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Deciding whether or not your child is ready for a cell phone is just one of the many difficult decisions you will have to make as a parent. With the increasing prevalence of mobile phones, parents may feel pressured to allow their child to have their own, even if they feel they may not be ready. Before caving in to the pressure of giving a child their own cell phone, parents and guardians will want to take into consideration the following advice.

Benefits of kids having a phone.

Aside from the convenience, there are multiple benefits of children having access to their own mobile devices, more specifically, a smartphone. Five benefits to consider before making the purchase include:

Educational Support: Giving children smartphones allows them to utilize the variety of tools that are either built-in to the phone or device (calculator, voice recorder, camera) or can be downloaded from the app store (DuoLingo, Goodreads, StudyBlue, etc.) to help them succeed in their studies. They may also access free online lessons, graphics, educational videos, and more.

Increased Social Interaction: Children who have a cell phone have the ability to contact their friends and family outside of school, allowing them to further improve their social skills. If your child meets the age requirement set by each company, downloading social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram may also allow them to reach out to others and create a bond with those who share common interests.

Understanding and Taking the Role of Responsibility: Allowing a child to have their own and expensive possession, like a smartphone, can help teach them how to be responsible and take proper care of their belongings. It can also be used as a tool to teach them about money, budgeting, and the consequences of overspending. You can do so by including them on the details of your family plan and letting them know how much data they will have each month.

Safety and Security: When kids are begging to be more independent, it can be difficult for parents to know their kids are fully ready for the next stage in their lives. Smartphones can give parents peace of mind, tracking their kids' whereabouts while still allowing their child/ren to feel free. When they reach their destination, such as a friend's house, library, or other after-school activities, sending a quick text or call can also ensure that the children are safe, even when they're away from home.

Tech-Savvy: Technology continues to evolve on a nearly daily basis. Allowing kids to have smartphones may give them an edge when it comes to learning new technological skills. Allowing them to explore the phone's features may also help build their confidence when using it.

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At what age should kids get a cell phone?

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Parents should be aware of the pros and cons before allowing their children to have a smartphone of their own. It is important to follow the given advice to help ensure the safety of your child once you decide to give them a cell phone.

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‘Virtual learning is okay, but no replacement for classroom lessons’

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We asked readers in Ludhiana for their take on online teaching. Is it more effective than classroom lessons? Can it replace classroom lessons entirely? Here’s what they say:

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Meet the students thriving in remote learning

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Remote learning can suck. But these students say it’s the best thing that ever happened to them.

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, universities across the world pivoted to virtual learning, and a host of negative consequences quickly followed. Virtual learning exhausts students, exacerbates social class differences and mirrors the gender inequities that exist in in-person classes.

And yet for all its drawbacks, virtual learning has an equalizing power that is undeniable. More institutions of higher learning must leverage many of the features that virtual learning provides to reduce bias and increase accessibility and inclusion for students, and to improve learning outcomes in ways not possible in person.

In a physical classroom, the professor is at the podium and students choose their seats in the classroom. This may result in unconscious biases in both the professor and students about various students' (front row or back benchers) abilities and motivations, creating the harmful Pygmalion effect with disparate effects on learning outcomes.

In a virtual setting, the teacher and students have the same class status and, importantly, cannot elect to be in any one seat, because the technology dynamically assigns seats, and these seats also change during the virtual class. Professors can use virtual learning etiquette rules and features such as chat windows and mute buttons, as well as the raising of electronic hands (and waiting for one's turn to speak), to democratize classrooms. By using audio-only mode, teachers can also eliminate pernicious issues related to disabilities, including stuttering. Such issues are widely prevalent in in-person classrooms and harm learning outcomes.

Virtual learning also enables students to bring their full selves to the virtual classroom. In physical classrooms, professors of classes of more than 100 students find it challenging, if not nearly impossible, to know students' names, to correctly pronounce them and to use correct pronouns. In virtual learning environments, technologies can be used to show students' profile pictures, names, titles, pronouns and pronunciations. All of this enables students to bring their full identities into the open, enhancing their engagement and learning outcomes.

It also eliminates differences that hinder in-person learning. In in-person classrooms, students' races and ethnicities; physical characteristics such as height, weight and disability; personality differences such as introversion and extroversion; and cognitive differences, such as autism spectrum or bipolar diagnoses, are more visible. This can create unconscious biases that can negatively affect student learning.

In virtual classes, visible differences in these categories are reduced and, in some cases, even eliminated. For example, introverts can engage fully through technology tools, including chat windows and response buttons. Moreover, through the creative use of free virtual backgrounds, faculty can eliminate surface-level differences among students in virtual classrooms that are conspicuous in in-person classrooms.

In-person classes are, by definition, at given geographic coordinates at a given time, making it difficult for students who have full-time jobs and family care responsibilities to attend classes, reducing access for those students. Teachers can use asynchronous class recordings and transcriptions of virtual classes to dramatically increase accessibility for such students.

And that's not all. In-person events for professional networking for students and faculty entail substantial costs, such as registration fees, travel costs (exacerbated by asymmetric foreign exchange rates) and visa expenses. Virtual events, at much lower cost to both organizers and participants, increase access, previously constrained by geography and budgets, by leaps and bounds.

There are certainly drawbacks with virtual learning, but it also has a remarkable equalizing power, which can be leveraged by institutions of higher learning to reduce long-standing inequities. It is exceptionally fortunate that higher education institutions can achieve such an aspirational goal during a dispiriting worldwide pandemic. And it is upon colleges and universities to seize the moment.

And, when the pandemic crisis is over, we would be wise to hold on to the positive aspects of virtual learning that we have discovered, and to use it to create a new paradigm for higher education that is truly inclusive, unabashedly equitable and wholeheartedly accessible to all.
Raji Srinivasan is the associate dean for diversity and inclusion in the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.
A version of this op-ed appeared in the San Antonio Express News, Austin American Statesman and the Abilene Reporter News.

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The Positives of Virtual Learning That Nobody Is Talking About

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, universities across the world pivoted to virtual learning, and a host of negative consequences quickly followed.

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Countless reports warn that distance learning will negatively affect children. But many kids and institutions have changed in ways that should be preserved post-pandemic.

As Jennifer Gomez prepared for an investor pitch, the 34-year-old Brooklyn native was primarily concerned with setting up her first grader, Olivia, for school and keeping her 3-year-old, Valentina, occupied. The pitch was a significant opportunity for her start-up, and she was afraid her kids would act out when it was most inconvenient. As Olivia's eyes tracked her mother scurrying to get organized, she precociously grabbed her hand and reassured her, "Mommy, we are a team, remember?" Olivia then pulled her sister aside for a talk. She gave Valentina a special assignment: to play with some paper, crayons, and Play-Doh. Olivia then figured out class on her own and was proud to have done so. Gomez recounts that this was one of the rare moments when she felt deep gratitude for remote school. "I realized we were all learning from each other's resilience and compassion," she told me over email. "This wasn't something Olivia had learned in a classroom, but from proximity to her family and watching us all figure it out together."

Much has been written about the toll the pandemic is taking on families and educators. Countless op-eds and scientific reports warn that distance learning will negatively affect children for many years to come. Parents are suffering through work and child care. Teachers have either taken on increased responsibilities (without increased pay) by moving their classroom online, or risked exposure to the coronavirus in places where in-person learning continues.

Students, for their part, will likely have lost months of learning by the time they fully return to physical classrooms. Most kids yearn for social connection with their peers and teachers, and the pandemic has caused many of them to fall behind. Some lack stable internet access, and have resorted to sitting in the parking lot of their school to use the high-speed Wi-Fi needed for Zoom conferencing. Barred access to in-person schooling can put many American children at risk of going without meals or spending increased time with abusive relatives. The general public has begun to acknowledge what educational research confirms: These issues are the result of extreme inequality in the United States, chronic divestment from public education, and insufficient social safety nets. Remote learning has exacerbated the institutional harms that were already being inflicted on many families.
Read: School wasn't so great before COVID, either
Yet experiences like Gomez's show that our tenuous experiment with virtual schooling could have a silver lining: Some children may end up being more resilient on the other side of the pandemic. Innovating on the fly, navigating uncertainty, maintaining hope for the future, communicating effectively, and relying on networks of people and community resources to overcome challenges are just some of the skills kids are developing during this time. These types of competencies-ones that children of color have typically brought to the classroom with little acknowledgment-are part of what Tara Yosso, an education professor at UC Riverside, calls " community cultural wealth." The pandemic could usher in an increased appreciation for what students who have faced significant hardships have had to master throughout their life: developing strengths from dealing with an untenable set of challenges.

For many students, learning from home can also be healthier than in-person schooling. Deepening one's bond with parents, for instance, sets foundations for trust and empathy, bolsters cognitive development, and even increases one's life expectancy. Gary Foster, a 33-year-old K-5 teacher's assistant in Los Angeles, told me that spending more time with his 6-year-old daughter, Allison, means daily lunch dates and working together to design a space in their house dedicated to her learning. "I work far from home, and I leave home before anyone else even wakes up," Foster explained. "So Allison wouldn't see me until ... oftentimes, 10 p.m., [because] I have night classes." Another mother I corresponded with, Amy Light from Boston, said that her 8-year-old daughter "enjoys the nonstop snacks, being in her own room, hanging with her gecko, going to the bathroom when she wants, [and] chatting with me during lunch and breaks." Research suggests that strengthened attachment to parents actually increases children's self-reliance later in life, and both Light and Gomez observed that being in closer proximity to their kids made their daughters more independent.

