By Melanie Hempe, After Babel (from April 3, 2024)

The most effective solutions to significant problems are sometimes surprisingly simple and yet strongly resisted. Take, for instance, the case of handwashing in 1847—a doctor's groundbreaking discovery that handwashing could effectively prevent the spread of germs was initially met with skepticism and rejected by prevailing cultural beliefs. In fact, handwashing remained controversial for four decades before finally gaining universal acceptance as a cornerstone of medical practice. Today, the adolescent screen crisis is our newest problem with a surprisingly simple and effective solution. That solution is to delay smartphones until the end of adolescence—period. Like handwashing, this solution sounds simple in concept and will one day seem like common sense, but right now, it is considered countercultural.
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By Dana Braga, Kiley Hurst, Shannon Greenwood, Nick Zanetti & John Carlo Mandapat, Pew Research Center (from April 4, 2024)

At a time when most teachers are feeling stressed and overwhelmed in their jobs, we asked 2,531 public K-12 teachers this open-ended question:

If there’s one thing you’d want the public to know about teachers, what would it be?
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By Crystal Land & Michele Williams, Independent School (Spring 2024)
ndependent schools typically fill their teams with high-performing individuals, ones who care deeply about the school and its students—and who are often fully occupied from the time they arrive at the school until late in the evening. Occasionally, at the beginning of a school year, teams will set aside some time to focus on team-building and the aspects that make teams effective. But once the year gets under way, the demands of the school day and year come into focus and the work around teams is not easily maintained. Perhaps inadvertently, we find ourselves structuring our days around the contents of our email inbox, a long and ever-growing to-do list, and, sometimes, the urgent need for crisis management. And that takes over any team-building time we might have had.
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By Sarah Mervosh & Francesca Paris, The New York Times (from March 29, 2024)
In Anchorage, affluent families set off on ski trips and other lengthy vacations, with the assumption that their children can keep up with schoolwork online.
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By Markham Held, The New York Times (from March 28, 2024)
The human hand is a marvel of nature. No other creature on Earth, not even our closest primate relatives, has hands structured quite like ours, capable of such precise grasping and manipulation.
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By Dan Rockwell, Leadership Freak (from April 3, 2024)
Culture is mortar, not bricks. Culture building is laying a bed of mortar on bricks. Culture binds people together. Culture is expressed by the way people treat each other while they do the work.
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By Brandon Busteed, Forbes (from February 21, 2024)
There is a growing discontent with American education. You can sense it swelling like a big wave, evidenced in a mix of troubling stats and trends from waning public perceptions of education to significant declines in enrollment and attendance. Students aren’t just talking about their discontent with education but walking it, too.
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By Emily Lorenz & Janet Gibbon, Gallup (from February 29, 2024)
While K-12 teaching is, for many in the profession, inherently purposeful, some leaders in education mistakenly believe that the mission-rich nature of educators’ work alone is sufficient to keep K-12 teachers in the classroom.
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By Michael Gaskell, Tech Learning (from March 4, 2024)

Remember when “big data” was the buzzword in education a decade ago? Books about big data were published, but what exactly was it? 

