Joanne Jacobs
‘Proud Boys’ interrupt Pride event
Drag Queen Story Hour was starting at a Bay Area library when a group of men entered shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs, reports...
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Joanne Jacobs
Jun 13, 20221 min read
No learning loss in Sweden
Photo: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels In Sweden, which kept schools open throughout the pandemic, first- through third-graders made normal...
Joanne Jacobs
May 31, 20222 min read
More Michigan 3rd graders fail reading test
Third graders who are a year behind in reading are supposed to repeat the grade under Michigan’s “read by grade three” law, but few are...
Joanne Jacobs
May 10, 20222 min read
School board loses focus on academics
Shanthi Gonzales “Schools aren’t meeting students’ needs” in Oakland, California, writes Shanthi Gonzales, who’s resigning from the...
Joanne Jacobs
Oct 11, 20182 min read
Dean, you didn’t prepare me to teach reading
“Schools aren’t teaching reading in ways that line up with the science,” concludes American Public Media’s Emily Hanford in Hard Words....
Joanne Jacobs
Sep 24, 20182 min read
Michigan 3rd graders must ‘read or flunk’
Justin Jennings went to Purdue with a basketball scholarship — and third-grade reading skills, he recalls. With intensive tutoring help,...
Joanne Jacobs
Sep 18, 20181 min read
If schooling was as important as football
Vesia Hawkins loves football, she writes on Volume & Light, which follows Nashville schools. This year, she’s taking her young cousin to...
Joanne Jacobs
Sep 3, 20182 min read
New teen fiction genre: School shootings
Lilia Martinez, 15, a student in Michigan “estimates that of the 28 books she read over the last school year, both for pleasure and...
Joanne Jacobs
Aug 22, 20182 min read
Digital readers crave excitment
She cites cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, author of The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads...
Joanne Jacobs
Aug 21, 20182 min read
For teens, texting crowds out books, TV
For today’s teens, “time on digital media has displaced time once spent enjoying a book or watching TV,” concludes Jean Twenge, author of...
Joanne Jacobs
Aug 19, 20182 min read
Teachers may not know how kids learn to read
How do children learn to read? Most states don’t require new elementary and special-education teachers to show they understand the...
Joanne Jacobs
Aug 2, 20181 min read
Coaching works for teachers
Personalized training for teachers is effective, write Matthew A. Kraft and David Blazar in Education Next, but taking coaching to scale...
Joanne Jacobs
Jul 28, 20181 min read
Build a book: Crafting ‘Treasure Island’
Microsoft, is trying to “schoolify” Minecraft, the wildly popular world-building game. The latest idea, Litcraft, lets kids build models...
Joanne Jacobs
Jul 25, 20182 min read
How Core kids learn reading, writing
Fordham’s Reading and Writing Instruction in America’s Schools looks at how teaching has changed in the Common Core era. Middle and high...
Joanne Jacobs
Jun 22, 20181 min read
Summer reading
My husband’s grandson is turning 3. Mom and Dad requested a gift of Newtonian Physics for Babies. Here are some other ideas:...
Joanne Jacobs
May 16, 20181 min read
Are test scores irrelevant?
Students defended their Providence, Rhode Island middle school in a panel discussion sponsored by Generation Citizen, reports the...
Joanne Jacobs
Apr 10, 20182 min read
Nation’s report card shows ‘lost decade’
Reading and math proficiency isn’t improving for fourth- and eighth-graders, according to the 2017 National Assessment of Education...
Joanne Jacobs
Mar 15, 20182 min read
Parents of dyslexics: Teach phonics
Parents of children with dyslexia forced their school district to teach phonics, reports Emily Hanford on NPR. Upper Arlington, Ohio...
Joanne Jacobs
Mar 14, 20182 min read
Bilingual ed for black English?
Remember Ebonics? Worried about black students’ reading skills, Oakland’s school board declared black English to be a separate,...
Joanne Jacobs
Nov 30, 20171 min read
To teach reading, teach history, science …
Reading isn’t a “general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts,” writes cognitive scientist Dan Willingham in the New...
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