And while many students' mental health has suffered during the past year, as the educator Erika Christakis has written, schools significantly contributed to their anxiety and depression even before the pandemic. A recent survey revealed that 43 percent of parents agreed with the statement "My child is less stressed now than before school closed." (Just 29 percent of respondents disagreed, while the rest were neutral.) Parents I spoke with expressed that teachers are more empathetic and attuned to students' mental health, even spending time in class to unpack their feelings-something they hoped will continue once kids return to campus.

When Lauren Mason Carris, a mother of three in Salt Lake City, asked her children (ages 6, 11, and 17) why they preferred remote learning, a deciding factor for them was the food. "Public-school food options are an embarrassment to our public health," she told me. "And the work required to [pack] quality meals at 6:30 a.m. [was] taxing for everyone." Unfortunately, many low-income children rely on school-nutrition programs, and the ability to cook healthy lunches and chat with one's child during the day is a privilege afforded to full-time caregivers and people whose jobs allow them to work from home. More opportunities for quality time for working-class families would in many cases improve the well-being of their children. This underscores the need for living wages, school schedules that are more in sync with work schedules, expanded child-income programs such as the newly approved child tax credit in the American Rescue Plan, the eradication of food deserts, and flexible paid parental leave at all levels of the workforce.
Read: Why did we ever send kids to school sick?
In some instances, distance learning has created more equitable conditions for marginalized students. Black mothers, for example, have posted stories on social media about intercepting racism directed at their children on video calls. Parents now have a front-row view of how teachers treat their children, and kids can learn from their parents how to advocate for themselves in a way they wouldn't be able to if they had to navigate instances of discrimination alone.

Many students with disabilities also benefit from the accommodations afforded by virtual learning. Parents of neurodivergent children, for instance, can limit sensory overload and take direction from their kids' evolving interest in subjects. Students with difficulties concentrating can rewatch recorded lessons on half-speed, pausing as needed. Disability advocates have long pushed for tech-enabled learning accommodations, only to be told that they would be too difficult to implement. That's now been proved false.

Ed-tech may be here to stay if it's able to demonstrate its long-term usefulness. Still, many will rightfully argue that an all-encompassing infiltration of Big Tech comes at the cost of privacy and the normalization of a surveillance state. Moreover, tech companies cannot code us out of a failing education system. I have written before about the threats facing young people in our techno-chauvinist society. However, the parents I spoke with said classrooms seem more organized, and students across backgrounds have developed a deeper tech literacy in just a short amount of time.

The past year has been an era of universal re-imagination, and Americans are now planning to transition into a post-pandemic world. Things will never be "normal" again, but "normal" also did not work for the large majority of people. Through the turmoil, many children have spent more time outdoors, which is crucial for healthy development. Schools have implemented flipped classrooms, in which teachers lecture less and children collaborate more. This moment has proved that educating children (and even admitting them to college) does not have to revolve around the regressive instruments of standardized testing. Educators have learned to use new tools to meet children where they are, emotionally and intellectually, rather than applying one-size-fits-all models. All of these advances can persist with in-person schooling. Thanks to distance learning, children will also benefit from increased accessibility to virtual schooling options when personal circumstances take them away from physical classrooms in the future. And schools can continue to promote a pedagogy that tends to children's social and emotional needs even after this period of collective mourning has passed.
Read: What my kids learned when they weren't in school
For generations, education scholars have bemoaned the slow pace of progress in public schooling. Americans now have a once-in-a-century opportunity to seize the benefits from a burst of radical shifts. Our ability to innovate quickly in crisis could transform into enduring political advocacy for the most vulnerable families. Having a closer view of your child's development is a gift of this unique point in history, but it should be a right. "It's really been a blessing for me to witness [Olivia] mature in this time ... She has just grown much more conscious as a person, much more empathetic," Gomez said. "From home, children can catch an inspiring glimpse into the world of adulthood and contribute more meaningfully to the household ... I see her setting goals in ways she wasn't before." America can also set goals in ways it hasn't before, and implement the lessons learned from virtual schooling as we embark on constructing a more equitable post-pandemic society.

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Virtual Learning Might Be the Best Thing to Happen to Schools

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Countless reports warn that distance learning will negatively affect children. But many kids and institutions have changed in ways that should be preserved post-pandemic. As Jennifer Gomez prepared for an investor pitch, the 34-year-old Brooklyn native was primarily concerned with setting up her first grader, Olivia, for school and keeping her 3-year-old, Valentina, occupied.

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SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Distance learning is getting disappointing marks from some educators and from the Center for Education Reform, which found that many students are not getting the feedback and engagement they need.

Having too many students at once on Google Meet or Zooming is robbing children of the opportunity to engage or get the proper feedback from teachers. That's what Karen Aronian an education expert found when analyzing remote classes at some public schools.

"We're seeing children who whether they are elevated in their learning or below in their learning and even midline, coming in way below with this type of offering." Aronian said.

She says students are competing for the teacher's attention when school districts could have hired more staff during the summer when it became apparent that they would start the fall learning online.

"That needed to be a call of action so early in this pandemic," Aronian said. "There are so many in the workforce that were newly credentialed, even retired, part-time."
RELATED: San Francisco opens community learning hubs to help students navigate virtual classes

The Center for Education Reform in Washington D.C. releases a yearly Parent Power Index in which California scored a D in the area of digital and personalized learning because last April when schools went online the state lacked laptops and WiFi hot spots to connect all students from home.

In a study done by the center, they also found that parents across the country have not been given the opportunity to make decisions that affect their children during the COVID-19 response.

"There were very little opportunities for parents to say well hold on, have you thought about the fact that we have to work as well or we're all going to be in the same house working." Michael Musante, from the Center for Education Reform, said. "Those decisions were made very high up and handed down."
App users: For a better experience, click here to view the story in a new window See more stories and videos about Building a Better Bay Area here. If you have a question or comment about the coronavirus pandemic, submit yours via the form below or here.
Handed down to parents, some of whom responded by creating those academic pods, while those who can't afford to join one, tend to fall even further behind.

Get the latest news, information and videos about the novel coronavirus pandemic here RELATED STORIES & VIDEOS:

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Online classes don't offer same benefits as in person learning, experts say

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SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Distance learning is getting disappointing marks from some educators and from the Center for Education Reform, which found that many students are not getting the feedback and engagement they need. Having too many students at once on Google Meet or Zooming is robbing children of the opportunity to engage or get the proper feedback from teachers.

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5 Advantages of Online Learning vs Traditional Classes

Online learning enables students to take courses on a computer from anywhere in the world. E-learning has given students freedom and customization options that make online learning a great alternative over the more traditional classroom environment. There is an increasing number of people who take courses online. According to a 2015 report from Babson Survey Research Group, the number of students who are enrolled in eLearning courses grew 5.8 percent, and this number has grown annually for the last 13 years.

There is a general misconception that Online Learning is easier than traditional learning. Students are still required put in as much effort, time and energy when taking courses online.

Here are 5 advantages of taking courses online when compared to studying in a classroom setting:

#1 - You can learn whatever you want

No matter your age or educational background, online learning allows you to take courses on any topic you are interested in. You can also use it to learn new technical skills that are especially helpful if you want to increase your chances of landing a job or advancing in your current career. Most online courses typically don't have admission requirements, such as GMAT Scores, SAT Scores or Academic Transcripts, which make them very accessible. Online learning has become a great medium to acquire in-demand industry certifications, such as the FMVA® Certification Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA)™ designation study from Georgetown University shows that by 2020, 65 percent of jobs in the US will look for candidates who have advanced education.

#2 - Learn at your own pace anywhere, anytime!

Unlike in a traditional classroom setup, online learning allows you to study wherever and whenever you want. You don't have to deal with commuting and heavy traffic, and you can study from the comfort of your home if you want to. Taking courses online gives you the option to study in a setting that is most conducive for you. Whether it's in your room, in the library, at a coffee shop or the park, all you need is a laptop or tablet with a reliable internet connection.

#3 - You will learn technical skills

If you want to learn applied technical skills, online learning is a great place to enhance them. When studying online, you are challenged to step outside your comfort zone and explore all the features of digital learning such as downloading materials Financial Modeling Download , interactive quizzes, and hands-on exercises on your own. All of these learning materials provide an optimal learning experience for technical skills, that generally require practice and repetition to master. Practice makes perfect, and you get a lot of practice through online learning.

In the digital age, learning technical skills will help you stay updated and be a more viable candidate for future hiring managers. According to the 2017 Career Advisory Board tech skills survey, 60 percent of employers said that most job applicants don't have the tech skills that they need for their careers. Also, half of the employers said there's a tech skills gap in their employee base.

CFI's Excel Crash Course and Advanced Excel Training Course will help you master the necessary Excel skills required for jobs in various fields.

