Educate

A few years ago, writer Jessica Lahey started noticing something troubling about many of her students: they were afraid of making mistakes in the classroom. She writes about this in her new book, "The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed."

Policymakers and community leaders have started to question traditional forms of school discipline like detention, suspension and expulsion because research shows that children who are suspended are more likely to drop out of school and end up in jail. And what’s more, children who are racial minorities are more likely to be suspended and expelled than their white classmates.

Some districts are ending out-of-school suspensions all together in favor of policies that consider why children are acting out and help correct misbehavior. But when a school lacks resources it may be hard to replace traditional school discipline with sensible alternatives.

Eli Hager visited a part of the country that is known for widespread poverty and troubled schools. Mississippi is one of the four states where some schools still use corporal punishment to keep kids in line. Hager recently wrote an article for the Marshall Project is called “When School Feels Like Jail.” For this week’s podcast, he spoke with ARW associate producer Suzanne Pekow.

There’s clearly a gulf of understanding between the Western and Arab worlds. A group called Bridges of Understanding wants to change that by helping middle and high school students in the United States talk with their peers in the Middle East and North Africa through video conferences.

Residents of Lower Price Hill in Cincinnati decided to turn a troubled neighborhood school into a community learning center, in hopes of battling urban poverty and crime. A new documentary follows the first year of the Oyler School transformation.

Can mindfulness reduce children's behavior and emotional challenges in school? That's what one district in Rockland County, N.Y. tried to find out.

Last week on the podcast, we ran a story about “growth mindset,” an incredibly popular educational concept having to do with motivation and self-esteem. But some people believe the craze over mindset is overblown. This week we hear from a critic.

“Growth mindset” is a term coined by Stanford Psychologist Carol Dweck. It means that students who view intelligence as pliable – […]

When students are struggling to find an answer in school, it’s tempting for teachers to want to jump in and help them right away. But research shows that a little struggle - or even a little failure - can be good for students to learn how overcome challenges.

Sports have long been an avenue for low-income students to get scholarships to college, but that might not be an option if the cost of after-school sports and activities continues to rise.

Wikipedia has gotten a lot of flak over the years for being inaccurate and untrustworthy. But in 2010, Wikimedia, the global movement behind Wikipedia, began recruiting professors from major U.S. universities to assign the work of editing Wikipedia articles to their students.