Many a mailbox is clogged with fervent appeals for charitable donations. Often, these imploring letters and brochures feature heart-tugging images of black children in need. Newly published research suggests this strategy may be quite effective at getting people to open their wallets — so long as those deprived youngsters have yet to reach adolescence. “Charitable behavior toward African American children decreases — and negative stereotypical inferences increase — with the age of those children,” reports a research team led by Deborah Small of the University of ... Read More
Children’s Books Increasingly Ignore Natural World
January 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Picture an illustrated children’s book — one that has won a prestigious award — and your mind conjures up images of furry animals, puffy clouds, and eager boys and girls enjoying adventures in the wild. In fact, our kids are entering a much different world in their earliest literary experiences — one in which nature plays an increasingly minor role. That’s the conclusion of a newly published study, which suggests these books reflect our growing estrangement from the natural environment. A group of researchers led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist J. Allen Williams ... Read More
Nonprofit Helps Duggars Memorialize Lost Daughter
December 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A year and a half ago, Kristin Ohlson told readers of Miller-McCune.com about Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a now 6-year-old Colorado nonprofit that takes pictures of babies who have died as a memento for grieving families. While some might see a tasteful picture of a mother holding their deceased child as a touch morbid, others view the black-and-white photos as an important gesture to memorialize a loved member of the family and to help the survivors in grieving. Anthropologist Linda Layne of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute told Ohlson, “For professional photographers to do that kind of ... Read More
Drawing Helps Kids Recount Details of Sex Abuse
November 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
As we have once again been reminded, the sexual abuse of children is an ongoing tragedy, one that creates multiple long-term problems for the victims. Police and prosecutors often find themselves at a disadvantage; such crimes tend to take place in private, and the victims — many of whom cut themselves off emotionally from the experience as a form of psychological self-protection — are often reluctant witnesses. So how can authorities get these traumatized kids to explain what happened in sufficient detail to bring a criminal case against their perpetrators? A 2010 study provides an ... Read More
Music Training Enhances Children’s Verbal Intelligence
October 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A just-published study from Canada suggests early music education stimulates a child’s brain, leading to improved performance in an entirely different arena – verbal intelligence. “These results are dramatic not only because they clearly connect cognitive improvement to musical training, but also because the improvements in language and attention are found in completely different domains than the one used for training,” said York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok, one of the paper’s co-authors. “This has enormous implications for development and education.” The study, ... Read More
Stop Griping About Standardized Tests
August 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It's fashionable today to hear educational policymakers say something like this: "I'm not opposed to standardized testing. I'm just opposed to the way in which standardized tests are being used." That pronouncement is typically followed with a litany of grousing about standardized tests. At a "Save Our Schools March" held in July in Washington, D.C., the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, a bevy of educational heavyweights and even one Hollywood star lambasted the No Child Left Behind law, focusing largely on its testing requirements. Here are four gripes ... Read More
Bad Teachers Improving With Help From Peers
August 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One afternoon last May, a veteran teacher in California's William S. Hart Union High School District looked back over what had been a rough year. The previous spring, she'd been headed for a bad evaluation, so she volunteered for the district's Peer Assistance and Review program. She was told she would receive up to two years of coaching — and if she didn't improve, she would be fired. "When you've been teaching for 20 years, there's a bit of a shame factor," the teacher said, asking to remain anonymous. "I take it personally. You get the feeling they're after you." But it was true, ... Read More
Chicago Charter Schools Aim to Lift Urban Education
August 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago's South Side has been beset for decades by a familiar and depressing assortment of urban ills — gangs, arson and depopulation. The commercial buildings that once lined East 63rd Street, the main business thoroughfare, have simply vanished, leaving blocks of vacant lots. Yet, Woodlawn Secondary School, a sixth-through-12th-grade charter in the heart of the community, is thriving. Last year, 98 percent of its graduates, most of whom are African American, were admitted to four-year colleges. It's an especially impressive outcome, considering that 85 ... Read More
What Would Diane Ravitch Say?
August 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In their embrace of testing, Sparks Middle School, Aspire Antonio Maria Lugo Academy and Wilmington Middle School reflect the data-driven approach to education that has dominated American schools since the No Child Left Behind Act was approved in 2001. These schools swear by their system, but it's a trend that many reformers decry, among them Diane Ravitch, the former assistant U.S. secretary of education. Ravitch, who initially supported No Child, now says the mandate for standardized testing is "part of the sickness of American education." She chronicled her change of heart in The Death ... Read More