#4 - There is less pressure

Students have different ways of dealing with pressure in schools that create a competitive environment. The bad news is, some people can't handle the pressure in the traditional classroom setup. According to a 2014 article by Amy Novotney for the American Psychological Association, students have been exposed to increased risks of anxiety, depression as well as suicidal thoughts. Between 2012 and 2013, almost half of the students who participated in the survey revealed that they attended counseling sessions for mental health concerns. With online learning, you can have interactions with classmates and instructors in an environment that is suitable for learning and not for competing with others.

#5 - It costs less

An average graduating student has college debt that reaches over US$37,000, in the USA. Learning in the traditional way means you will pay for the classes, accommodation, meals, activity fees and books. Online learning comes at a much lower cost since you don't have to pay for things such as paper handouts, classroom space, desks, chairs, and other supplies.

Additional Resources

The Corporate Finance Institute offers the online courses that can be taken on-demand from anywhere in the world. Here are some additional resources to take a look into:

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5 Advantages of Online Learning vs Traditional Classes

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Online learning enables students to take courses on a computer from anywhere in the world. E-learning has given students freedom and customization options that make online learning a great alternative over the more traditional classroom environment. There is an increasing number of people who take courses online.

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Online School vs. Traditional School | Which is best?

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Online school benefits students seeking a flexible schedule and personalized learning in a safe setting. See how virtual school can fit your family's needs.

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As we know, our world is in crisis. We are in a time where everything normal seems non-existent. Stores are closed, people are sick, and education is going completely online for the rest of the semester.

Being from the north, when I heard the news that students should not return to campus and that they should complete their work online, my heart shattered. Tuscaloosa has become my home, and I wanted nothing more than to finish my freshman year the same way I started: in a big lecture hall with all my friends and that one professor we all love. Saying this, many students are not as connected online as in person.

To start, it is easier to engage in person than through your computer. As much as a student may try, there will always be distractions right at their fingertips. When at home and not in a school setting, people tend to unwind and become lazy since they have the comfort of their own property. Online learning requires much more discipline and self-motivation to stay on task. Students have to take time to study and apply what they are learning without being in the setting of a classroom.

And, some classes just cannot be taught online. Science classes are a great example, as it is often necessary to complete a lab to understand the material. This is not possible to do in most homes, and it makes science extremely difficult for students to comprehend through a screen.

Face-to-face learning also lends a hand in organizing students and their studies. They are given the ability to interact with their instructors and other students. Yes, face-to-face learning still requires self-discipline, as students are still required to go to class and participate. However, even if students do not have much self-discipline, they still have the ability to simply go sit in lecture and listen to their instructor.

All in all, online learning makes it harder for students to learn as their traditional educational environment is pretty much gone. The workload is completely up to them to complete, and they are expected to act as if they are still in their normal classroom.

I find that most of the time on the University of Alabama campus, students complete their work in coffee shops, libraries or even outside in the fresh air. With the outbreak of the coronavirus, many students are unable to complete their work in these environments.

I am from New York - one of the many states during this time that are in lockdown. This means that any non-essential stores must be closed, including libraries and coffee shops. In addition, sitting outside is really not an option in snowy weather. I find that completing my work inside my household is extremely distracting and I believe it will further impact my grades for this semester.

Face-to-face learning is truly not an option at a time like this. As students, we will have to get used to online learning. We can only hope that once August begins, everything will be back to normal.

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Face-to-face learning is better than online

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As we know, our world is in crisis. We are in a time where everything normal seems non-existent. Stores are closed, people are sick, and education is going completely online for the rest of the semester. Being from the north, when I heard the news that students should not return to campus and that they should complete their work online, my heart shattered.

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The debate between online learning vs. traditional learning is growing each year, and its relevance has only increased for 2021 with unprecedented amounts of people now learning from home.

The National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Department of Education revealed that in 2018, nearly six million students were enrolled in online learning courses at degree-granting, post-secondary institutions in the U.S.

Furthermore, in 2020, about 70% of the world's total student population was affected by school closures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The global eLearning market, which was already witnessing massive growth, only grew in importance. There is an unprecedented necessity for students to be able to take part in forms of online learning, and more people than ever-students and teachers alike-are curious about the differences between online learning vs. traditional learning.

While remote or online learning offers students incredible flexibility and the ability to learn on-demand, post-secondary institutions that provide online eLearning courses also stand to benefit from increased recognition in new markets or countries, as well as a larger student base from which to draw revenue.

At the same time, it's also evident that traditional learning methods involving in-person teaching and hands-on training from an expert will always be necessary in certain circumstances.

That's why we interviewed Dr. Sarah Glova, the founder of Reify Media, a digital media company that builds eLearning content. Glova helped answer our questions: What is the best method for course delivery? Why should I choose online learning vs. traditional learning?

Glova has a Ph.D. in Instructional Technology and has taught both online and in-person at North Carolina State University. She's spoken internationally to educators and businesses about online education, active learning strategies and how to engage the adult learner.

In this article, we'll explain the key differences between delivering online vs. traditional learning, highlight the pros and cons between offering your learning content online or in-person, and hear from those who have taken online courses to successfully pivot in their careers.

What Is Traditional Learning?

Traditional learning almost always involves a 'sage on the stage': the teacher who communicates in-person with a group of students in a brick and mortar facility. This method of learning typically involves students gathering in physical classrooms during a certain timeframe with the purpose of learning about specific topics or to gain specific hands-on job training and experience.

The curricula and lessons are typically based on a standardized and government-approved textbook, which the teacher and students work through.

"There will always be a place for in-person learning," says Glova.

"At the end of the day, we have to consider what's best for the learners and content. There are some things that we're just going to have to teach in person," Glova says.

"I appreciate that the pilots who are flying me across the country have some in-person training experience. I appreciate that the experts who prepare my food in the restaurants I eat at have some in-person training experience. There will always be opportunities for in-person learning," Glova says.

The Advantages of Traditional Learning

Face-to-face learning: Learning in-person allows students and teachers to get to know each other much better. Teachers can pick up on physical queues and nuances that might typically go unnoticed in an online setting. Most importantly, interacting with a teacher face-to-face allows students to build an intimate sort of trust with the educator.

"In an in-person format, I'm very focused on the time I have in front of my participants," Glova says.

Creates good routines: For many children and young adults, the discipline of following a daily school schedule establishes important routines and sets them up for success as a working adult.

Hands-on examples: Educators have the opportunity to provide students with real life examples they can touch and interact with. This is a crucial element for hands-on learners.

Teaches good social skills: The idea of being put into a class with people of all different backgrounds and personality types allows for countless social opportunities that you won't necessarily experience in an online format.

Better for physical health: Students are way more likely to get physical exercise if they have scheduled time carved out each day to do so, or have a campus gym nearby.

The Disadvantages of Traditional Learning

Inflexible hours: Teachers and students might find the strict schedule of an educational institution difficult to maintain if they have multiple jobs or other commitments.

Commuting: Driving back and forth to an educational facility every day can take up a lot of time for both educators and learners. Getting to and from school can require a lot of time and money spent on gas, vehicle maintenance, or public transit.

Larger student loans: Piggybacking off of the last point, the loans taken out by students who take part in traditional learning in-person will generally be much greater due to living costs (residence or off-campus), commuting, and more expensive tuition.

Passive listening: When educators deliver a lecture or lesson in front of a classroom of students, those students may end up only listening passively, which causes the potential for disengagement to skyrocket.

What Is Online Learning?

Online learning is exactly what it sounds like: learning that takes place in an online format. Online learning typically involves a teacher uploading tailored content onto a learning management software (LMS) and sharing it with their class digitally. The learning content can be accessed on devices that are connected to the internet.

This online learning content can be accessed at any place or time, meaning that students don't all need to be in the same physical place to take the same course.

In many cases of online learning, students aren't directly interacting with the teacher or faculty. Many LMSs offer students the ability to interact with teachers via chat rooms, forums, or email. Some LMSs also offer live online streams where students can engage with the teacher as they instruct on the course in a live setting.

A healthy chunk of the online learning industry is typically geared to working professionals looking to continue their education or pivot careers entirely.

Some popular online learning platforms include Udacity, Skillshare, MasterClass, and Coursera.

However, more and more colleges and universities now offer undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral-level courses and programs conducted entirely online.

Creating an Online Course vs Teaching in Person

It may surprise you that Glova, who founded a company that creates online courses, didn't always think highly of online learning.

"I was actually resistant to the idea of teaching in the online format. But once I taught on the online format, I learned about all the different affordances that are offered for that medium," Glova explains. "I still love teaching in person. I think what's important to recognize is they are two very different formats. It's much more than taking your in-class or in-training assets and making them digital, that doesn't constitute an online course."

Glova says educators have to consider how your participants or students are going to be interacting with the course content, its instructors, and with each other.

"It's different online. But that difference is not a bad thing, just like with any choice, there are pros and cons. You have to be intentional about considering each," Glova says.

The Advantages of Online Learning

On-Demand: Participants can access the learning content whenever it's best for them. The teacher can also give the participants control over when and at what pace they see the content and at what pace they access the content.

"Whether [the students] do a deep dive into content to get a better understanding, or skip over some resources and focus in another area, it's really giving that control back to the participant," Glova says.

