Attention Function in Children with ADHD

FDA.gov Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permitted marketing of the first game-based digital therapeutic device to improve attention function in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The prescription-only game-based device, called EndeavorRx, is indicated for pediatric patients ages 8 to12 years old with primarily inattentive or combined-type ADHD who have demonstrated […]

Fewer students and increased competition will require public institutions to be dynamic and responsive

Aaron Garth Smith and Jude Schwalbach Today, between declining birth rates, fiscal chaos, and competition from charter and private schools, public education bears little resemblance to what it was before the pandemic. These challenges will deepen in the coming years, and widespread school closures and staff reductions are likely. But the most daunting task will be convincing […]

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school

Rose Horowitch This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. […]

“Changes in states like Wisconsin have renewed criticism of a testing”

Linda Jacobson: Changing standards and proficiency targets is a routine process for states that some say offers a more accurate reflection of what students know. But given the cataclysmic effects of COVID on student learning, experts say now is not the time to tweak how we measure performance.  “Many parents are already underestimating the degree to which […]

“more than 40 percent of school-aged children and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition”

Robert Redfield: Parents reported around 41 percent of children under 18 had “current or lifelong health conditions” when asked about 25 health conditions. For instance, obesity in American children has increased dramatically since John F. Kennedy’s presidency, from around 4 percent in the 1960s to almost 20 percent in 2024. The causes of childhood obesity are complex, but a primary origin is […]

56% of those without children would have some if they could go back.

Frank Newport and Joy Wilke: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the U.S. general fertility rate reached an all-time low in 2011, at 63.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The fertility rate has dropped 11% from 1990, when there were 70.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The […]

“The public schools prepare Chicago schoolchildren only for prison, not success in life”

John Kass: The mayor of Chicago would rather protect the violent over his citizens. He’d rather embrace repeat gang offenders than the people who need his protection.  As the corrupt corporate media becomes anxious and defensive about Johnson’s self-destructive reasoning, like the clownish leftist fools mocked by Matt Walsh in “Am I a Racist?” a great […]

“Lowering the cut scores will make it appear that a greater percentage of students are performing at higher levels.”

Dean Gorrell: State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly recently took to defending her decision to lower the cut scores for the Wisconsin Forward Exam. Lowering the cut scores will make it appear that a greater percentage of students are performing at higher levels. Underly offered this reason for the change: “They (the students) were appearing to be […]

Why is LAUSD spending $70 million to boost capacity at a school in Silver Lake, when nearby schools have thousands of empty seats?

Tim Deroche: It’s the feel-good story of the year for the Los Angeles Unified School District campuses. L.A. Unified recently broke ground on a beautiful new $70 million renovation of Ivanhoe Elementary in Silver Lake, adding a shiny new building that will boost permanent capacity at the school. Ivanhoe is one of the shining stars […]

‘They’re about two years behind’: fears for children born during lockdown as they start at school

Anna Fazackerley Babies born in 2020 started life in the strange world of lockdown in a small bubble of people with faces hidden behind masks. Social ­experiences, such as seeing extended family, trips to the playground or mother and baby groups, could not happen. And struggling public ­services meant infants were likely to miss out on face-to-face […]

3-in-10 Chicago public school teachers send their children to private school

Hannah Schmid, Jon Josko Nearly 31% of public school teachers in Chicago send at least one of their children to private school, according to federal data. The leader of the Chicago Teachers Union sends her oldest child to a private school, too. The fact that so many public schools teachers are choosing private schools for […]

the national reckoning around how we teach kids to read in schools—and where we’re still getting it wrong.

Holly Korbey In schools, the podcast was a shot across the bow in a longstanding battle over the best way to teach young children to read. “A lot of teachers didn’t know about this research. It was very clear to them, when they started to learn about it, that it has huge implications,” says Hanford. […]

The story of the deaf Nicaraguan children who invented their own language

Sequoyah Sudler: Avila would only find out about this new language when she was nineteen years old. She was at home when she received a knock at the door from a man who she had never met before. Strangely, the man was American. He had a long, thin face, adorned with wiry metal glasses perched […]

KOSA is not the solution for protecting children from social media

Rand Paul: KOSA only leads to silencing free speech KOSA supporters will tell you that they have no desire to regulate content. But the requirement that platforms mitigate undefined harms belies the bill’s effect to regulate online content. Imposing a “duty of care” on online platforms to mitigate harms associated with mental health can only […]

What Gives Poor Kids a Shot at Better Lives? Economists Find an Unexpected Answer

