The Department of Education
has launched the “Hurricane Help for Schools” webpage to serve
as a nationwide clearinghouse addressing the needs of the affected children
and schools and districts serving displaced students.
http://hurricanehelpforschools.gov/
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Homeland
Insecurity -- Why Children Must Be a Priority in the
2008 Presidential Campaign
The pages which
follow focus on health, child abuse, imprisonment and
poverty. These are big issues affecting millions of children and
families. But
there are others that also must be addressed: substance abuse, homelessness,
the lack of quality child care for millions of children while parents
work, no
access to school readiness experiences for millions more, and yet
additional
millions unsupervised and alone every day after school.
To spotlight the need for smart new national investments in all
of our children,
the Every Child Matters Education Fund is waging a non-partisan
public
education campaign during the 2008 presidential race. Our goal is
to win
new investments in health, education, and social programs –
and to make
homeland security a reality for all American children and families.
Read
More |
NEW!
5/28/2008
Reading
Scores Get 'Bump' From Student Incentives, Study Finds
School-based reward programs that offer students such incentives
as cash, free MP3 players, or other gifts appear to produce improved
reading achievement across grade levels, preliminary findings from
an ongoing research project suggest. The analysis looked only at
charter schools because of the prevalence of incentive programs
there.
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NEW!
5/28/2008
If I
Could Do It Over Again: Advice From Grads
As your teen hustles through high school, he’s likely getting
loads of advice from adults as well as pressure from peers. Have
him take a deep breath and read what some recent high school grads
say they wish they’d done differently in high school. Whether
it’s study skills or sleep habits, these wise-but-cool young
adults offer sound advice.
Help
your teen learn from others’ experience >
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NEW!
5/22/2008
"Student
Volunteer Network Proposed for Kansas Campuses"
Students recently presented to the Kansas Board of Regents a proposal
for a Kansas Corps, a community-service alliance involving students
from every two-year and four-year college, university and technical
school in the state. The student volunteers could help with disaster
recovery, social-service needs such as homelessness or illiteracy,
and community development such as building neighborhood playgrounds.
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NEW!
5/21/2008
Keep the reading,
writing, and engaged learning going all summer long. Our summer
reading section has great ideas for building literacy activities
into your everyday schedule and during special summertime travels.
Browse our resources for parents, teachers, and librarians.
Pack Your Bag
for Summer Learning Adventures
The school bell may stop ringing, but summer is a great time for
all kinds of learning opportunities. Reading Rockets has packed
a "virtual beach bag" of activities for teachers to help
families get ready for summer and to launch students to fun, enriching
summertime experiences. Teachers will find materials to download
and distribute as well as ideas and resources to offer parents and
kids.
Go
to summer learning activities >
New! Summer Reading
Roundtable
Research reveals that children lose one to three months of learning
during the summer, and that the loss can be compounded every year.
Join Ron Fairchild, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Summer
Learning, and Dr. Loriene Roy, president of the American Library
Association as they discuss how to turn summer loss into summer
gain — in our latest professional development webcast.
Go
to Summer Reading webcast >
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NEW!
5/16/2008
"United
Way To Target Health, Education and Income"
The United Way of America announced that it will direct its giving
toward ambitious 10 year goals that would cut in half the high school
dropout rate and the number of working families struggling financially.
The nonprofit organization also wants to increase by one-third the
number of youths and adults considered healthy. The announcement
comes as it releases a report detailing a precipitous decline in
key education, personal finance and health indicators. |
NEW!
5/16/2008
ENCOURAGING
WALKING TO COMBAT CHILDHOOD OBESITY
May is National Fitness Month, and the Milton Area School District
in Pennsylvania is participating by having its students take part
in the annual All Children Exercise Simultaneously (ACES) walking
event, reports Jeff Shaffer in the Milton Standard Journal. The
walk was first started in 1989 by New Jersey physical education
teacher Len Saunders and claims millions of participants nationwide
and in other countries. Its premise is that children are motivated
by the knowledge that others are exercising alongside them - something
that could mitigate the near-epidemic nature of childhood obesity
in this country, where a generation of students are already exhibiting
risk factors for heart disease.
Some teachers in the
district are finding enterprising ways to engage children in physical
activity. Kara Steck, a teacher in Baugher, Pa., is having her students
measure their steps to collectively "walk" the 2,175 miles
of the Appalachian Trail.
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NEW!
5/16/2008
NEW
RAND STUDY RECOMMENDS USE OF ECONOMICS TO STEER EARLY CHILDHOOD
POLICY
A new study by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization,
could prompt a reorganization of child and human services away from
the current system that "treats" problems after the fact
in favor of investment and prevention. Using the economic concepts
of human capital theory and monetary "payoffs" from investments
in early childhood services, a host of experts that includes business
CEOs, Federal Reserve analysts, and Nobel Prize-winning economists
has called for greater public spending on early childhood programs.
Programs evaluated according to these economic concepts show, for
example, that increased investment in early childhood results in
government savings by leading to less need for social services later
in life and increased earnings by individuals - which in turn leads
to greater tax revenue for the government. "The Economics of
Early Childhood: What the Dismal Science Has to Say About Investing
in Children" aims to serve as a primer for policy-makers in
the use of cost/benefits/rate-of-return analysis in making early
childhood policy. |
NEW!
5/12/2008
"Consistent
ELL Guides Proposed"
The Department of Education is planning to tell states they must
each use a consistent yardstick in determining when a child is fluent
in English and when that child no longer needs special ELL services.
That's likely to reduce the flexibility that states typically have
given districts in assessing the progress of their English-learners
under No Child Left Behind and to have a big impact on how school
systems decide when those students are ready to leave ELL programs.
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NEW!
5/7/2008
Math
Group Tries to Help Young Teachers Stay the Course
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics are trying to ease
new teachers' transition in other ways, particularly by helping
them master new or difficult math content, manage their classrooms
effectively, and know where to go for resources. |
NEW!
5/2/2008
HOW
EARLY SHOULD EDUCATION START?
Recent research on early childhood development is inspiring prominent
scientists and politicians to argue for an unprecedented investment
in schooling that begins virtually at birth, reports Jeremy Mainer
for the Chicago Tribune. However, as decades of studies on brain
development are explored, experts have become divided on where best
to focus attention. In fact, many experts now believe some policies
popular with politicians (universal pre-kindergarten) may not reach
at-risk kids at a young enough age. Still, universal pre-K supporters
say the evidence for earlier interventions is not yet solid, while
offering conventional pre-K to everyone would help foster support
for more early interventions. Nevertheless, in theory, starting
to intervene soon after birth should help kids more because that
is when experience shapes brains. Children's brains change more
between conception and kindergarten than at any other time. According
to several studies, connections between cells in most brain areas
peak by age three, then decline gradually as experiences mold the
brain's circuitry. This doesn't mean the age zero to three period
is a magical and irreplaceable window, but studies demonstrate that
babies raised in poverty get fewer of the early experiences that
spur vocabulary growth and good social judgment. For example, in
the Abecedarian Project, a 1970s enrichment program in North Carolina
that enrolled 111 low-income African American infants, program participants
did better on reading and math tests, were more likely to attend
college and were less likely to have babies at an early age than
others. |
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