Families are critical partners in addressing chronic absenteeism. Drawing from research, authors Thomas J. Capretta, Jingyang (Max) Zhang, and Barbara J. Boone present four throughlines and six strategies for schools to improve attendance by building trust and partnering with families. In view of chronic absenteeism's association with negative…

Kathryn Welby's case study of schools in regions of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine that have been touched by the opioid crisis yields eye-opening insights into the devastating impact the opioid epidemic has on schools. Students in these communities are experiencing serious trauma because of opioid addiction in their families, and this…

Behind every student dealing with a mental health problem is a family trying to grasp what's happening to their child and struggling to do its best. This personal story shares the journey of a family as it confronts a child with Generalized Anxiety and Panic Disorder and describes the many starts and stops and confusion of diagnosing and…

Television--public television, in particular--has come to be seen as a great educational resource for the home, but it hasn't been as widely embraced in the classroom. Thanks to a number of recent, large-scale research projects, it's time to put those concerns to rest. Not only does educational television have powerful effects on children's…

The author says it's not enough just to have less homework or even better homework. We should change the fundamental expectation in our schools so that students are asked to take schoolwork home only when there's a reasonable likelihood that a particular assignment will be beneficial to most of them. The bottom line: No homework except for those…

Some teenagers need to attend schools that do far more, in the way of providing a social-psychological home, than schools do now. These schools must take up where the family has left off. (Author/IRT)

About half of all American marriages now end in divorce. Many divorces involve children whose parents remarry and create step-relationships. Educators should help normalize the idea of stepfamilies, send communications recognizing family diversity, train school personnel appropriately, enlist the school counselor's assistance, and provide…

Since 1966, support of public schools has been damaged by widely accepted hypotheses built by Coleman, Jencks, and others on inadequate samples and faulty measurement. Describes the research of Herbert Walberg and his associates who are generating diametrically opposed hypotheses from new data. (Editor)

Debunks nostalgic beliefs about traditional family life. Throughout most of U.S. history, families have been diverse and needed more than one breadwinner. Women and children have borne the brunt of poverty, and violence and abuse were once a normal part of maintaining family order. Today, many stable, intact families depend on illegal immigrants'…

A cooperative project between middle-schoolers and elementary students makes clever use of a flight theme, and, as the author reports in this article, students' learning soars. In this project, the pilots are enthusiastic members of Ms. Herring's eighth-grade English class at Hampton Roads Academy (HRA) in Newport News, Virginia. The copilots are…

The shift to alterable variables (those that can be changed before or during the teaching and learning processes) enables researchers to move from an emphasis on prediction and classification to a concern for causality and the relations between means and ends in teaching and learning. (Author/IRT)

Since home is the most unequal environment in education, school should be an arena of equity. Alternative education can catalyze America's unrealized hopes by helping poor, discouraged youngsters overcome their most debilitating handicaps: rampant pessimism, failure to trust in effort, and mistrust of societal institutions. Doing nothing is not an…