Author: studyblog

Key points: Once upon a time. For generations, those four words were an invitation. Children leaned in because a story was beginning. They would listen closely, follow the characters, and stay with the plot until the end. Today, childhood looks different. Days are fuller, information moves faster, and screens offer a source of constant entertainment. There’s an undeniable shift in our daily lives that leaves kids with fewer chances to practice the slow, sustained kind of reading that builds focus, imagination and emotional resilience. As a literacy expert, researcher, and executive director of a school for students with language-based learning…

Key points: There is a period in the school leadership journey that we do not talk about enough: the time between earning an administrative license and actually becoming a school leader. For some, that transition happens quickly because they graduate and step directly into an assistant principal or leadership role, sometimes because they are fortunate enough to have a position waiting for them. For many others, the opportunity does not come right away. Some wait months, some wait years, and some never expected the opportunity at all. For many aspiring school leaders, however, the transition is not immediate, and what…

This piece originally ran on LinkedIn and is republished here with permission. Key points: “Maybe we have too much teacher training.” That headline is a sentence I never thought I’d write, given that I run a company built around supporting teachers’ professional growth. But it has been sitting with me since I read the latest Education Scorecard report. The Education Scorecard is a research project led by economists at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Stanford. Their latest release cuts against the conventional story about American student achievement. The decline in student achievement did not start with the pandemic. It started around 2013.…

Key points: Across classrooms right now, many educators are noticing the same shift: Students are even harder to reach than they were just a short time ago. In a recent survey, teachers pointed to rising disengagement as a growing concern, with more students opting out of learning in both loud and quiet ways. Sometimes disengagement looks like misbehavior, with jokes or side conversations. Just as often, it’s quieter, with students doing only what’s required to get through the day, exhibiting minimal effort, or acting withdrawn. All forms signal the same underlying challenge. It’s easy to attribute this trend to phones…

Key points: In 2023, Bob Bolduc, the founder of Hope for Youth and Families, identified a gap in our student’s reading success here in Springfield, Massachusetts. He sought to identify a solution that would specifically support middle school students reading below grade level, and in 2024 partnered with Storyshares and HILL for Literacy to create an intensive, four-week summer literacy program. That summer, students who completed the program showed twice as much growth in their MAP scores as their peers had shown during the entire school year. The next summer, students showed the same impressive growth. Here are the essential…

Key points: On Valentine’s Day, my fifth graders broke up with King George III. They wrote him letters, real ones, with reasons, and to do it well, they had to go back into their textbooks and dig up the evidence. Every grievance the colonists had ever aired, every broken promise and overreach of power, became ammunition for a breakup that felt, to a 10-year-old, deeply personal. They understood something that day that no worksheet had ever quite managed to teach them: The colonists and the crown were done, and they could explain exactly why. I’ve been teaching fifth grade in…

Key points: Here is a lesson for you: If you wait until the first day of school to address attendance, you’ve already lost the battle.  For the students who struggle the most, summer isn’t just a break. It’s also when they lose the connection to the school community they need to stay on track. If we aren’t reaching out to them before the doors open in August, we spend the rest of the year playing catch-up. The Ecorse community faces tough challenges: unemployment, housing issues, and a lack of access to basic healthcare. Many of our students have to take…

Key points: Ameer Baraka knew something was wrong long before anyone gave it a name. Ameer grew up in poverty in Louisiana and had difficulty learning to read, but no one caught it. By third grade, he had already decided he would never amount to anything. By his teenage years, he was incarcerated for the first time. It wasn’t until his second prison sentence, in his early 20s, that an on-site teacher finally screened him, and he was diagnosed with dyslexia. More than 70 percent of incarcerated Americans cannot read above a fourth-grade level, according to the U.S. Department of…

Key points: Career-connected learning is critical for life-skills development and the middle grades are as important as any other level. While some schools have pivoted to more project-based learning to ensure that students are gaining skills beyond just the content, there are only so many skills that students can acquire in a classroom setting with a teacher and their peers. We argue that the future of high-quality middle level engagement will include career exposure and exploration with a focus on transferable skills and the development of career goals. Career connections lead to durable skills The link between career-connected learning and…

Key points: Cyber resilience in education starts at the data layer. That is because the data layer is where schools’ most important information lives and where recovery begins when something goes wrong. It includes the storage, protection, backup, snapshot, and recovery capabilities that keep student records, learning platforms, research data, and administrative systems available and recoverable. If that layer is not protected, schools will struggle to restore operations quickly. The recent Canvas ransomware incident is a reminder of how exposed education environments have become. K-12 districts and higher education institutions manage large volumes of sensitive data while relying on digital…