Headlines about the negative effects of screen time may alarm teachers and cause them to worry about using digital media with early childhood and elementary school students. However, the relationship between digital media use and language and literacy learning is complex, and there are, in fact, arguments both "for" and…

As an American Indian woman, parent, educator, and scholar, the author grapples with the question of how to ensure American Indian children receive an equitable, just, and appropriate education. The creation of culturally and academically affirming schools for Native children requires educators, to ask themselves some difficult questions. Honest…

High-leverage practices (HLPs) are instructional approaches educators in K-12 can use to teach different types of learners and content. They are deemed "high leverage" because they are foundational to effective instruction, they help with managing and intervening in students' behavior, and they support successful implementation of the…

The degree to which a student expresses a reading difficulty is always an interaction between the child's opportunity to learn (due to absences, instructional quality, or other issues) and the extent of the student's reading impairment. Thus, youngsters who are provided a genuine opportunity to learn to read--including high-quality, explicit,…

Anti-bias education is an optimistic commitment to supporting children who live in a highly diverse and yet still inequitable world. Rather than a formula for a particular curriculum, it is an underpinning perspective and framework that permeates everything in early childhood education--including a teacher's interactions with children, families,…

Many families are desperate to get their kids back to school, and many political leaders agree, worried about harm to children's educations and believing that key to fixing the economy is making it easier for parents to work. But the pandemic, which is still raging, has led to one of the most politicized and divisive debates in America: Can we…

Academically underprepared postsecondary students make up a large proportion of college campuses. Recent estimates indicate that up to 70 percent of incoming students at two-year community colleges and up to 40 percent of incoming students at four-year colleges enroll in developmental courses. There has been some criticism of the effectiveness of…

Community colleges have long provided students a gateway to greater economic opportunities, primarily through two pathways: completing two years of college courses while preparing to transfer to earn a four-year degree or career training that can lead to stable, well-paying positions. Eva L. Rivera Lebrón, a professor of mathematics at…

Among the many tensions that the year 2020 laid bare, the divisions in beliefs about the continued role of racism in the United States were central. While some of these divisions were drawn along political lines, with liberals far more likely than conservatives to see systemic racism as an ongoing problem, many were also drawn along racial lines.…

As winter swept across the United States at the outset of 2018, ushering in the bitterest and bleakest days of the year, American teachers and their unions had little to celebrate. The first eight years of the decade had exacted a heavy toll, and still more trouble was lurking on the horizon. In the wake of the Great Recession, funding for public…

The McKinney-Vento Act Homeless Assistance Act, including revisions made during the reauthorization in Title IX, Part A, of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) and its implications are not as widely known as they should be among educators and administrators. The McKinney-Vento Act defines homelessness as any student without "a fixed,…

Until the last quarter of the 20th century racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but is…

Racism is a systemic issue that works alongside white privilege, a system of unearned benefits, such as obtaining financial breaks and loans, being reflected consistently in classroom curriculum, and being assumed as the "norm." Assumptions about people with light skin include their being honest, responsible, and safe. Thus, white…

Embedding discipline-specific literacy instruction within social studies content can assist a variety of students, including those with reading difficulties, to build higher-level reading abilities, increase knowledge acquisition, and improve their overall content learning. Moreover, many state learning standards already address the need for…

About one-third of children under age 8 in the United States have at least one parent who speaks a language other than English at home. And as of 2016, 9.6 percent of all U.S. public school students were identified as English language learners. It is obvious that the American student population is becoming increasingly multilingual. This trend is…