The ability to collaborate on content: Another major advantage to online learning is the ability for the class to collectively curate and collaborate on content in the LMS hub. Glova explains how she asked her students to help build out the resources she needed for course topics.

"In an online format, you can create really robust curated libraries of content. You can tag them and organize them in ways to make it really easy for the participants to find what they're looking for," Glova says.

"I remember developing one online course and instead of going out as the instructor and finding all the resources I needed to teach a topic, I actually made it a challenge for the participants," Glova elaborates. "I said, 'go find resources related to these different topics and choose your favorite ones.' So with the participants, I built this curated library that they had a hand in creating."

Modern medium: Many students and working professionals are on their laptop, tablet, or smartphone for a large part of the day. Vast amounts of content and information are accessed through the internet nowadays. Online learning provides students with the ability to absorb information using the technological medium or platform that's most effective for their style of learning.

"When I switched to teaching online, I found that I used so many different media formats," Glova shares. "I was using podcasts and videos, and I was having students create videos. You just get opened up to so much more technology in different media formats."

The Disadvantages of Online Learning

The course creator is responsible for building community: It can be isolating learning by yourself. Without the opportunity to regularly interact face-to-face with your classmates and teacher, you can certainly miss out on the benefits of becoming part of an in-person community.

"I think the biggest drawback in the online space is if we're not intentional about creating a community, it can be so cold and isolating," Glova says.

Content requires reformatting: Some online instructors don't always take advantage of all the functions that an LMS has to offer. Instead, they simply offload all of their course content into the LMS and call it an 'online course.'

"That's one of the biggest risks that we see. If instructors and professionals are just taking their learning assets into a digital space and calling it a course, that's really dangerous," Glova says. "When we're not being intentional about how the participants are going to be involved with that content, then can we even call it a course?"

Monitoring and maintaining student focus: It can be extremely challenging to focus for long periods of time if you're not in the same room as the teacher and required to give your undivided attention. It can occasionally be challenging for online educators to monitor their learners and accurately determine who is engaged and fully participating in their class.

Lack of LMS faculty training: One thing Glova has identified throughout years of teaching and researching at NC State University was a real lack of LMS training for faculty across the country. Glova says that this is due to a shortage of resources at many institutions, meaning that teachers never fully get trained on how to properly move their course content into an online space.

"That's when we start to see courses that aren't effective. Students aren't focused on the learning objectives, they're focused more on the technology. Or they're in a course that's much more like an online resource library and it's not clear how they interact with content. With that, only basic information is memorized and lost after the next semester because it wasn't interacted with in a way that students are able to remember it," Glova explains.

Cheating: Do you actually know the answer because you studied and retained it? Or did you just search the question online and forget about it immediately after you input the answer?

Comparison of Online Learning vs. Traditional Learning

Since there are a number of elements of online learning and traditional learning that stand in contrast with one another, we figured it might be helpful to see a visualization of them side by side to help determine which method of educational delivery works better for you.

Learn anywhere with an internet connection

Learn in-person in a physical setting

Access content anytime you choose

Adhere to a schedule

Limited socialization and sense of community

Interact with teachers and other students in the classroom

Virtual interaction with course content

Hands-on learning

Employs contemporary technology that comes naturally to students

Conducted in person using means that most educators are familiar with

Nanodegrees and New Careers

Due to the rise in popularity of online learning, many are forgoing traditional learning environments to get the convenient career training they need, exactly when they want it.

In the U.S., the average job length is 4.6 years and 20% of workers are in a temporary position, according to Forbes. These short-term career stats are showing that more and more people are holding multiple positions in a number of jobs throughout their lifetime.

Leading online learning platforms like Udacity offer 'nanodegrees' that allow learners the ability to land jobs, promotions or pivot careers in emerging fields like AI or blockchain, for example.

Well-equipped, working professionals, many of whom already have diplomas and degrees from post-secondary institutions, often don't have time to go back to school full-time. Nanodegrees or online learning courses tailored to job-specific training and knowledge can ultimately offer the best option.

Online Learning Success Stories

Jamie Cambell went to the University of California, Berkeley to get his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science. But in order to pursue his career as a cyber security specialist, he still needed some extra training after getting a Ph.D. from such a prestigious university.

Jamie ended up taking some specific online learning courses to land a much-coveted job at Google as a security engineer.

"To be a specialized security engineer in a Fortune 500 company (Alphabet) means you need to be a bit 'extra.' You must go out of your way to pursue extra training, develop a skill set that fits a certain niche," the cybersecurity expert and founder of GoBestVPN says.

"Anecdotally speaking, I've seen many of my colleagues who had taken the same route as me - a mix of both [traditional learning followed by specific online learning] can go a long way."

The same trend is occurring in the UK as well.

Corinne Card is the co-founder of Full Story Media and the former marketing manager at atom42 in London, England. She attended the University of Cambridge and University of Sussex, but still needed to take some online courses to pivot careers.

"In 2017, I decided to leave my job and start my own company, but I didn't have experience running a business or time to go back to university or college. Instead, I did an online course with FutureLearn about how to start and run a company, and it was really good," Card says.

It didn't take her too long either.

"It took eight weeks because they drip-fed the content but the total time needed to actually do it was more like eight hours."

Vicky Shilling was also able to completely pivot jobs largely due to the help of some online courses, and says it was a "total game changer."

Shilling now runs the successful health and wellness coaching resource The Flourishing Pantry.

"I did No Bull Business School's Blog School back in 2016 and it totally changed my life. I was working in the music industry in London before I did the course, in a job that I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with. The Blog School tools allowed me to build my own blog and start following a passion in health and wellness," Shilling says.

"I now coach wellness entrepreneurs to set up and run their own businesses, run a series of retreats called 'The Reset,' and continue blogging and working with brands, focusing on helping entrepreneurs to eat and live healthily."

Do you prefer online learning or traditional learning? Have you ever taken an online course to pivot careers? Or maybe you've developed an online course!

Do you have an online learning or eLearning course you need a voice actor for? Sign up for a Voices account today.

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Online Learning vs. Traditional Learning: Considerations for Educators

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The debate between online learning vs. traditional learning is growing each year, and its relevance has only increased for 2021 with unprecedented amounts of people now learning from home. The National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Department of Education revealed that in 2018, nearly six million students were enrolled in online learning courses at degree-granting, post-secondary institutions in the U.S.

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A lot has changed in the world during the pandemic including how students learn. Although doing virtual school is necessary and a good idea to keep everyone safe, I think that it's much more challenging than having school in person.

One thing that's nice about being in a classroom with a teacher is that you can ask them questions and get help when you need it very easily. This isn't the case when you're online though. Instead of easily asking a quick question, students have to send an email to a teacher which causes them to have to wait a while for an answer since the teachers are busy and aren't always checking their emails.

And even if you have time during a Zoom call to ask your question, it's still a lot harder to communicate with your teacher since there can be problems with technology on both ends and it's more difficult for teachers to see a message in chat or hear a student talk if there are multiple people that have something to say.

Another reason that online school is harder is that it's easy to lose focus. In a normal school setting, you wouldn't be allowed to have your phone out and are constantly being watched by a teacher. Being in a classroom environment also tells your brain to be more focused.

Although, when you're in your own home with access to technology and other distractions, it's easier to lose interest in your school work and start doing something else that's less productive. For example, when a student is having asynchronous or even synchronous time with their camera turned off, they could easily get on their phone without anyone knowing.

And even if you try to stay focused and keep your room free of distractions, your brain might shut off a little bit since it associates being home with relaxing and not working. With no one to hold you accountable, it can cause you to care less about your work.

But virtual learning isn't just hard for students. It affects teachers as well. If a teacher isn't comfortable with using certain platforms such as Blend or Google Drive, then this can affect their ability to easily teach their classes.

It can also be stressful to constantly be having to create lessons that work for students whether they are synchronous or asynchronous. They have to change the way that they've always done things and it can be frustrating which could negatively affect how they teach things to their students.

One argument that could be made is that you don't have to move around as much and that it's easier to get your classes without having to wander around the building trying to find your next class.

Although this is true, I don't think that this makes being home and doing school any easier. In fact, when you're not moving around as much it can cause you to become more tired and again, less focused.

It can also be stressful to try and get to your next class Zoom meeting because sometimes you can't find the link, or your computer is being glitchy or having problems. This can cause students to miss important information in the class or be confused about the material.

Although it is necessary, online school is much more difficult than having school in person for both students and teachers.

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Virtual learning is harder than in-person learning

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A lot has changed in the world during the pandemic including how students learn. Although doing virtual school is necessary and a good idea to keep everyone safe, I think that it's much more challenging than having school in person. One thing that's nice about being in a classroom with a teacher is that you...

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Facts: Is Online Learning As Good As Face-To-Face Learning?

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With schools and classes forced online nowadays, you may be wondering, is online learning as good as face-to-face learning? We answer that and more here.

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Virtual vs. In-person Learning: Students debate pros, cons
Written by Sophia Hysaw, Opinion Editor & Staff Writer
As many schools around the world have begun a new year of learning, this year brought an obstacle no one had anticipated - the decision to send kids back to school or keep them safe at home staring at a screen.

