The new Fordham Institute report, Is There a Gifted Gap?, gave me a lot of food for thought this week. Let’s start with some important positives: Although gifted education research is in many ways thriving, attention to policy research has been woefully underdeveloped, and this study is a major contribution to filling that void. I’ve also […]

How important was collaboration when designing the FirstView¬Á† suite of products? Extremely. When we began to develop FirstView, we conducted nationwide focus groups asking both parents and administrators for their transportation pain points. We received meaningful feedback. The study enabled a thorough and open dialog. Administrators wanted bus tracking and easy communication. Parents gave us […]

When Kristie Autrey became curriculum director for Mitchell County School District in North Carolina, and learned the state had partnered with Learning Ally, she jumped at the chance to implement it. Learning Ally is a nonprofit library of high-quality, human-read audiobooks and a suite of teacher and student resources that integrates into the school instruction […]

Two years ago, the Mehlville School District in suburban St. Louis passed a tax levy that included dedicated funding for professional development and strategic plans focusing on middle school STEM programs. For Tina Plummer, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning in Mehlville, that meant implementing the STEM Innovator program with Discovery Education, where staff had […]

How can district administrators make more efficient, effective and strategic decisions? There is data available to support many of the decisions that school administrators make every day. Often though, it takes time to manually gather and model that data. If a project uses 80 percent of its timeline to gather and model data, that leaves […]

Parents rate family and community engagement as the most important driver of satisfaction with their child’s school—but districts frequently fail to offer them a voice in the education system, according to a recent study from Rice University. Of 7,200 public school parents surveyed, only 34 percent said they were “very satisfied” with family and community […]

In school districts across the country, administrators and teachers unions are increasingly working together to address challenges. Districts are seeking help from unions on pressing political issues, including how to address Dreamer students who are concerned about deportation after the Trump administration rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This has brought the […]

Students in seventh-grade math classes are not necessarily ready for seventh-grade math. They may be rusty in concepts taught in sixth grade, or ready for high-level applications covered in high school. That is why the ALEKS¬Á† personalized learning program from McGraw-Hill Education is an integral part of the math curriculum in Oak Creek-Franklin middle schools, […]