 Dear Reader:
There’s not a whole lot for middle-schoolers to do in the small, dense neighborhood of Cypress Hills, a low-income New York City neighborhood of more than 40,000 people on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, surrounded by cemeteries.
That’s why a story about a summer program victimized by budget snafus made me so angry this week. Written by former Hechinger Report intern Michael Elsen-Rooney, now a reporter at the New York Daily News, the story told why the director of a popular after-school program couldn’t open a well-planned summer camp that many students were looking forward to, one the community had fought hard for.
In New York City, some 23,000 middle school students have been able to attend free camps like the “safe, fun, experiential” one in Cypress Hills, funded through a city initiative. This year, budget cuts have made it impossible for the Cypress Hills camp to open – for the second year in a row.
My inbox is filled with pitches about how to stem “summer learning loss,” (along with inevitable back-to-school ideas), yet I keep thinking about the lost opportunity for these middle schoolers who have nowhere to go in these dog days of August.
Liz Willen, Editor
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As schools seek to better serve an increasingly diverse student population and to close racial achievement gaps, Sussex Tech offers a case study in culturally responsive practice. Its experience shows how committed educators can create classrooms where all students feel respected and included. But it also shows how hard it can be to change the culture of a school — and the mindsets of its teachers.
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Reading List
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Race to the Top laws helped to usher in a new era of data collection, school turnarounds and innovation that focused on added resources and reforms, and that sparked widespread changes to K-12 public education.
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My story is for those who, like me, had no clue how to navigate college, much less saw value in higher education — to encourage and inspire others who come from similar backgrounds: a family with drug and alcohol addiction, single motherhood, a long gap in schooling and more.
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My story is for those who, like me, had no clue how to navigate college, much less saw value in higher education — to encourage and inspire others who come from similar backgrounds: a family with drug and alcohol addiction, single motherhood, a long gap in schooling and more.
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At Youth Music — a U.K. charity that funds music-making projects for those aged 0-25 — we are guided by young people’s needs and interests. When reimagined to become more relevant to and inclusive of all young people, music education in schools can help students with the issues they face in today’s world.
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Solutions
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This week’s solutions section came from SolutionsU powered by Solutions Journalism Network and their database of solutions journalism. Search for more solutions.
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We cover inequality and innovation in education with in-depth journalism that uses research, data and stories from classrooms and campuses to show the public how education can be improved and why it matters.
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