Anyone who has been a parent for more than two seconds knows that parenting is not all sunshine and rainbows. Yet, parents also know that there are magical moments in parenting that make it all worth it — like getting a gummy smile from your baby or being handed a bouquet of wildflowers that your child picked just for you. Recently, there has been a movement on social media to recognize and appreciate these “glimmers,” or moments of joy. While this idea is discussed as a more general life hack on social media, it seems particularly applicable to the lives of parents which seems to be a stress ..read more

Excerpted from Antiracist Reading Revolution: A Framework for Teaching Beyond Representation Toward Liberation by Sonja Cherry-Paul. Copyright (c) 2024 by Corwin Press, Inc. All rights reserved. While there is no one way to define antiracist curriculum or instruction, several characteristics emerge from the existing and growing body of scholarship on antiracism. I have identified five that can inform instruction and shape the educational experiences of students. Each of these characteristics works together as a whole to construct a vision of an antiracist reading classroom—the work of teachers ..read more

Excerpted from Equity Now: Justice, Repair, and Belonging in Schools by Tyrone C. Howard. Copyright (c) 2024 by Corwin Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Hate speech is often deliberate and meant to be hurtful, while microaggressions are often more common, subtle everyday slights directed at someone’s identity. Microaggressions can be intentional or unintentional, and often perpetrators are unaware of the injury that they may have caused. Hate speech, on the other hand, is usually intentional and a direct attack on some aspect of a person’s individual or group identity. Both are problematic at s ..read more

Sensitive children often get a bad rap. They can be labeled as “difficult,” “dramatic” or “spoiled,” and often parents are blamed for coddling or over-accommodating them. Yet, research increasingly suggests that children show real differences in sensitivity and respond to parenting differently as a result. In other words, some children really are more sensitive than other children and it isn’t just an excuse that parents use for “misbehavior.” One way that researchers have conceptualized sensitive children is the Orchid-Dandelion metaphor. According to this metaphor, some children are orchids ..read more

When Walmart stopped requiring college degrees for most of its corporate jobs last year, the company confronted three deep truths about work and schooling: A college diploma is only a proxy for what someone knows, and not always a perfect one. A degree’s high cost sidelines many people. For industries dominated by workers without degrees, cultivating future talent demands a different playbook. Some of the nation’s largest employers, including Walmart and McDonald’s, are now broaching a new frontier in higher education: convincing colleges to give retail and fast-food workers credit for what th ..read more

Sam is a smiling, wiggly six-year-old who loves dinosaurs and “anything big and powerful,” says his mother, Tabitha, a full-time parent and former special education teacher. Sam lives with his seven siblings and parents in a small town in central Georgia. Sam has significant disabilities including cri-du-chat syndrome — a rare genetic disorder. He can use a walker for short distances, but he mostly gets around using a wheelchair. Lately, Sam has been bestowing Sign names upon everyone in his house— Sam primarily communicates using American Sign Language (ASL) because he’s partially deaf. His o ..read more

When ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, advocates and watchdogs warned about the potential for racial bias. The new large language model was created by harvesting 300 billion words from books, articles and online writing, which include racist falsehoods and reflect writers’ implicit biases. Biased training data is likely to generate biased advice, answers and essays. Garbage in, garbage out.  Researchers are starting to document how AI bias manifests in unexpected ways. Inside the research and development arm of the giant testing organization ETS, which administers the S ..read more

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters. While older children are showing encouraging signs of academic recovery, younger children are not making that same progress, and are sometimes falling even further behind, especially in math. New data released Monday points to the pandemic’s profound and enduring effects on the nation’s youngest public school children, many of whom were not yet in a formal school setting when COVID hit. “It’s showing that these students — who were either toddlers or maybe in preschool — that their learning w ..read more

Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling. Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more eye-popping were stories about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck. So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and helped them catch up academically. Though ..read more

It may soon be phones down for students in New York City, the largest school district in the nation. David Banks, the chancellor of New York City Public Schools, announced Wednesday that he and Mayor Eric Adams plan to ban the use of phones in the coming weeks, saying phones have gone from a distraction to an addiction for many of the city’s more than 900,000 students. “They’re not just a distraction, kids are fully addicted now to phones,” Banks said in an interview with local Fox affiliate WNYW. “And many parents will understand this because even when kids are not in school, it’s very hard t ..read more