Justin Lahart: For all our divisions, Americans have been united by a singular obsession: How can we have a better life? Economists call this economic mobility—the ability to move up the income ladder and make it to a higher rung than your parents. Harvard University economist Raj Chetty has spent more than a decade working to understand […]

“The Justice Department tries to silence and imprison whistleblowers who expose the barbarism of transgender medicine”

Madeleine Rowley According to a letter written by Haim’s lawyers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari admitted that she hadn’t reviewed the purported evidence against Haim and was instead relying on what FBI agents told her. In the same discussion, Ansari insisted that the documents Haim sent to Rufo included children’s names, but nothing in the documents Rufo saw identified any […]

Doctors Protecting Children

www As physicians, together with nurses, psychotherapists and behavioral health clinicians, other health professionals, scientists, researchers, and public health and policy professionals, we have serious concerns about the physical and mental health effects of the current protocols promoted for the care of children and adolescents in the United States who express discomfort with their biological sex.

Mississippi students and educators have closed the gap and reached the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Julia James: This growth can be attributed to several factors, but chief among them is a 2013 state law that created a more robust infrastructure around helping children learn to read and holding them back at the end of third grade if they didn’t hit a certain benchmark. But this national test also measures students […]

“America is a country whose children score low in math and science but off the charts in self-esteem”

Oliver Wiseman: A study of eight developed countries found that U.S. students were dead last in math skills but number one in confidence in math skills, even though they suck at it. Yes, we’re number one in thinking we’re number one. The idea that kids have too little self-esteem is antiquated. It’s a Zombie Lie, […]

“where we were and why nothing ever changes. Both are worth reading.”

Quinton Klabon: Alan Borsuk: Wisconsin’s kids need help learning to read, so let’s see more cooperation and an end to power maneuvers and partisanship. Enough. Enough.   I’m fed up with partisanship, polarization and power maneuvers in the state Capitol that put adults and politics first and kids last.  There have been many episodes of this […]

“newest “community school”” literacy?

Abbey Machtig: Madison developed the community schools program in 2015 and Kennedy will be the eighth school with that designation.  Starting next school year, Kennedy will be granted a community school resource coordinator and a family liaison who will work full-time from the school. Kennedy also is adding several other new staff members, including another school social worker, a […]

Cutting Off Your Foot to Spite the Children: Carmen Eviction Would Harm MPS Bottom Line as Well as Kids

WILL: The state’s largest public school district, Milwaukee Public Schools, continues with its financial woes. Despite the narrow approval of a massive $252 million referendum just last month, Milwaukee Public Schools recently announced that substantial cuts to their budget will be required. These cuts could include over 280 staffing positions including nearly 150 teacher filled using pandemic-era […]

We’ve lost the art of creating local infrastructure that allows young people to explore, play and lead healthier lives.

Timothy P. Carney Congress, the White House and policy experts have started debating “family policy” in recent years, rattled by an epidemic of childhood anxiety and plummeting birthrates. Child-care subsidies, marriage penalties and maternity care all deserve attention, but one government action that would greatly help today’s parents is almost entirely local—and involves concrete, grass […]

“They viewed reading more as rules and memorization”

Kayla Huynh: After years of stagnant reading scores, educators see renewed promise in Act 20. The law, signed in July with broad support from legislators and school districts, is set to make sweeping changes across the state in how schools teach kindergarten through third grade students how to read. Under the act, districts next school year will […]

“The author’s efforts to place responsibility for Ohio’s reading struggles into my lap, however, are unwarranted”

Lucy Caulkins: The author’s efforts to place responsibility for Ohio’s reading struggles into my lap, however, are unwarranted. He writes, “A recent survey from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce found that two of the most popular curricula statewide are Fountas and Pinnell’s Classroom and Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study,” and he goes on […]

“An uncomfortable fact was that most of the concerned parents were white and the two counsellors under scrutiny were not”

Jessica Winter: In truth, the crisis was a collision of multiple issues: racial tension, union power, the respectful treatment of queer and trans kids, and the place of religion in schools—not to mention the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic and what it has done to the fabric of civic life in the U.S. The public schools […]

An open letter from Eastman’s children and a call to action

Benjamin Eastman and Christina Wheatland  If the Electoral Count Act unambiguously did not allow for the vice president’s involvement, as some have contended, why did Congress quietly modify the law in an omnibus bill to clarify that the vice president’s role in the certification of elections was merely ministerial — a high-priced letter opener? Finally, the legacy […]