Although some complications may come into play while attempting to learn solely through technology, it is not as dangerous as going to school with only a mask and the hope that everyone keeps their distance from one another.

With a pandemic among us and cases being reported at an alarming rate in Wisconsin, the most effective thing to do would be to stay home and avoid the general public. Going to school could jeopardize the health of many. In fact, within the first few weeks of school, Kenosha Unified School District had 39 positive COVID-19 cases districtwide as of Oct. 7 - seven at Indian Trail High School - and more than 700 students and staff out on quarantine.

Sending kids to school just to send them back home the next day and going on and off every week isn't very effective, and will most likely increase the number of cases as well. If everyone could do online schooling for the time being, then there might be a high chance that the spread of the virus would slow down, which would result in everybody being able to go back to school without possibly risking their health.
Written by Elly Herrick, News Editor & Staff Writer
Sure there might be problems with connection during class calls and technology issues much more often than the following school years, but whether in school or online, the majority of assignments are online anyway. Although slow internet can get annoying, it's a simple small sacrifice that could achieve a goal everyone wants.

No matter what choice you made for your schooling, this year will be filled with challenges that many have never had to face before. Though one of those challenges should not have to be the struggle of trying to protect one's health and the health of others.

Sitting on your bed while you do school seems like a dream, but for some it can be a nightmare. Ever since KUSD decided to offer the option of going in-person or online, a lot of students and parents have argued the issue.

For some students, it can be hard to focus on online, since learning at home could be new to them. There's not a whole lot of accountability either; not to mention how easy it is to cheat on tests.

When students don't see each other, it's much harder for students to interact and learn communication skills. Studies have shown that about 80% of employers look for communication skills. It's difficult to communicate and see a person's non-verbal expressions by looking at an icon.

With no paper handouts, it also affects the student's ability to memorize content. Typing and writing something down on a piece of paper are two very different. A person can't learn how to spell by just looking at a dictionary, they have to put in the work, memorize and practice.

Even when students are present and ready to learn, technology issues are bound to happen and disturb learning. Going through both in-person and online, I prefer in-person. In my in-person classes, students are very respectful with masks, and teachers don't budge on safety precautions.

While in-person is risky, KUSD is taking precautions, and it's up to students whether or not they follow them (no matter how many times the staff tells them to pull their mask up.)

For some kids, school is their only escape from home, whether they need to attend because of a bad home life or because they to see their friends every day. It's difficult to make friends when everyone has their camera off and there is not a lot of time to talk to people, plus whatever you say will be heard by the whole class. If there is class time leftover, some teachers dismiss class early. Kids with a tough homelife will take any opportunity to leave home, but when their seven hours of school is at home, it may be hard for that child to ever get out.

No one should feel pressured to go into an unsafe environment, but what kind of quality of learning are you getting through a screen?

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Virtual vs. In-person Learning: Students debate pros, cons of each

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Written by Sophia Hysaw, Opinion Editor & Staff Writer As many schools around the world have begun a new year of learning, this year brought an obstacle no one had anticipated - the decision to send kids back to school or keep them safe at home staring at a screen.

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How Effective Is Online Learning? What the Research Does and Doesn’t Tell Us (Opinion)

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Research suggests on average students don’t learn as much online, particularly if they are already struggling, writes Susanna Loeb.

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With ever-changing landscapes and new global challenges, educators and learners around the world have had to adapt. In this new era, connecting with friends and family had to happen over WhatsApp, FaceTime, or Zoom, and so education has followed suit.

There's no denying that digital learning is a valuable asset - and online education certainly has its merits. But, when the world returns to normal, will it still come out on top? Or can nothing really beat meeting face-to-face and learning in a classroom? Let's explore the research.

Online learning makes education accessible

The emergence of online learning has 'disrupted' the education system. Schooling has traditionally happened in person, which has had limitations for individuals unable to attend. So, the most obvious benefit of offering learning opportunities online is that you open education up to many more people.

Digital education facilities have enabled many learners to gain qualifications and even retrain for new careers at any stage in their life, by offering online learning courses that can be taken over a long period of time. This opens up formal education for those who can't leave full-time employment or other commitments to attend university, allowing them to study and achieve at home and at convenient times.

Scientists looking at the effectiveness of distance learning found that in some studies, distance education students performed slightly better in exams and grades than traditional classroom students, but that overall the average performance outcomes weren't that different. This research also recognized an important opportunity for foreign language students. Interacting with native speakers is a proven method for achieving language competency, and online platforms can connect students easily with native-speakers in another country.

In classrooms (virtual or physical), technology offers teachers novel ways to explain things. Technology has also amplified the role of gamification, also known as play-based learning, in online education. Gamification is often seen in the use of language-learning apps, which enable the user to learn the lexicon of their chosen studied language through a series of virtual contests which have instant rewards. The obvious benefit of these apps is the potential for individuals to learn at their own comfort and pace.

But digital it has its limitations too

Delivering online learning requires different approaches and skills to delivering lessons in a physical classroom. Particularly this year, traditional classroom teachers have had to adapt and learn themselves, in order to teach students online. This could well have slowed down the progress of education, particularly as students also had to adjust to learning online.

For online or remote learning to work effectively, the content of the course being delivered has an impact on the student's progress, and the content has to be of a very high standard, tailored to the online learning environment. Much like a successful physical class will have taken a great deal of preparation and an understanding of in-person teaching theory and best practice, the same is required of digital education.

Interactivity is key in a learning environment. A key barrier to learning, identified by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is a teachers' ability to connect with students and identify their needs. This can be harder to achieve without time spent in the physical classroom, particularly if online learning is delivered to a large class rather than in small tutored groups or one-on-one environments.

Plus, where students don't have access to technology or are learning at the mercy of a poor internet connection, issues connecting to live video conferencing can leave them at a disadvantage. Digital skills are also not distributed evenly among students, and not all learners will have the required knowledge or understanding to get the most out of virtual education. If teachers don't have the skills or time to support this skill development, students may get left behind.

In-person classes also have some drawbacks

Where students live and their socio-economic background can be a barrier to accessing education. With in-person class sizes capped to the capacity of the school and many schools only taking students who live locally, exclusively offering teaching in person will exclude some groups of individuals from learning. This is particularly true where education is not made freely available.

Though it has been the traditional way of learning for decades, some students' learning style does not suit that of a full classroom. Many find speaking out in front of their peers intimidating and this limits their interaction and opportunity for valuable feedback. These students may find it easier to participate in class discussions when activities are hosted digitally.

But face-to-face learning wins out in the end

In the classroom, a teacher's value extends beyond the class being delivered. To get the best out of their students, a teacher's role is also to motivate, encourage and supervise - the latter being particularly difficult to do through video conferencing software. Technology can even be brought into the classroom as an effective supplement to in-person classes. For example, including animations, video content and game-based learning allows students to experience several of the benefits of online learning tools, and is more effective than online learning used exclusively.

Interactivity, personalization and effective communication are key ingredients for successful learning. You can't beat the classroom as an environment for providing valuable feedback. Research has identified two-way dialogue as one of the most effective ways of communicating, and it is particularly important in education. This is learning with plenty of back-and-forths; education built on questions and answers - easiest achieved when in the same room. In a classroom, it has the potential even to go beyond teacher-pupil dialogue, with student-to-student and group learning interactions.

But particularly when learning a language, students often achieve the best results when learning in person - not just in a classroom, but also when living in the country whose language they're embracing. Learning during a study abroad program or working in another country accelerates the rate of language learning and improves a learner's language proficiency.

Culture is an important and enjoyable part of language learning; language and culture are tightly entwined and understanding the culture helps you to understand the roots of the language as well as its use on a deeper level. It changes the motivation of language learning to connection instead of learning for a purely functional purpose such as for career success. It's even been shown to deepen a student's sense of 'self'. And the best way to connect with the culture of the language and those who speak it, is to learn whilst embedded in amongst native speakers.

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Online learning vs. in-person classes - what's better? ‹ GO Blog | EF United States

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With ever-changing landscapes and new global challenges, educators and learners around the world have had to adapt. In this new era, connecting with friends and family had to happen over WhatsApp, FaceTime, or Zoom, and so education has followed suit. There's no denying that digital learning is a valuable asset - and online education certainly has its merits.

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Recently introduced federal legislation would make free meals mandatory for all public school students.

SDI Productions / E+ / Getty Images

In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, an area with a poverty rate of 13.8 percent, about 1,000 families received letters in August warning that unless their arrears were paid in full, they could be taken to Dependency Court for negligence. "The result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care," threatened the missive, which was sent a month before the 2019-2020 school year began. The total owed, the district reported, was more than $22,000.

Meanwhile, in Richfield, Minnesota, where arrears totaled almost $20,000, 40 Richfield High School students - some of whom owed as little as $15 in meal fees - were given cold sandwiches after their hot lunches were tossed in the trash.

This phenomenon is so pervasive that it has a name: lunch shaming. It refers to a particular set of humiliating behaviors, most typically verbal taunts or threats, that are lobbed by school personnel after a caretaking adult falls behind in paying for a child's breakfast, lunch or after-school snack. It can take a variety of forms and sometimes targets the blameless child and sometimes targets the adults, both of whom are victims of penury.

