Back from an unannounced hiatus: Stories and essays, particularly related to education in the United States, that caught my attention this week. A 🕛 symbol indicates a metered paywall.
Rolling Stone and the Pulitzer Center produced Brandi Morin’s and Annie Marie Musselman’s feature story 🕛 on the brutal legacy of America’s residential school system for Native American children.
Jill Barshay discussed the limitations of a research study that seems to demonstrate the importance of content knowledge in developing children’s reading skills.
The American Library Association counted 2,571 book titles that were challenged in 2022—40 percent more than in 2021, thanks to organized attempts to purge whole lists of books.
But this April, voters in Illinois and Wisconsin have turned out against book-banning in school board races.
The Seattle Public Library joined the Brooklyn Public Library in its “Books Unbanned” program, offering e-lending library cards to patrons between the ages of 13 and 26 across the United States.
In Oklahoma, five years after a failed teacher walkout, conservative state legislators may be coming around to the teachers’ point of view. But some educators are wary.
The University of Chicago, one of 17 elite institutions being sued for violating U.S. antitrust law in their financial aid practices, is reportedly the first school to settle.
The effects haven’t been uniform. But on balance, it really does look like social media, especially in the age of the smartphone, are bad for young people’s mental health.
In Minneapolis, hackers appear to have stolen 200,000 files from a public school system with 30,000 students, releasing extremely sensitive student and employee records, including reports of sexual abuse.
Schools in Wisconsin use an application called the Dropout Early Warning System to identify students at risk of failing to finish high school. It may be stigmatizing Black and Hispanic teenagers without improving graduation rates.
In Hammond, Indiana—and communities like it across the United States—rail companies like Norfolk Southern park their trains across intersections, forcing children to crawl over and under trains to get to school. The federal government received 28,000 complaints last year.
Marking its 40th anniversary, James Harvey, a staffer of the commission that produced the Reagan administration’s “Nation at Risk” report in 1983, described how the political leaders of the commission doctored the professionals’ findings to portray America’s public schools as failures. Frederick Hess pointed out some paradoxes in the report’s legacy.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the 2021 findings of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Although risky sexual behavior, drug use, and experiences of bullying at school have continued to decrease, most other measures of teen wellbeing have worsened.
Cedarville University’s idea of addressing sexual harassment apparently involves shaming women for “encouraging” their boyfriends to violate their boundaries.
Blue Book Diaries 