Washington State bill of rights for parents whose children attend public school

Wall Street Journal: That’s good news for residents who have experienced the harmful side effects of progressive policies. In 2021 lawmakers restricted police officers’ ability to pursue suspects in vehicles on grounds that car theft is merely a property crime. Motor vehicle theft in the state increased 73% between 2019 and 2022, according to Washington […]

More than 1 billion people have obesity, including 159 million young people, study estimates

Elaine Chen: Obesity rates grew particularly fast among children and teens, quadrupling from 1990 to 2022, the latest year the analysis looked at, while rates among adults more than doubled. That comes to 159 million children and teens with obesity, and 879 million adults, according to the study, published Thursday in the Lancet and conducted by the […]

Should we citizens debate debt (taxes, grandchildren burdens, spending and outcomes)?

A.J. Bayatpour: As MPS asks taxpayers for $252 million in April, I asked (taxpayer funded Milwaukee K-12) Superintendent Keith Posley about national testing data (NAEP) that show Milwaukee 4th graders have been scoring worse than the average big city district for more than a decade (deeper dive). (His response): “We have made things happen for […]

The happiest kids in the world have social safety nets

Rachael Lyle-Thompson When my sister, her husband and their four-month-old daughter moved from New Jersey to the Netherlands in March of 2022, I wasn’t expecting our family to receive a lesson in Dutch parenting. But, after spending time at their former home on Bloemgracht, a street and canal in the Jordaan neighborhood of Amsterdam, I […]

“As a PhD candidate in UW-Madison’s microbiology program, Conley has had two children during her time in graduate school”

Nick Bumgardner Her program’s principal investigator was able to move funds to give Conley six weeks of paid leave, but she considers herself “privileged” and sees her experience as the “best-case scenario.” “I’ve spoken with so many parents who have not had the experience I have had,” Conley said. “[They] have been put in a […]

Who Will Raise Chicago’s Children?

James Bosco: How new laws will affect children and parenting “Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his lifelong. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all […]

China’s Population Decline Accelerates as Women Resist Pressure to Have Babies

Liyan Qi: The number of newborns has gone into free fall over the past several years. Official figures released Wednesday showed that China had fewer than half the number of births in 2023 than the country did in 2016, after China abolished the one-child policy. The latest number points to a fertility rate—the number of […]

We tend to think that gifted children cruise through school destined for university and successful careers

Matthew Archer: The highly intelligent child must learn to suffer fools gladly — not sneeringly, not angrily, not despairingly, not weepingly — but gladly if personal development is to proceed successfully in the world as it is. — Leta Hollingworth, 1942 [emphasis added] London, September 2018. It’s the start of a new school year. A thirteen-year-old […]

The pressure on smart kids to get into top schools has never been higher. But the differences between these schools and the next tier down have never been smaller

Gregg Easterbrook: Today almost everyone seems to assume that the critical moment in young people’s lives is finding out which colleges have accepted them. Winning admission to an elite school is imagined to be a golden passport to success; for bright students, failing to do so is seen as a major life setback. As a […]

The DINKs video isn’t shaping culture—it’s a cultural response to the rising opportunity cost of having children in free and prosperous societies.

Alex Nowrastesh: room at Fox News. He had just been on air, and I was about to go on to talk about my area of expertise, the latest immigration controversy. (Yes, this is a very DC story.) I asked him what he was working on and he said, “The fertility crisis.” I was broadly aware […]

Should children clean their own schools? Japan thinks so

Fino Menezes: One of the traditions of the Japanese education system is that students do o-soji(cleaning). However, it’s been in print more than once that Japanese schools have no janitors because students do all the cleaning. That’s simply not true. Japanese schools have non-teaching staff called yomushuji , or shuji for short. They have many responsibilities, […]

‘Right-to-read’ settlement spurred higher reading scores in California’s lowest performing schools, study finds

Jill Barshay: In 2017, public interest lawyers sued California because they claimed that too many low- income Black and Hispanic children weren’t learning to read at school. Filed on behalf of families and teachers at three schools with pitiful reading test scores, the suit was an effort to establish a constitutional right to read. However, […]

“My 8th grade students are 4-6 years below grade according to their NWEA test scores and my observations. Yet I’m ordered to teach 8th grade curriculum to them”

Upstate Guy: I’m a science teacher with urban HS and MS experience. The learning loss and gap predate the pandemic, it just accelerated it. The roots of our problems are actually easy to recognize:  1) In a bizarre quest for equity, we aren’t allowed to suspend black or brown students because the State says they […]

