Mandatory reporting is the first step in a troubling and common cascade: Poverty, reframed as "neglect," precipitates far too many reports, with roughly one-third of children enduring a CPS investigation. Investigated families are monitored and coerced to change their parenting (usually without support for alleviating their poverty),…

Young adults today are the least happy demographic group, departing from a long-established U-shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age in many countries worldwide. The longstanding U-curve reflects the unhappiness and stress that most people experience in the midlife years as they juggle financial and family constraints while both the…

Grassroots efforts and other advocacy have led to the vast majority of states adopting policies designed to improve the reading outcomes of all children, including those who struggle to read. Whereas these policies consider various aspects of reading, much of their emphasis has been on developing word reading accuracy and fluency through explicit…

For too many educators, the idea of a morally centered school may seem like a fantasy--or be so novel a concept that it is hard to grasp. In this article, the authors describe such schools, which truly serve students' best interests by following a set of shared professional values, and how educators and their unions can help create them. The four…

In the face of systemic neglect of low-income urban neighborhoods, Hip Hop was much more than entertainment: it was a countercultural revolution embodied as a way of life bound to community action and social change. Hip Hop represents resilience, resistance, and redemption for those living on the margins; to this day, it is an art form for the…

There is a growing interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) units and projects in the early childhood and elementary years. There are many advantages of embedding math in STEM contexts and activities; it can be excellent for reinforcing math (as well as science, technology, and engineering) concepts and skills. However,…

The goals of LETRS are to build teachers' knowledge of language structure and the processes involved in learning to read words, spell, and comprehend, and then to help teachers apply these understandings in their classrooms. The LETRS courses, which are designed for teachers in grades K-3, are to be implemented over two years. In the first year of…

Recent resistance to teaching students about the history of racial power and privilege dynamics in the United States has been accompanied by a parallel resistance to LGBTQ+ studies and resources in K-12 classrooms, libraries, and extracurricular spaces. There is a very practical benefit to trusting teachers to craft lessons that integrate LGBTQ+…

The COVID-19 pandemic and recent racial justice movements have made it very apparent that our current approaches to keeping students safe and healthy in schools need major restructuring and reform. The country lacks mental health supports in many schools at a time when students need them most. Students of color are being punished and removed from…

Current federal aid allocation policies do an admirable job of targeting aid to school districts serving the neediest students. But these policies have one significant, underlying weakness: they fail to consider states' effort levels (and their capacities to raise revenue). In this article, the authors propose a new federal aid framework that…

According to Randi Weingarten, attacks on public education are not new. The difference today is that the attacks are intended to destroy it. Over the last three years, legislators in 45 states proposed hundreds of laws placing public schools at the center of culture wars: laws seeking to ban books from school libraries; laws restricting what…

Community schools are an example of a comprehensive education reform initiative that brings communities together to address many of the pressing challenges facing education today. Unlike traditional schools, community schools serve as a hub, engaging educators, families, and community partners. Open to the community during evenings, weekends, and…

In these fraught, divisive times, K-12 educators have an opportunity to make a profound contribution to students' academic, intellectual, and civic maturity by giving civil, purposeful discussion the priority it deserves. With reading and writing, discussion is a co-equal leg of the tripod of literacy. By engaging in frequent discussions of…

Coordinating meaning across sentences is crucial to reading comprehension, because sentences can take on quite different meanings depending on the surrounding context. The same need applies in a far more complex way when reading textbooks. Writers organize the material hierarchically, so readers often need to connect what they're reading now to…

Writing can improve children's speaking, boost their reading comprehension, build their knowledge, and elevate their thinking. However a reason it may be hard to learn is that without explicit writing instruction, children often write the way they speak. From elementary through high school, many children answer questions with little elaboration.…