Kids, Education | featured news

Ah, back-to-school season. The rustling of leaves, the squeak of new sneakers, the reassuring sound of chalk on a blackboard. Wait, does anyone still use chalk? And if they do, is it emitting some sort of toxic dust that's dooming our children to a life of bad health and environmental despair?

The L.A. school board's decision to stop serving flavored milks on campuses is just the beginning.

A Pennsylvania mother has decided she does not want her two children to take the two-week-long standardized tests given by her state as part of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

As if the vast distributed intelligence of the Internet were seeking to drive home a theme of my last post, I just tripped across this Reuters article relating some findings from the first wave of the UK household longitudinal study. The ambitious government-funded study will follow 40,000 households over 20 years, allowing researchers to tease out how changes in income, health, marital status, educational attainment and so on affect individual well-being over time.  Reporteth Reuters:

Even as schools raise prices on meals, new guidelines under federal consideration threaten to put an added burden on an already budget-strained program.

A Tampa mother is defending her decision to stick her teenage son on a street corner with a sign that says, among other things, "GPA 1.22 ... honk if I need education."...

Only one or two out of 100 displayed a mastery of science on nationwide tests, the Department of Education said.

They don't agree with all of Amy Chua's strict, controversial methods — banning play dates, sleepovers and all grades lower than A. But setting high expectations has some value, they say. In "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (Penguin Press, 2011), Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua describes child-rearing techniques that, as she puts it, "would seem unimaginable — even legally actionable — to Westerners."

“Texas uses fourth grade reading scores to project the number of prison cells they’re going need 10 years later.”

Evidence for the long-term benefits of breast-feeding — well beyond infancy — continue to grow. In the latest analysis of the academic performance of children who were breast- or bottle-fed, researchers found that breast-fed babies scored higher on tests of math, reading and writing skills at 10 years old, compared with those who were bottle-fed as babies.