The poor, powerless casualties of Wisconsin’s school choice lawsuit

Patrick McIlheran: Two-thirds of children whose schools are under attack by Minocqua beer baron are racial or ethnic minorities, many are poor, many are very likely his fellow Democrats In the lawsuit bankrolled by the Minocqua beer marketer, Kirk Bangstad, who’s trying to kill school choice in Wisconsin, his lawyers make an icy admission: They […]

Civics: “If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,”

Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube: “If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,” a senior U.S. official said. The official said the administration is particularly worried about a narrative taking hold that Biden supports all Israeli military actions and that U.S.-provided weapons have been used to […]

Objectively Assessing Whether Our Colleges Have Gone Mad

Leslie Eastman: I asserted one of the many reasons that students felt empowered to engage in soulless tactics, such as tearing down posters of missing Israeli children and smearing the videos of torture and murder as faked, is that the administration and educators at colleges and universities have gotten more stridently progressive and activist in […]

J.B. Pritzker and the Illinois Children

Wall Street Journal: Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he wants his state to continue its Invest in Kids scholarship program, but only if he doesn’t have to spend political capital to pass it. That’s the message between the lines of his statement last week that he wouldn’t block the program, which gives scholarships to more […]

Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence

Peter Gray, David F. Lancy and David F. Bjorklund: It is no secret that rates of anxiety and depression among school-aged children and teens in the US are at an all- time high. Recognizing this, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psy- chiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association issued, in 2021, […]

Conventional twin studies overestimate the environmental differences between families relevant to educational attainment

Tobias Wolfram & Damien Morris Educational attainment (i.e., ultimate years of education completed) is a key variable in the behavioural sciences because of its effectiveness in predicting a wide variety of important life outcomes. Despite being a measure that can be calculated from a single questionnaire item (e.g., “what is the highest qualification you’ve obtained?”) […]

Many American Parents Have No Idea How Their Kids Are Doing in School

Jenny Anderson: In third grade, Cristyonna mostly got As and Bs on her report cards. At parent-teacher evenings, teachers were positive about her learning. So Shareeda Jones, her mother, was surprised when they moved neighborhoods and schools and her daughter’s new teacher told her Cristyonna was three grade levels behind in reading. “I was shocked,” […]

Did New York City Forget How to Teach Children to Read?

Caitlin Moscatello At a meeting with parents in May, Elizabeth Phillips, a longtime principal at P.S. 321, a highly sought-after elementary school in Park Slope, didn’t mince words about the new reading curricula being implemented across the city this fall by Mayor Eric Adams’s administration. Not only did she refer to the trio of options selected […]

A quarter of UK men over 42 do not have children. When that is not by choice, regret can grow into pain

Amelia Hill: Father’s Day is dangerous for Robert Nurden. Childless not through choice but, as he puts it, “complacency, bad luck, bad judgment”, he tries to stay indoors and ignore the family celebrations outside. But one year, he went for a walk. “I met family after family. There were children everywhere,” he remembered. “It was […]

‘The Singular Cruelty of America Toward Children’

James Freeman: The best way to prevent politicians and bureaucrats from ever again inflicting on American kids the learning losses, social isolation and staggering financial burden of the Covid lockdowns is to ensure a just reckoning for the destruction they caused. Perhaps this is beginning to happen. John Fensterwald reports in the Bakersfield Californian: This […]

A Sperm Donor Chases a Role in the Lives of the 96 Children He Fathered

Amy Dockser Marcus: Dylan Stone-Miller took a 9,000-mile road trip this summer to see some of his 96 children. Emotionally, logistically, in all ways, it is complicated for the kids, their families and for Stone-Miller, a prolific 32-year-old sperm donor. His road trip is part of a larger odyssey—to figure out how he fits in […]

Chromebooks Were Once a Good Deal for Schools. Now They’re Becoming E-Waste.

Nicole Nguyen: Low-price, easy-to-use Chromebooks were once a boon to cost-conscious schools. Educators say the simple laptops are no longer a good deal. Models have shot up in price in the past four years. Constant repairs add to the cost. Google imposes expiration dates, even if the hardware still works. This year, Google ceases support […]

‘Work-from-anywhere’ families are increasingly crossing the globe to provide their children with a progressive curriculum

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The Victorians achieved so much because they were cleverer than us, a new study suggests.

