Updates

When it comes to grades, behavior, attendance, concentration, and memory, the nutrition and fitness levels of students are inextricably linked to positive academic outcomes. Mental health supports are also important, yet schools tend to compartmentalize health and physical education from mental health supports and social and emotional learning (SEL).

Samantha had been a veteran educator for fourteen years, first as a classroom teacher and then a principal, when the pandemic shut down schools. Last year, when she learned about the then-growing learning pod movement, she thought starting one would help solve several immediate problems. 

“[My daughter] needs social interaction,” she said in an interview. “I know there’s other kids out there that need social interaction. I know there’s working parents out there that could use the support of somebody like me, and then it just snowballed from there.”

Linking an evaluation plan to your project and program planning efforts makes it much more likely that you will minimize data collection burdens, meet reporting requirements, and, most importantly, collect and use meaningful, high-quality data to guide continuous improvement. To assist state staff and other stakeholders in planning for the State Systemic Improvement Plan (SSIP), IDC developed A Guide to SSIP Evaluation Planning. While IDC originally developed the guide to help states with their SSIP evaluation planning, you can easily use the guide for any data-informed project or program planning at the state or local level.

Education policymakers and reformers have sought for many years to illuminate student needs and public schools’ performance through standardized test scores, graduation rates and other “outcome” measures. Now, there are expanding efforts to add to the education equation the myriad factors that research says contribute to student achievement. These equity indicators go far beyond disparities in test scores and graduation rates to include broader measures of student outcomes such as course completion rates, a deeper understanding of disparities in school-based opportunities to learn such as access to advanced coursework and same-race teachers, and the school and community conditions that influence student learning, including financial resources, food security, health care, neighborhood safety, and reliable internet and transit.

A director of curriculum explains how his district is teaching students last year’s and this year’s skills at the same time.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have voiced concern over a new strain of COVID-19, dubbed Omicron, that is now found in the United States and 23 other countries. Yet the playbook for school and district leaders to prevent a new wave of the pandemic is unlikely to change.

The Council for Exceptional Children and The Council of Administrators of Special Education have developed updated standards for administrators of special education.

All too many educators abandon read-alouds past elementary school, but research shows that the practice can have a powerful impact on older kids too. From teachers modeling their thinking process while reading in front of the class to parsing academic texts in other subjects, creating a culture of reading starts with reading out loud. 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, can you imagine all of the stories that one picture tells? When students are able to fully “read” images, they can understand beyond the text and delve deeply into the author’s message. Imagine close reading, but instead of text, they’re examining images. Visual literacy encompasses the ability to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media.

Over the past few years, the pandemic made online education the de-facto schooling format for nearly all Americans. While it proved viable for many, it also exposed some of the common pitfalls in the traditional online education landscape, leading to a common perception that online education formats don’t yield the same level of instruction and retention for students. However, this belief is often misguided or a direct result of imperfect execution by school systems that struggle to adapt to a virtual format.