Some school districts have stamped students' arms with the words "I need lunch money," or have placed a neon sheet on lunch trays with the same blaring message. Others have barred students who owe money from wearing a cap and gown at graduation, while still others have kept students from participating in extracurricular activities, including prom.

The goal, of course, is to get families to pay up, and fast - something that is often impossible and puts them at odds with their equally cash-strapped schools. In fact, the School Nutrition Association estimates that 75 percent of U.S. school districts have gone into the red because of an explosion of school meal debt.

Related Story

Bernie Sanders condemned the "casual cruelty that motivates Trump and his billionaire friends."

In recent years, the issue has captured media notice (and great hoopla) when local businesspeople, philanthropists or regular folks with a bit of extra cash have stepped in to pay what's owed. Nonetheless, food justice activists and educators know that this is not a solution. Instead, they are demanding systemic change in how meals are delivered to the nation's children and are championing the Universal School Meals Act, federal legislation mandating the provision of nutritious food to every public school student, regardless of family income.

School Meals Have a Long History

The Act - sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) - builds on a longstanding but never wholly adequate school meals program. What's more, it recognizes that although schools have been providing food to students since 1946, meal delivery could be better and more equitably organized.

Some school districts have stamped students' arms with the words "I need lunch money," or have placed a neon sheet on lunch trays with the same blaring message.

One of the major issues, Diane Pratt-Heavner, director of media relations at the School Nutrition Association, told Truthout, is that federal policy limits how meal programs are funded and administered. For example, she reports that "meal programs have to be paid for through federal reimbursement and meal sales alone, separate and apart from the general school district budget."

This, she continues, has led to severe difficulties, allowing large deficits to develop when meal fees go unpaid. In fact, federal law mandates that uncollected charges be written off as "bad debt" and further stipulates that the district cover what's owed through private donations, parent-teacher association fundraisers or other revenue.

But before delving into this further, let's look at the way the school meals program is organized, how it functions and who it serves.

Currently, approximately 100,000 schools feed 29.7 million students a day: 20.2 million receive free lunches; 1.8 million pay a reduced fee; and 7.7 million pay full price. The total annual cost of running the program is $13.83 billion.

To qualify for a free lunch, families must fill out forms and prove that they are at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty threshold, which is $25,750 for a household of four. Those between 131 and 185 percent (earning between $33,475 and $47,638 for four people) qualify for reduced-fee lunches costing 40 cents a meal. Districts have free rein in setting what is charged for full-cost meals for those whose incomes exceed these amounts.

Approximately 100,000 schools feed 29.7 million students a day: 20.2 million receive free lunches; 1.8 million pay a reduced fee; and 7.7 million pay full price.

School meals are under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; during this academic year schools receive reimbursement of $3.41 for every free lunch; $3.01 for each reduced-fee lunch; and 32 cents for every full-price meal served. In addition, in districts where at least 40 percent of the students qualify for no-cost meals, school administrators can apply to participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). CEP provides free meals to every enrolled student in high-poverty areas, regardless of family income. The 5-year-old program distributes breakfast and lunch to 13.6 million kids a day in 28,614 schools.

"CEP has been a game changer," said Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school time programs at the Food Research and Action Center. "It has revolutionized school meal provision in places where it has been implemented."

But it is still a far cry from universal access to no-cost meals.

Emotional Toll of Shaming

For their part, students simply want decent-tasting, nutritious food at mealtimes, regardless of their living situation or household circumstances. And needless to say, they are appalled by lunch shaming and recognize the pain it causes.

One of the major impacts of the humiliation is seen in the classroom, where shamed students often have trouble focusing. "Some kids who are shamed at school won't want to go anymore," New York City art psychotherapist Nazarena Cordero told Truthout. "They may not want to be seen or may develop a social anxiety. Some won't want to speak in public, fearful that if they say the wrong thing, they'll be considered silly or ignorant. In addition, you can't concentrate if you're hungry and may feel dizzy, faint or weak in class."

Chloe Bland, chair of the psychology department at the College of Saint Elizabeth in Morristown, New Jersey, adds that shaming a child "damages the whole climate and culture of a school," not just for the shamed child, but for those who witness a peer being belittled. According to Bland, this can reinforce a "social pecking order."

"Kids learn by watching how adults behave. When they see the have-nots being shamed, it creates a model that they internalize."

"Kids learn by watching how adults behave. When they see the have-nots being shamed, it creates a model that they internalize," Bland told Truthout. "For the kids being targeted, it's likely that they'll go into a fight-or-flight response, which will compromise their cognitive abilities; they may not be open to learning for the rest of that day."

Diane Nilan is president of HEAR US Inc., a 14-year-old organization that works to give voice and visibility to children and youth experiencing homelessness. Nilan notes another problem: how kids qualify for free or reduced-fee meals. On paper, she says, children who are homeless, or whose parents receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or food stamps, are automatically eligible for free school meals. But they do not always receive them.

As a case in point, Nilan describes a recent visit to the relatively affluent town of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where she met with the district liaison for homeless families. "I was told that two children had been identified as homeless," Nilan said. "I then went to the food pantry in Cherry Hill and met many parents and grandparents who were living doubled up with school-aged kids. We asked them if they knew that their kids were eligible for a free school lunch. Many did not, and reported that their kids had been shamed for being poor."

Nilan notes that poverty shaming sticks with recipients. "Someone who was shamed decades back will remember it," she said.

Another issue is immigration status. Even though school meals are exempt from "public charge" consideration - rules that bar immigrants from receiving any type of public welfare benefits - Nilan reports that noncitizens are often fearful of filling out the required paperwork to secure no-cost meals.

But the clincher, Nilan concludes, is the Trump administration's proposed cuts to the food stamp program, also known as SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Under the proposed plan, the standard utility deduction will be reduced and all able-bodied adults will need to work in exchange for benefits, a change that will impact nearly 700,000 people. Even more significant, Nilan notes that 1 million kids could lose their automatic eligibility for free or reduced-fee meals if their families are knocked off the program. The Trump proposal also changes the ways states certify people for SNAP benefits: for instance, requiring an in-person appearance at a local office, rather than completing a recertification form online.

Pushback at the State and Federal Levels

Several states have stepped into the fray and are not only opposing the SNAP cutbacks, but are working to end both lunch shaming and hunger more generally.

New Mexico was the first to take the leap, passing the Hunger-Free Students Bill of Rights in April 2017. The bill makes it illegal for a school to require students to mop floors, clean tables, set up chairs or otherwise be singled out in exchange for food. California followed suit a month later and mandated that schools stop penalizing students whose parents were in debt. Several other states, including Texas, Virginia, Washington and Oregon, have also passed legislation to protect students from harassment.

"We strongly believe that school meals are as important as teachers and textbooks."

The Student Success Act, passed by the Oregon legislature in May 2019, allows students whose household incomes are below 300 percent of federal poverty guidelines ($50,730 for a two-person and $77,250 for a four-person family) to eat in school for free.

According to Charles Boyle, press secretary for the office of Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, "The 2020 budget aimed to address Oregon's underfunded education system with a $2 billion education investment package. The Student Success Act responded to a call from educators and parents to meet the critical needs of students and our schools." The bill provides for smaller classes, more school counselors and increased access to no-cost meals - all of it paid for through a new corporate activity tax on commercial activity in excess of $1 million. Boyce reports that the tax is expected to raise approximately $1 billion a year.

Still, state efforts, no matter how impressive, sidestep the larger issue of food insecurity that exists throughout the U.S.

"We strongly believe that school meals are as important as teachers and textbooks," Pratt-Heavner of the School Nutrition Association told Truthout.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten agrees. "Lunch shaming converts what should be a safe and welcoming school environment to one that is hostile and punitive," she told Truthout in an email. "Instead of hurting kids, we need to ensure that school budgets meet their needs."

The Universal School Meals Program Act, introduced in October by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ilhan Omar, would do just that and would provide free breakfast, lunch and dinner to every student, regardless of family income. While critics have dubbed the idea a pie-in-the-sky pipedream, a Sanders spokesperson told Truthout that paying for the program is not an issue, noting that if we collected one-third of the unpaid taxes owed by the top 1 percent, we could fund universal school meals for hungry kids as well as a Green New Deal.

It's simply a question of will - and of priorities.

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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All Students Should Receive Free School Meals

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In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, an area with a poverty rate of 13.8 percent, about 1,000 families received letters in August warning that unless their arrears were paid in full, they could be taken to Dependency Court for negligence.

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Students take part in a Save School Lunch event on Nov. 14, 2019, organized to deliver 1.5 million petitions to the Agriculture Department in Washington. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Parents Together)

With the Trump administration's proposed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, nearly 1 million children stand to lose their automatic free-lunch eligibility at a time when families across the country are struggling to afford school lunches. This is not a new problem, however.

Since the National School Lunch Program was created in 1946, it has had a flawed funding model that relies on children's payments to supplement federal funding. This ultimately puts pressure on local school administrators to go after families with unpaid school lunch bills, or "lunch debt," to balance budgets.

