Education

11/08/2009

Pinpointing reasons for dropping out
Robert Balfanz is an accomplished, even famous researcher. But he also has one foot firmly planted in the reality of a high school, which anchors him and his research in the raw, complicated realities of being a kid these days, particularly an urban kid.

11/01/2009

Julia Steiny: Ending hiring of teachers by seniority will help students

10/25/2009

E-learning keeps potential failures from dropping out
Sixteen-year-old Danny drops into a chair at Woonsocket High’s E-Learning Academy like he’s a bag of loose parts. The adults ask him to tell me his story, but with a goofy smile, he mumbles that he doesn’t know anything. A sky-blue hoodie matches his sleepy blue eyes, emphasizing his sweet, baby-faced youth, even as a sparkly stud in one ear tries to be punk and tough.

10/18/2009

At one charter school, the lesson plan gets a makeover
On a sweltering summer day, I slipped into the cool of the Rhode Island Foundation’s conference room, where the entire staff of the Learning Community Charter School was planning the coming year. Every August, the whole school spends two weeks refurbishing their curricula for writing, reading and math. If teachers are bored with teaching a certain book, this is the time to pick a new one. If a strategy didn’t work last year, now’s the time to rethink it. A curriculum needs to be fresh and interesting to the teachers, responsive to what the kids need and enjoy, and true to the state standards.

10/11/2009

Julia Steiny: Even students agree on improving teacher evaluations
When two names were called for the public comment portion of the Board of Regents’ August meeting, 27 students stood up. Wearing the signature purple polo shirts of the Providence youth organization, Young Voices, the diverse high school students stood in support of their two spokespersons.

10/04/2009

Julia Steiny: Report: Good luck trying to succeed as a kid in America
If the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent report had been an international comparison of test scores, the media would have gone berserk. Negativity certainly erupts when ODEC releases the results of their Programme for International Student Assessment test, since it generally shows U.S. students performing poorly compared with their peers in other industrialized nations. The PISA tests invariably get lots of press, with experts making dire predictions that our under-skilled kids and lackluster schools are taking us down to economic ruin.

09/27/2009

This school has every department working on writing
In the spring of 2008, Greg Shea, physics teacher at Mt. Hope High School, was proctoring the 11th-grade New England Common Assessment Program science test.

09/20/2009

Education Watch: ‘Bumping’ is the bugaboo of school reform efforts
“Bumping” is a scourge on Rhode Island’s education landscape.

09/13/2009

Meeting these beetles will help teachers keep it real
Sometimes performing the real work of science involves slogging around in real rain, through real mud, while getting whiffs of the pungent perfume of real rotting chicken. Who knew?

09/06/2009

Mid-career professionals now find a route to teaching
Every year, Rhode Island’s eight teacher-preparation programs mint about 1,000 new teachers.

08/30/2009

New education commissioner outlines her 3-year plan
Deborah Gist is a jolt of pure energy. Sitting with the Regents at a recent board meeting, Rhode Island’s new education commissioner looked like the petite, fine-boned woman she is. But in her office, one-on-one, she’s huge.

08/23/2009

Steiny: Schools shouldn’t use data only as a way to beat up on teachers
Most teachers hate data. And for really good reason. The explosion of information technology produced lots of negative statistics that politicians were quick to use to blame teachers for poor academic achievement. As if poverty made no difference, for example.

08/16/2009

Caring adults can help prevent teens from dropping out
“I am a high-school dropout myself.”

08/09/2009

Julia Steiny: Children can learn valuable lessons from time spent at play
Here’s a fun factoid: All mammals play-fight. Puppies, kittens, kids, all of them. But why? Evolution must have had something in mind. What’s all that growling, wrestling, chasing, hissing, pushing and pouncing for?

08/02/2009

R.I. Children’s Museum tries to encourage open-ended play
As the director of the Children’s Museum since 1985, Janice O’Donnell has spent a lot of time watching how kids and adults play with each other and with the museum’s stuff. She routinely cruises into the water-play room, past the spaceship, checking on the fun-house mirrors to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to — invite kids into exciting, adventuresome play.

07/26/2009

Julia Steiny: The shame of R.I. — no equitable school funding formula
The day of reckoning is coming, General Assembly. Rhode Island can’t stay the only state in the nation without an education-funding formula. At some point the Obama administration will withhold federal funds. They threatened to do so if funding for our new charter schools was cut from the budget, so you, the legislature, put it back. Surely the new feds won’t look kindly on leaders who refuse to bother even trying to fund education equitably for all public-school kids.

07/19/2009

Julia Steiny: Unstructured outdoor play is in danger of extinction
When my kids were little, we moved to an urban neighborhood where older children played dodge ball in the middle of the block during good weather. They had rules about yelling “car” when you saw one, grabbing the ball and quickly getting to the sidewalk. The group, quite diverse in all respects, initiated newcomers and worked out their own disagreements. The boys in particular went about as a pack, settling into a sandbox for a while, riding bikes and banging together scrap-wood projects. They watched some TV at other kids’ houses — we didn’t have one — but mostly they hung out and found ways to entertain themselves.

07/12/2009

Julia Steiny: Achievement soars when kids are happy, thirsty to learn
While on vacation recently, I puttered in a motorboat along the banks of the Amazon River outside of Leticia, Colombia. Children of all ages looked up from their tasks or came out of their houses to wave and smile at us. We were four obvious gringos, not the only foreigners in evidence, but strange enough to be curiosities to the native people. The kids stared. I suppose we stared back.

07/05/2009

Civilizing offenders requires community relationships
This is the last of four columns in a series about the nation’s oldest and most mature restorative juvenile justice system.

06/28/2009

Julia Steiny: Vermont’s juvenile justice teaches kids community can help
This is the third of four columns in a series about the nation’s oldest and most mature restorative juvenile justice system.

06/21/2009

Julia Steiny: Vermont’s juvenile-justice system bucks nationwide trend
This is the second of four columns in a series about the nation’s oldest and most mature restorative juvenile justice system.

06/14/2009

Julia Steiny: Vermont’s juvenile justice system saves a woman’s life
This is the first of four columns in a series about the nation’s oldest and most mature restorative juvenile justice system.

06/07/2009

Julia Steiny: Very special kids perform a special show
I happily accepted an invitation to Birch Vocational School’s end-of-the-year production of High School Musical. I needed an up. What with all the rain, the economic collapse and clinically-depressing local news, I was sure Birch’s very special students would produce an endearing version of the Disney-manufactured teen sensation.

05/31/2009

Julia Steiny: Zero-tolerance policies in schools need to end
“Zero Tolerance is a social disease,” announces Dr. Aviva Rich-Shea.

05/24/2009

Julia Steiny: Mothering Heights — a personal story
Two Christmas vacations ago, I could hear my son Felix upstairs whooping and hollering after a phone call from a community theater in the upstate New York town where he goes to college. He’d landed the leading role. His theater professor had gotten him an audition, but the company was actually looking for a high school kid, who would be closer in age to the 8-year-old central character.

05/17/2009

Julia Steiny: The only state in the nation without a funding formula
Of the roughly 30 million dollars allocated for charter schools in Rhode Island, half of the money doesn’t go to the charters schools at all. It goes to the kids’ home school districts, to protect districts from losing the revenue the now-charter student would have generated for them — a practice known as “holding the district harmless.”