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Education

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.”

05/10/2009

Julia Steiny: Time for charter schools to replace chronically dysfunctional district schools
A golden opportunity knocks at Rhode Island’s door.

05/03/2009

Julia Steiny: Suddenly, kids find physics a magnetic field to study
At Portsmouth High School, the number of students signed up to take Advanced Placement science next year nearly doubled since 2006-07. Furthermore, 60 seniors will be taking a fourth year of science over and above the 200 that usually did in the past. They don’t have to. The state requires only three years of science.

04/26/2009

Julia Steiny: The real school revolution is a new responsiveness to kids
The real revolution in American schools is not going to come about by collecting and analyzing more data. We already have tons we don’t use very well. The revolution won’t be a result of stricter accountability, national standards, merit pay, or any other mechanical fix. We will never overcome the legacy of factory-model schools — designed to churn out academic product called “achievement” — through more tests, regulations, legislation, or contract negotiations.

04/19/2009

Julia Steiny: UCAP cultivates strategies to correct academic deficits
This is the second of two columns about an urban middle school that specializes in helping adolescents who’ve already failed in other schools.

04/12/2009

Julia Steiny: A school dedicated to redeeming academic failures
This is the first of two columns about an urban middle school that specializes in helping adolescents who’ve already failed in other schools.

04/05/2009

Julia Steiny: McWalters worked to humanize schools
Peter McWalters, Rhode Island’s out-going education commissioner, is well known as a brilliant education philosopher.

03/29/2009

Julia Steiny: Zero-tolerance policies wreak havoc on children’s education
There are children who matter so little that no government agency even bothers to count or keep statistical track of them. They are the children of prisoners. Nationally, the justice systems have no interest in how children or families are affected by an offending parent’s imprisonment. The state ensures that the sins of the father are visited upon the son.

03/22/2009

Julia Steiny: Partnership with charter school reaps rewards for Central Falls school
The superintendent of Central Falls’ schools, Frances Gallo, is nothing if not a fierce crusader for kids. So while it’s highly unusual, it’s not bizarre that she would broker a partnership between one of her own district schools, Captain G. Harold Hunt, and a terrific charter school that happens to be in her neighborhood.

03/15/2009

Julia Steiny: Use stimulus money to achieve fair school financing formula
There is not enough money in the world to satisfy the vultures circling President Obama’s stimulus package.

03/08/2009

Julia Steiny: Hope’s challenge to ramp up students’ proficiency
This is the third in a three-part series about how Providence’s Hope High School redeemed itself from being an educational blight.

03/01/2009

Julia Steiny: Hope High a national model
This is the second in a three-part series about how Providence’s Hope High School redeemed itself from being an educational blight.

02/22/2009

Julia Steiny: Hope High School nearly triples its reading scores
This is the first in a three-part series about how Providence’s Hope High School redeemed itself from being an educational blight.

02/08/2009

Financial decision-making a great way to teach some math skills
The Biblical-size lesson of our financial meltdown is that encouraging greed to fuel an economy will take an ugly toll.

02/01/2009

Open minds key in dialogue on teachers’ compensation
What is fair teacher compensation? In a fiscal crisis, what does “fair” mean?

01/25/2009

Julia Steiny: Parental choice of schools would consolidate districts
Buried in the cuts and carnage of the governor’s supplemental budget proposal are some wonderful, long overdue, cost-saving policies. Really good ones. None of these ideas are new. Legislators have been half-heartedly jawing about them for years. But the state’s budget “crisitunity,” as Homer Simpson would say, has finally created the incentive to do a few right things.

01/18/2009

JULIA STEINY: Vocational ed pushes kids to think about their future
Good vocational technical schools understand incentives. And how to use them well.

01/11/2009

JULIA STEINY: MASSACHUSETTS’ IMPRESSIVELY SUCCESSFUL VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS
Acceptance letters to Massachusetts’ vocational schools have become sought-after prizes. Voke schools? Why on earth?