To engage all learners, schools must offer career-pathway courses that combine academics and deeper learning. Gene Bottoms, until recently head of the Southern Regional Education Board, describes a transformation he believes must happen in US high schools--adopting curriculums that include intellectual rigor in career and technical education (CTE)…

When disruptive or violent student behavior make their way into the K--12 classroom, the best efforts at classroom management can get derailed. The authors outline a three-part approach to addressing disruptive behavior to keep it from boiling into violence or crisis: clarifying norms and creating a safe climate; de-escalating the situation if…

The logic behind "continuous improvement" sounds simple--but it takes a skillful leader to make the process pay off. While the logic behind the popular "continuous improvement" process seems simple, the authors' study of schools using approaches based on continuous improvement revealed that skilled leadership is as important as…

K-12 educators often face the dilemma of how to respond to a student who makes a threatening statement. They must decide whether the threat is credible and the student poses a real danger, as well as how to respond to keep everyone safe. In such situations, a team of professionals often does a "safety assessment" to learn more about this…

In an era when overlapping, intersecting national and cultural identities are a reality for many K-12 students in the United States, it is schools' responsibility to nurture skills and attitudes that help students feel empowered as citizens of their local area or country as well as of other cultural groups they identify with--and of the world.…

Students in poverty need both academic and social supports. Former New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew and scholar Pedro Noguera argue that students in poverty need both intensive academic and social supports. They maintain that U.S. education policy, with its focus on academic accountability, has generally failed to grasp this dual…

Pared down standards, according to ASCD author Mike Schmoker, are the cure to the Common Core. In this provocative article, Schmoker describes how the Common Core literacy standards have largely been a "disaster"--their tangled implementation "an impossible profusion of grade-by-grade minutiae." To "right the ship of…

What matters more--grit or gratitude? University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth's research on the importance of "grit" to academic success sparked a new area of focus in K-12 education--as well as its fair share of criticism. But Duckworth, founder and CEO of the Character Lab, believes that the concept is often…

Sketchnoting--a method of recording ideas visually as one reads or listens to information that's popular in the tech world--is finding its way into K-12 education as a technique to help engagement and comprehension. Given that students on the autism spectrum struggle with comprehending and retaining information, sketchnoting might help some of…

When a school weaves social-emotional learning throughout its curriculum and culture--both helping students tune in to emotions and teaching "emotional skills" for handling difficult feelings--students and teachers thrive. Brackett discusses ways to develop the emotional intelligence of everyone in the school and lists five key emotion…

In looking at four broad factors related to teacher assignments in the Los Angeles School District--instructional load, homophily, colleague qualifications, and professional culture--researchers of urban education policy at the University of Southern California discovered three main lessons for practice: First, that teacher working conditions are…

The curriculum of K-12 schools is scrutinized, Westheimer claims, because what we teach can be a proxy for the kind of society and citizen we hope to create. People need to look closely at what kinds of citizenship skills public schools are promoting. Westheimer recommends three practices we should inject into education to prepare youth to be…

When San Francisco implemented a new policy to improve graduation rates and college enrollment, district officials realized their work was only beginning. San Francisco Unified School District revamped its college-ready graduation policy in 2009, hoping to increase the likelihood that students would graduate with the necessary courses to go to a…

The "Every Student Succeeds Act" requires that student's test scores be disaggregated by racial characteristics. Nevertheless, the author's recent study suggests that K-12 school principals may not intentionally think about race when they collect, interpret, analyze, and make decisions about data. By not disaggregating data by race,…

Miguel A. Cardona, the former commissioner of education in Connecticut, became the U.S. Secretary of Education on March 2, 2021, taking office in the midst of an historic pandemic that had profoundly reshaped the nation's schools. In his initial months on the job, Cardona- also a one-time public school teacher and principal--has focused closely on…