But when benign tactics for collecting payment like sending notices to a child's parents or guardian fail, schools may resort to a set of practices widely referred to as " lunch shaming." Forcing students to wear wristbands or complete chores in front of their peers, weaponizing a tuna sandwich as a "badge of shame," publicly dumping lunch trays filled with uneaten food into the trash can and preventing students from participating in extracurricular activities are just a few of the tactics that schools have used to pressure families into paying up.

While some states are enacting laws to prohibit lunch shaming, and both charities and individual donors have stepped to the plate to pay student debt, the real solution is one that has been bouncing around for over a century: free school lunches for all children. Only this will remove the stigma from poor children and ensure no children go hungry.

In the 1890s, when experimental nonprofit "penny lunch" programs first popped up in America's schools, advocates argued that all children should receive free lunches and nutrition education as part of their schooling. But fiscally conservative school board members and critics who worried that free lunches were socialist and would, therefore, teach children (and their parents) that they didn't need to work hard rejected this idea. This left child nutrition advocates scrambling to keep costs as low as possible, including soliciting charitable contributions to subsidize school lunches for extremely poor students.

A 1916 Agriculture Department pamphlet described what became the "almost universally agreed upon" school lunch structure: School boards would pay for the initial cost of facilities, kitchen equipment and the program director's salary, but children's lunch fees and private donations covered food and labor. As school lunch programs expanded in the decades to come, this structure guided them.

This cost-sharing agreement was then codified in the National School Lunch Act ( NSLA) of 1946, which established a permanent mechanism for funding nonprofit school lunch programs. The program aimed to "safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation's children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other food."

Participation in the new federal program was voluntary. However, any school that opted to join the NSLP - and gain access to federal cash assistance and donated agricultural commodities - was legally required to serve free or reduced-price lunches to "needy" students.

The NSLA specified schools were not allowed to segregate or discriminate against children who were unable to pay the full price of a school meal. But in reality, this provision was never adequately implemented at the local level. Instead, the entire administrative and legal structure of the NSLA was biased against poor people and communities of color.

That was the main finding of the Committee on School Lunch Participation, a coalition of five women's organizations that conducted a nationwide survey of school lunch programs between October 1967 and March 1968. After interviews with roughly 1,500 people - including administrators, teachers, cafeteria staff and parents - the committee found that just under 4 percent of schoolchildren were "able to get a free or reduced-price school lunch." Their eligibility was determined solely by "local decisions about administration and financing which may or may not have anything to do with the need of the individual child. And generally speaking, the greater the need of children from a poor neighborhood, the less the community is able to meet it."

But inadequate support for poor students was only part of the problem. The program also ended up shaming them. One administrator required children to be deloused before they could have a free lunch. Others required poor kids to scrub dishes, serve meals or help with record-keeping in exchange for free lunches.

Parents and allies pushed back. In Cook County, Ill., more than 1,100 people signed a petition demanding an end to the "humiliating requirements" that families were forced to endure to secure their children's right to free school lunches. In other parts of the country, fed-up parents filed lawsuits and organized random checks to ensure their children's schools were in compliance with federal law.

While state and local administrators bore some responsibility for this conduct, Congress was also at fault: The NSLA had stipulated that states and local school food authorities were required to contribute $3 for every $1 of federal school lunch aid they received. The idea was that school lunch should be a cooperative endeavor, jointly supported by local municipalities, states and the federal government.

But this law allowed schools to count charitable gifts and children's payments toward these matching funds, which enabled states to push their public cost-sharing responsibilities onto the private sector - and children.

By the early 1970s, public outrage and coordinated activism pushed policymakers into action. Congress altered the funding mechanism for free lunches, replacing block-grant funding that often ran out midyear with entitlement funding that guaranteed schools would be reimbursed for every free lunch they served and assuming full responsibility for financing the cost of free lunches. But between 1971 and 1974, legislators rejected four bills to provide free lunches for all students out of concern about the potential cost of such a program.

Eligibility would instead be determined by federal poverty guidelines that sorted children into different payment categories based on their family income. Today, students from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level ($33,475 for a family of four during the 2019-2020 school year) are eligible for free breakfasts and lunches, while those with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of the federal poverty level ($47,638 for a family of four) pay a reduced price of 30 cents per breakfast and 40 cents per lunch. Everyone else pays full price, typically between $2 and $3.50, per meal.

But this formula isn't working. The problem of lunch debt has actually gotten worse in recent years: According to a survey of 1,500 school districts, lunch debt rose from a median $2,000 per district in 2016 to $3,400 in 2019.

The solution is the one that Congress rejected in the 1970s because of its seemingly high price-tag - and that nutrition advocates have pushed for since the 1890s: universal free school meals.

Until the United States guarantees free school breakfasts and lunches to all children, regardless of income, there will always be shame in the cafeteria. Sorting students into three tiers of eligibility - free, reduced-price and paid meals - based on family income affirms the harmful idea that school food is "welfare food." This solution would improve the social climate in schools by making income differences less visible, cause less financial stress for families, better equip students to learn and leave schools with more money to devote to farm-to-school programs that support local farms.

Anti-lunch shaming bills and charitable acts of paying off lunch debt may eliminate the most egregious signs of injustice in school cafeterias, but nothing short of federal legislation guaranteeing all children's right to free school meals will address the root cause of the lunch-shaming crisis and ensure cafeterias are inclusive, nourishing, educational spaces.

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Perspective | It's long past time to give every child free lunch at school

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With the Trump administration's proposed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, nearly 1 million children stand to lose their automatic free-lunch eligibility at a time when families across the country are struggling to afford school lunches. This is not a new problem, however.

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Pennington Publishing Blog | Assessment-based ELA and Reading Instruction.

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5 Reasons SSR Doesn’t WorkPennington Publishing Blog

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For Students Who Are Not Yet Fluent, Silent Reading Is Not the Best Use of Classroom Time

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Teachers do their best to improve students’ fluency, but sometimes the information they have to work with is incomplete and, therefore, leads them down the wrong path. For example, silent reading or ‘Round Robin’ reading seem like good ways to improve fluency. But, in fact, increasing fluency requir…

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Last week I answered a teacher's question about free reading time during the school day and its relationship to reading motivation (e.g., making kids like reading). I pointed out that such reading time has a rather weak relationship with learning (various kinds of instruction exert about an 800% greater influence on learning than on having kids reading on their own during the school day) and that the connection with motivation appears to be even more tenuous. I then compared the DEAR/SSR practice unfavorably with theories and research on what motivates human beings.

Not surprisingly that generated much comment. Although the following was not sent to me, it was so addressed and posted at the blog site of Gwen Flaskamp, a practicing teacher. She is evidently passionate about this practice, and I think her posting deserves a response. I have quoted liberally from her posting below in italics-and have interspersed my responses throughout. To read her complete statement in its entirety, please follow this link: My Letter To Tim Shanahan: In Defense of Independent Reading.

From Flaskamp's blog

Recently, I read the latest blog post by Tim Shanahan where he provides his strong opinions how giving students time to independently read in class is wasteful. Although I usually value his opinions and have referenced him several times on my blog, I had a strong, visceral response to his latest piece.... I felt compelled to stand up for the inclusion of independent reading time during the school day. Thus, I crafted this letter. I'm hoping he reads it.

But, more importantly, I'm hoping that teachers who wish to instill lifelong reading habits in their students do not stop with Mr. Shanahan's advice and consider my perspective and the perspective of others on this important topic.

I think you sound like an impolite blogger, and perhaps a misinformed one. You've neglected to consider the following important points in your discussion of the value of independent reading.

You claim that time spent independent reading is wasted due to the fact that "even when they have been done well, the "learning payoffs" have been small. By "learning payoffs," I am assuming that you mean students' progress on standardized exams (typically the way reading growth is measured in research studies) does not increase with the inclusion of independent reading time in schools.

Some major problems exist with this claim.

Increased reading does lead to increased achievement.

Research does support the idea that students who typically achieve higher on reading tests are also those who read more voraciously. Those who score at the lower end usually read less.

Shanahan's response

Thanks for writing. There are several problems with your claims up to this point.

That good readers read more than poor readers is true, but has no bearing on my response to that teacher's question. Correlation doesn't prove causation. That good readers read more does not mean that it was reading more that made them good readers. Maybe good readers choose to read more because they can do it well. You are making a good argument for teaching everyone to read well, not for sending kids off to read on their own during the school day.

You are citing very selectively here. You refer to the correlational studies that can't answer the question, while ignoring the experimental ones that have directly tested your theory. Studies in which DEAR time is provided to some kids but not to others have not found much payoff - even when the non-readers were doing no more than random worksheets!

You seem to be claiming that since reading on one's own leads to improved achievement - then any and all approaches to encouraging reading must be effective. Following that logic, then telling kids to read on their own, buying books for them, rewarding them with pizzas, or employing electric cattle prods... all must work, too.

Remember I wasn't saying kids shouldn't read, only that requiring "independent reading" during the school day has not been effective. Only one study bothered to check its impact on amount of reading, and it found that middle school kids read less as a result of the practice - since it reduced the amount of reading they did on their own.

As a parent and grandparent, I'd rather that teachers reacted intellectually rather than "viscerally" to questions about instructional practices. Similarly, I hope my physician will be visceral about my health and well-being, but not about his pills and scalpels.

