Last April, an email went out to families in the Troy School District outside Detroit. Signed by unnamed “concerned Troy parents,” it said that a district proposal for its middle schools to end “basic” and “honors” math classes for sixth and seventh graders was part of a longer-term district plan to completely abolish honors classes in all of its schools. Superintendent Richard Machesky and his team were stunned. The district was indeed proposing to merge separate sixth- and seventh-grade math tracks into what it said would be a single, rigorous pathway emphasizing pre-algebra skills. In eight ..read more

When Jenny Kist’s students walk through the classroom door every morning, they take out their “little safe place” boxes. Made to be a portable version of a calming physical space in Kist’s early childhood education classroom, these small plastic pencil boxes hold everything Kist’s students need throughout the day to practice self-regulation and emotional identification. Developed when Kist’s classroom went virtual after the onset of covid, “little safe place” boxes are now a mainstay for Kist’s three to five year-old students. Each student is provided with their own box and practices self-regu ..read more

This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series, from the Hidden Brain team. It features stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else. Juleus Ghunta is a published children’s author and award-winning poet. But growing up, he could barely read. Ghunta and his three siblings lived in a rural part of Western Jamaica. They were raised by a single mother, and she often had to make tough choices about how to use their limited resources — including a decision to send his oldest sister to school, and to keep Ghunta at home. “Life was very difficult for us,” he recalled. W ..read more

Every school day, thousands of students are suspended for vague, subjective reasons, such as defiance and disorderly conduct. The Hechinger Report’s investigative team recently took a deep dive into these punishments, based on 20 states for which we were able to obtain data. Our analysis revealed more than 2.8 million suspensions and expulsions from 2017-18 to 2021-22 under these ambiguous categories.  Here’s a closer look at some of what we found: 1. Suspensions for these categories of behavior are incredibly common. Our analysis found that nearly a third of suspensions and expulsions re ..read more

Imagine interacting with an avatar that dissolves into tears – and being assessed on how intelligently and empathetically you respond to its emotional display. Or taking a math test that is created for you on the spot, the questions written to be responsive to the strengths and weaknesses you’ve displayed in prior answers. Picture being evaluated on your scientific knowledge and getting instantaneous feedback on your answers, in ways that help you better understand and respond to other questions. These are just a few of the types of scenarios that could become reality as generative artificial ..read more

Adapted with permission from Dewhurst, M. (2023). Social Justice Art Education: A Framework for Activist Art Pedagogy, 2nd Ed., (pp. 37 – 39). Harvard Education Press.  Listen to any group of artist-educators talking about their work and you’ll notice the slip to we in conversations about social justice education. It’s a very active we, an invitation to collective work. We engage in social justice art education (SJAE) when we come with the understanding that we will be working with other people to create activist artwork together; it is not a solitary practice, it requires the w ..read more

“Oh my God! I can do that?”  That’s what one mother told Aliza Pressman when encouraged to change screen time rules that she struggled to enforce at home. Her son had been having a hard time peeling himself away from a video game and said he was feeling stress and anxiety when he wasn’t playing. But the parent was worried about changing recently agreed upon rules which allowed her son to play that video game a little bit every day. It was a big change from the previous ‘weekends only’ video game rule.  Pressman’s response to the parent was simple: “Just change the rules.”  Press ..read more

School leaders nationwide often complain about how hard it is to hire teachers and how teaching job vacancies have mushroomed. Fixing the problem is not easy because those shortages aren’t universal. Wealthy suburbs can have a surplus of qualified applicants for elementary schools at the same time that a remote, rural school cannot find anyone to teach high school physics.  A study published online in April 2024 in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis illustrates the inconsistencies of teacher shortages in Tennessee, where one district had a surplus of high school social ..read more

On a Thursday evening in January, parents sat at cafeteria tables with sixth-graders, eating pasta and discussing scripted questions, including “How does someone earn your trust?” and “What makes a good friend?”  “So many boys describe feelings of loneliness, of having friends but longing for someone they can confide in about hard feelings,” said Adam Diaz, a school counselor and my colleague at Landon School, an independent boys school in Bethesda, Maryland. We designed this activity at the school’s annual spaghetti dinner to encourage conversation among caregivers and students about hea ..read more

Teens’ focus is interrupted, on average, every 90 seconds. Something as simple as an audible notification can draw focus away from a task. And when humans are distracted, it takes 23 minutes to get back to that previous level of focus. In schools, that means that in a 55-minute class period, multiple distractions across the classroom create an almost impossible task of staying on topic and focused. “When you toggle between two things, you lose cognitive energy and it takes a lot longer to get into deep focus,” said school psychologist Rebecca Branstetter. Teens “don’t realize that multitasking ..read more