Big data described the large and continuously growing masses of data and the process of analyzing student performance. This became complicated, and big data was often just that, too big. In fact, shorter data sets were evidenced as effective, and I have written about the power of small wins, tracking microsteps in students progress.
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By Abbie Misha, EdSurge (from February 19, 2024)
In an era where technology and digital platforms are integral to our everyday lives, the role of digital citizenship is ever more critical. This is especially true in educational settings, where equipping students with digital citizenship skills is essential for their safe and responsible navigation of the digital landscape. On February 13, 2023, the Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy Act was introduced in the Senate. The bill is aimed at increasing media literacy education and helping students navigate disinformation, ultimately strengthening digital citizenship.
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By NAIS (from March 8, 2024)
In the months leading up to a presidential election or during other times of heightened partisanship, independent schools benefit from considering the degree to which school policies promote constructive dialogue, reinforce community norms, and ensure legal compliance.
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By Michael Thrasher, Institutional Investor (from February 28, 2024)
Endowment performance for independent schools — private, nonprofit day and boarding schools with students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade — bounced back last fiscal year.
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By The Social Institute (from February 22, 2024)
TikTok users, a third of whom are students, have been thinking a lot about Doritos lately. On February 8th, one user, celeste.aria_, posted a video about an interesting concept she recently heard about: the Dorito Theory. She explained that while delicious and loved by many, Doritos don’t provide a ton of nutritional value compared to a well-balanced meal. In the same way, many students enjoy scrolling on social media because it’s entertaining, but scrolling might not make them feel “full” mentally or emotionally after. The video now has over 126,000 likes on TikTok and a few articles written about it, proving how eye-opening the concept is and how quickly new ideas spread online.
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By Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report (from February 26, 2024)
Educators around the country have embraced the “science of reading” in their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean there’s a truce in the reading wars. In fact, controversies are emerging about an important but less understood aspect of learning to read: phonemic awareness.
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By John K. Wilson, The Chronicle of Higher Education (from March 18, 2024)
More than a half-century after it was released, an obscure University of Chicago faculty committee document known as the Kalven Report has become the center of a national debate about campus institutional statements. The Kalven Report stands for the ideal that faculty academic freedom is so precious that the mere statement of a position by the administration should be discouraged for fear that it could intimidate faculty members. Now, this same report is being abused to demand legislative and administrative censorship of the faculty.
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By Daniel Pink, The Washington Post (from February 19, 2024)
Adam DiPerna always had to hold it in. As a Spanish teacher at Gerald G. Huesken Middle School in Lancaster, Pa., he’d arrive in his classroom at 7:10 a.m. each day and cannonball into a morning that left no time for a bathroom break. He’d teach back-to-back-to-back-to-back classes until his lunch period, 27 minutes during which he also had to heat and eat the food he’d brought from home, email parents about problems and absences, and field questions from students. After school, he coached wrestling, advised the student council and chaired the GHMS world language department. Work, from grading papers to preparing lessons, spilled into the evenings and weekends he wanted to spend with his wife and three kids.
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By Christina A. Samuels, The Hechinger Report (from February 15, 2024)

By traditional measures of well-being, America’s children and teens should be doing well. Consider that:

• Over the past two decades, high school graduation rates have gone up.
• Fewer teens are taking up smoking.
• The birth rate among 15-to-19 year olds is at a record low.
• Arrest rates among teens are dropping. Youth drug use is trending down.

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By Jill Barshay, KQED (from February 5, 2024)
Psychologists have long warned that children’s lives are overscheduled, which undermines their ability to develop non-academic skills that they’ll need in adulthood, from coping with setbacks to building strong relationships. Now a trio of economists say they’ve been able to calculate some of these psychological costs.
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By Jessica Comola, ASCD (from February 13, 2023)
“Belonging” is a fundamental human need—but not one that’s easily defined. In their latest video column for Educational Leadership’s February issue, Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher ask, “What does it really mean to ‘belong’ at school?” To unpack this question, Fisher and Frey gathered perspectives from both faculty and students—and their responses shed light on the profound impact that a sense of belonging can have on overall well-being.
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By New Leaders
When former Duke University men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, better known as “Coach K,” retired in April 2022, there was no denying his incredible legacy—a 46-season career with a record 1,170 wins and five national championships.
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By Jessica Black, DRG (from February 13, 2023)
When I work with an organization looking to hire the right talent, they often talk about looking for candidates who are a “culture fit” for their organization. This is a well-intentioned but misguided approach—one that can lead to bias and prevent us from finding people who add value to an organization’s culture rather than those who just fit in. It can also get in the way of hiring someone who truly has the needed skills and experience to do the work.
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By Ben Wigert, Gallup (from December 18, 2023)
In 2024, employers and employees are heading for a relationship reset. This shift partly stems from changes in where and how people work. In 2019, 60% of remote-capable employees spent their week working fully on-site, whereas that figure has fallen to just 20% in 2023.
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By Eric Hudson, Learning on Purpose (from February 9, 2024)
When it comes to learning and teaching, AI is a design challenge, not a technology challenge.  We are making, and will continue to make, choices about what, why, and how we want students to learn in our new AI era. In many cases, this means integrating AI into coursework and teaching students how to use it responsibly. In other cases, though, it might mean purposefully and strategically going tech-free, and I wanted to dedicate at least one post to that.
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By Ian Symmonds & Associates (from February 7, 2024)
The private education sector is struggling.  You might not experience it directly at your school or college, but there are signs all around us that private education is, yet again, at another inflection point.  The writing is on the wall, from softening demand, college closures and school consolidations.
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By Anna Merod, K-12 Dive (from February 16, 2024)

Amid ongoing efforts to diversify the K-12 teacher workforce , a United Negro College Fund report finds some historically Black colleges and universities are working to get Black students in the teacher pipeline by tapping into faculty networks, establishing relationships with school districts and using financial aid as a recruitment tool.
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