Parents and educators hailed FERPA, COPPA and the Student Privacy Pledge as significant steps toward securing student data. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that Google, a prominent player in edtech, is already violating those measures. In December, the foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco, filed a complaint with the Federal […]

A wealth of choices. Accessible at home or at school. Both fiction and nonfiction options. Those were the qualifications for new ELA software for the 37,000 students of West Ada School District in western Idaho. “We had other instructional reading tools, but they were very expensive and did not provide content at the time” says […]

Old computers may not be trendy, but as school tech budgets shrink or stagnate, many administrators try to squeeze the most life out of their aging devices. Recycling and retrofitting, and hooking up to the cloud, allow districts to delay or even abandon established schedules for buying brand-new equipment. In 2015, 8.9 million laptops and […]

By all accounts, Marysville School District in Michigan is a high-success, high-performance district. While the average state graduation rate hovers at about 78 percent, Marysville graduates 95 percent of its students. It’s a point of pride that students exit Marysville—a suburban community located 55 miles northeast of Detroit—prepared to meet the rigorous demands of higher […]

The Duval County School Board reconceived six schools to focus on early learning, autism, arts, military leadership and advanced studies. Last summer, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti spearheaded the program and boundary changes to improve low performance and offer stronger educational options to attract students back to traditional public schools. “Clearly, we have communities and parents that […]

In the name of saving money, K12 administrators are also discovering that reconfiguring grade levels offers unique education advantages. School leaders nationwide are exploring innovative group-level groupings and thinking beyond the typical K5 elementary school, grades 6 through 8 middle school and grades 9 through 12 high school model to figure out how to continue […]

Here are some tips from Jen VonLintel, of School Therapy Dogs: Find studies that show benefits. A binder of research and examples of dogs working in schools can be key to gaining the support of top administrators and/or the school board. Include insurance documents, training data, vet certificates and reports on progress made by students […]

The push to establish national academic benchmarks may have been dealt yet another blow by the Every Student Succeeds Act. Nearly two dozen states began revising the Common Core after the new law reaffirmed their authority to create their own standards. As of this writing, three states had reversed their adoption of the Common Core: […]