Nick Collins: Reaction times – a reliable marker of general intelligence – have declined steadily since the Victorian era from about 183 milliseconds to 250ms in men, and from 187ms to 277ms in women.  The slowing of our reflexes points to a decrease in general intelligence equivalent to 1.23 IQ points per decade since the […]

Millions of kids are missing weeks of school as attendance tanks across the US

BIANCA VÁZQUEZ TONESS Across the country, students have been absentat record rates since schools reopened during the pandemic. More than a quarter of students missed at least 10% of the 2021-22 school year, making them chronically absent, according to the most recent data available. Before the pandemic, only 15% of students missed that much school.  All […]

Allowing more unsupervised free play is among the most powerful and least expensive ways to bring down rates of mental illness

Jon Haidt & Peter Gray: The central idea of my forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation, is that we have overprotected children in the real world, where they need a lot of free play and autonomy,while underprotecting them online, where they are not developmentally ready for much of what happens to them. Much of my thinking about […]

Moms of dyslexic children helped push passage of new reading reform law in Wisconsin

Emily Files: Parents of children with dyslexia have been ringing an alarm bell in Wisconsin. They say school districts often fail to teach children to read. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only one in three Wisconsin fourth graders is a proficient reader. After years of debate in the Capitol, Gov. Evers and Republican lawmakers […]

“In effect, the study shows, these policies amounted to affirmative action for the children of the 1 percent, whose parents earn more than $611,000 a year.”

Aatish Bhatia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz: Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent. A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades […]

“We don’t co-parent with the government”

Joanne Jacobs: Founded less than three years ago to fight masking mandates, the Moms for Liberty — with 120,000 members and nearly 300 chapters in 45 U.S. states — is now a political force, he writes. Members believe “malign forces in public schools — gender ideology, critical race theory, Marxism, anti-Americanism — have come for their children, […]

Wisconsin DPI data from 2021-22 shows 76 percent of students physically restrained have a disability

Corinne Hess: Wisconsin schools reported nearly 6,000 instances of seclusion and nearly 7,000 occurrences of physical restraint during the 2021-22 school year, according to the latest data available from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Among those instances, 1,920 students at 32 percent of Wisconsin’s schools were secluded and 2,856 students at 44 percent of the […]

The wealthy, the powerful families, didn’t send their kids to that war.

Jeffrey Carter: No, better to do a non-profit and tackle some cause that has no real solution, like food deserts. Or they’d send their kids to get a degree in public policy and then work for a consulting group dreaming up spider web solutions to issues that are better handled by the free market instead […]

In country with world’s lowest fertility rate, doubts creep in about wisdom of ‘no-kids zones’

Chris Lau, Gawon Bae, Jake Kwon and Nayoon Kim: For a country with the world’s lowest fertility rate – one that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to encourage women to have more babies – the idea of barring children from places like cafes and restaurants might seem a little counterproductive. But in […]

Do you want your children to be like you?

A programmer’s perspective A question I often ask myself lately is wether I am the person that I want my children to grow up to be. Children, and human beings in general, learn mostly by imitation. We look at how others behave and we try to emulate their behaviour. Small children copy everything their parents […]

Randi Weingarten admits there was ‘of course’ learning loss, mental health crisis during pandemic

Kendall Tietz: “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing,” Pompeo said of teachers unions and the state of education in the U.S.  Weingarten went […]

Children and the baked bike ride

David Blaska: “A concerned Dane County citizen sent me an e-mail and photograph alleging that a child was allowed to participate in Madison’s Naked Bike Ride. The photograph shows what appears to be a child, surrounded by naked adults riding bicycles around the Wisconsin Capital. I have e-mailed Sheriff Barrett and have asked that his department investigate […]

A physician reveals the nightmare of transgender ideology in a major children’s hospital.

Christopher Rufo have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with a physician who works in a major children’s hospital in a blue city. This physician has witnessed firsthand how transgender ideology has captured the medical profession and jeopardized the first commandment of the healing sciences: do no harm. He has now chosen to speak out, […]

Politics and teaching children to read: Mother Jones Edition

Kiera Butlers Ten years ago, Marilyn Muller began to suspect that her kindergarten daughter, Lauryn, was struggling with reading. Lauryn, a bright child, seemed mystified by the process of sounding out simple words. Still, the teachers at the top-rated Massachusetts public school reassured Muller that nothing was wrong, and Lauryn would pick up the skill—eventually. Surely […]

‘Nation’s Report Card’ (NAEP) shows math skills reset to the level of the 1990s, while struggling readers are scoring lower than they did in 1971

Kevin Mahnken: COVID-19’s cataclysmic impact on K–12 education, coming on the heels of a decade of stagnation in schools, has yielded a lost generation of growth for adolescents, new federal data reveal.  Wednesday’s publication of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — America’s most prominent benchmark of learning, typically referred to as […]