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BUFFALO, N.Y. – Kids who faced daunting barriers to success in the classroom had a clear message for University at Buffalo researchers who asked them as young adults to look back on their experiences with maltreatment, homelessness and their time in school: Adults can do better. “It’s as though they’re asking us as adults not to give up on them, to stick with them,” says Annette Semanchin Jones, an assistant professor in UB’s School of Social Work (SSW) and lead author of the paper with...

Basketball superstar LeBron James continues to make offseason headlines. This time, it's for something that even 76ers fans can agree on. James' I Promise School model recognizes that a child's environment plays an important role in his or her success. A high IQ and personal initiative don't mean students will excel in the classroom, especially if they don't have support at home, don't know where their next meal is coming from or don't feel safe in their own neighborhood. James has opened...

A new movement was born out of a Tweet from a colleague that I have never met. The Empty Desk Project is the unofficial working name and our hashtag is #NoMoreEmptyDesks. We have a name, a plan to begin, and a vision for what we want to accomplish - all from a Tweet. Here is the message that began this new movement: I read and re-read Kendrea's message and my mind jumped to involving students in painting desks to symbolize students who have been lost to gun violence. I thought of an art...

“Play has become a four-letter word.” So says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek , a psychologist at Temple University and one of the authors of a new paper about the importance of play in children’s lives. The clinical report , published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommends that pediatricians write a “prescription for play” at doctor visits in the first two years of life. Years of research have shown that play is an important part of a child’s development, assisting in cognition, memory, social...

The challenge of the fast pace and the strain of living in the 21 st century is the chronic stress of keeping up with volume of information, expectations and adverse experiences that leads to stressors of daily living. Adults have become good at adjusting to and compartmentalizing these stressors. Children and adolescents however are struggling to keep up and are in fact caving under the weight of the stresses. In addition, many children lack adequate nurturing and supports needed to give...

The Center for American Progress (CAP) has a long history of advocating for test-driven, market-driven school reforms. I doubt that the CAP is ready to abandon its belief that better instruction, leadership, data-driven accountability, and choice can drive systemic improvement in the highest-poverty schools, but a recent panel discussion, which was aired on CSPAN , indicates that it is open to social and cognitive science research which argues for a more holistic approach to school...

There’s been heightened awareness and activism in recent years surrounding the discipline gap, or the occurrence that minorities — black males in particular — are disproportionately suspended or expelled relative to other racial and gender subgroups. But what’s received less attention are some of the other surprising trends embedded deep in data out of California. Black males in California public schools are suspended at a rate 3.6 times greater than the statewide average for all students,...

Gmail. Instagram. YouTube. Chances are you’ve opened up one of those apps today on your phone (and perhaps spent more time on them than you might like to admit). But earlier this week, one educational app reigned over all in the endless galaxy of apps. According to both Apple and App Annie , a website that tracks the popularity of mobile apps by number of new downloads, Remind , a school communications platform, took the #1 spot on the chart of free iOS apps. Remind’s app allows educators,...

There was just one student in the Boulder Valley School District’s teen parent program last year. She graduated in May, and and the district spent the summer turning the program’s nursery into a child care center for staff . In the Englewood district just south of Denver there were no students in the teen parent program last year, and in the western Colorado city of Montrose, the long-standing charter school for pregnant and parenting teens was newly closed because of dwindling enrollment.

Primary school students are more likely to eat a nutritional breakfast when given 10 extra minutes to do so, according to a new study by researchers at Virginia Tech and Georgia Southern University. The study, which is the first of its kind to analyze school breakfast programs, evaluated how students change their breakfast consumption when given extra time to eat in a school cafeteria. The study also compared results of these cafeteria breakfasts to results of serving in-classroom breakfasts...

Child Trends is now accepting submissions of published or unpublished evaluations, reports, or other documented information about programs, policies, and practices that schools have implemented to identify students who have experienced trauma, link them to care within the school or broader community, or foster environments that avoid re-traumatizing students. This request is part of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded project aimed at supporting the development of evidence-informed...

The clock ran out for Promise Academy in its extended battle with San Jose Unified to open a charter school this fall — a delay that reflects escalating tensions between school districts and charter school organizations in California. Over the past year, Promise won two lawsuits involving the district. It obtained a charter from the State Board of Education in January on its second and final level of appeal after the San Jose Unified school board rejected its charter application for a...