__________________________________

From Flaskamp's blog
Since research also shows that the amount of time middle school students typically spend reading outside of class declines as they grow older, finding time for students to practice reading independently in schools is crucial. If we do not attempt to foster a love of reading inside the classroom, how will we help students who have not yet discovered the joy of reading on their own increase their reading minutes?
Shanahan's response

Indeed, that is a great question. Given that we know this method hasn't improved achievement or made kids like reading, then why cling so tightly to it? Or, given that DEAR time has been so ubiquitous in elementary classrooms for the past generation, how is it possible that middle school students are reading so little? If this practice so powerfully fosters "a love of reading" among kids that lasts a lifetime, then why aren't years of it lasting even until kids are 12?

________________________________

From Flaskamp's blog
I'm sure you are aware that much research exists linking student engagement (i.e. motivation) to increases in learning. Thus, spending time on increasing student motivation should, in fact, lead to increases in achievement.
Shanahan's response

That makes sense to me, and yet studies show that this particular approach accomplishes neither. That might mean that what you are so certain must be motivational for all kids, maybe isn't.

________________________________

From Flaskamp's blog
You advise teachers that " If you don't want kids to love reading, then sacrifice their instructional time to focus on motivation rather than learning." This argument, although cleverly disguised, is a type we would use with students when poking holes in an argument and is a type of logical fallacy. Your argument seems to suggest that teachers can focus either on motivation or on learning. Can we not focus on both?..."
Shanahan's response

Your analysis of my argument is flawed. We are in agreement that we can focus on motivation and learning simultaneously. Where we disagree is whether you can do that with a procedure that has failed to successfully foster either motivation or learning.

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An Argument about Independent Reading Time During the School Day | Reading Rockets

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Last week I answered a teacher's question about free reading time during the school day and its relationship to reading motivation (e.g., making kids like reading).

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It probably comes as no surprise that teachers want more emphasis placed on independent reading. According to the International Literacy Association's 2020 What's Hot in Literacy Report, 70% of educators say there isn't enough time set aside for this task. If we all believe in the importance of independent reading, why are we failing to make it a priority?

The benefits of independent reading are clear

Independent reading is associated with higher reading achievement . When students read something that interests them, it boosts their engagement. Increased free reading improves fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. As students become more proficient readers, they want to read even more. With wide reading comes background knowledge that will help them across varying content areas and in future reading. Essentially, free choice reading creates a cycle of better and more advanced reading.

But the barriers are real

If self-selected reading is valuable, why isn't it on the schedule daily? Respondents to the survey overwhelmingly answered that there just isn't enough time, given other curriculum goals. Others felt that their administration and/or teachers didn't value independent reading. The absence of an independent reading component in the literacy curriculum and a lack of books for the classrooms were also concerns.

Who has the time?

According to ILA's report, 82% of teachers said students should read independently for at least 20 minutes a day. However, only 33% were actually able to block off that amount of time, with 4% reporting no time for free choice reading at all. This, despite the fact that 40% of respondents said that making time for student-selected independent reading during the school day was the best way to help students become strong readers.

What can teachers do?

Systemic change is necessary, however, there are ways to reclaim independent reading time even if free reading is not currently part of your school culture or curriculum. Here are some ideas:

Make it part of your morning routine. Skip the entry task and have students read at their desks after they've checked in and put their backpacks away.

Nix the "early finishers" work. Build into your classroom expectations that students read a book of their choice when they finish their work.

Use guided reading time. When you are working with a small group, allow the rest of the class to read on their own.

Streamline your transitions. The act of moving from one classroom or activity to another eats up a lot of time. If you tighten transitions, you'll have more minutes to allocate to independent reading.

Use choice books to teach skills. You don't have to use an anthology to teach theme or setting. Any fiction book will do.

How do you find time for independent reading? Come share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook. Plus, check out our article on passion projects for independent reading.

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70% of Educators Say There Isn't Enough Time Set Aside for Independent Reading

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It probably comes as no surprise that teachers want more emphasis placed on independent reading. According to the International Literacy Association's 2020 What's Hot in Literacy Report, 70% of educators say there isn't enough time set aside for this task. If we all believe in the importance of independent reading, why are we failing to make it a priority?

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"We only had one recess today!" Beatrice Dathan complained to her mother after coming home from school one day. That was four years ago. Beatrice's family had recently moved to Connecticut from California. In California, Beatrice had enjoyed three recess blocks each day, totaling 50 minutes. But in Connecticut, recess was one 20-minute period. Lucy Dathan is Beatrice's mother. She feels that Beatrice, now in sixth grade, has missed out on the advantages a longer recess has to offer. "Recess helps kids build relationships and be creative thinkers," Dathan told TIME for Kids.

Dathan is now a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives. She is working to pass a state . It would require Connecticut schools to provide time for at least 50 minutes of play each day. Dathan is among a growing number of people nationwide trying to give kids more time for recess.

Clear Benefits

In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and SHAPE America published a report confirming the benefits of recess: Play periods encourage kids to be physically active, which can build healthy bodies and prevent obesity. Plus, physical activity can improve brain function, which helps students do better in class (see "Test Case"). And recess helps kids form friendships and strengthen social skills.

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Chris Lineberry has seen the benefits of recess firsthand. He's the principal of Stanfield Elementary School, in Arizona. Last year, the state began two recess periods a day for students in kindergarten through fifth grade. It's up to each school to decide how long the periods will be. But since the requirement went into effect, Lineberry has noticed "a deeper level of student in the classroom."

The CDC calls for at least 20 minutes of daily recess for elementary school students. The average U.S. school offers 27 minutes of recess. But some schools have none at all.

Powerful Voices

Today, at least six states have laws that require elementary schools to provide daily recess. More are similar bills. Kids can make a difference by speaking up. This was proven earlier this year, when kids in Arkansas urged lawmakers to consider a bill that requires 40 minutes of recess for elementary school students. Izzy Kopsky, 8, is one of those kids. He says the best part of recess is "playing and talking with my friends." But Izzy felt he didn't have enough time to do that. So in February, he before Arkansas lawmakers. He told them that having more recess time would allow students to burn up extra energy, which means they could better focus in class. "Everyone would learn more," he added.

DARREN IRBY

Asa Hutchinson is the governor of Arkansas. He signed the state's recess reform bill into law on April 1. TFK Kid Reporter Belle Irby was on the scene at the State Capitol that day. Hutchinson admires the kids' determination. "Young people can have a powerful voice," he told Belle. "It's impressive what they've done."

RANDALL LEE

Sidebar: Test Case

There is pressure on schools to ensure students do well on state tests. That's why some of them shorten recess-to make time for more in-class instruction. Some schools also take away recess as punishment for poor academic performance.

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But cutting back on recess may not be the best way to improve test results. According to the 2017 CDC and SHAPE America report, recess can improve a child's memory and focus.

Stop & Think! What questions would you have asked Izzy Kopsky and Governor Hutchinson if you were a TFK Kid Reporter? Is there anyone else you would have interviewed for this story?

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"We only had one recess today!" Beatrice Dathan complained to her mother after coming home from school one day. That was four years ago. Beatrice's family had recently moved to Connecticut from California. In California, Beatrice had enjoyed three recess...

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States Consider Longer School Recess, and the Adults Aren’t Complaining (Published 2019)

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Some believe more playtime will encourage creativity and make children less cranky and restless.

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Longer Recess, Stronger Child Development

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With an hour-long recess, elementary schools can help children develop through increased creative play, authentic SEL, and adequate physical regulation.

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The nutrition of school lunches - or lack thereof - is a hotly contested debate as childhood obesity rates have risen in the United States. A part of this debate focuses on the length of school lunch times, whether school lunch times should be extended to give students more time to eat - and eat healthily. Both pros and cons exist in the debate over longer school lunches.

Pro: Healthier Food

Tossing some pizza in the oven and tater tots in the deep fryer doesn't take long. However, making healthy lunches is more time consuming for cafeteria staff and students. For example, Greenville, S.C., schools installed salad bars in their cafeterias, a healthy option, but one that takes longer since students have to make their salads and then eat them, as reported by North Carolina's WSPA 7. A longer school lunch time allows students to enjoy these healthier menu items.

Con: Longer Day

Adding to the school lunch time can add to the school day if administrators are not willing to cut time in other ways. A longer school day leaves students less time after school for physical activity, which is another important component in keeping students at a healthy weight. In addition, a longer school day might lead to burnout among students and, ultimately, make that extra lunch time simply not worth it.

Pro: Less Rush

The Journal of Child Nutrition and Management, in a spring 2002 article by Martha T. Conklin and other researchers, reported that kindergartners through 12th-grade students took seven to 10 minutes to eat their lunches - not much time. With a longer lunch day, students can have more time to eat slowly and recognize signs of fullness, which do not develop until 20 minutes after eating. Students can also take advantage of important socialization time with a longer lunch break.

Con: Missed Class Time

Extending the school lunch time, without extending the school day, means that academics will take a hit. Students will spend more time in the cafeteria and less time in the classroom. While this might be beneficial for their social skills, it will not help them in their academics. Teachers will have to fit their current lesson plans into shorter classes, which can be challenging and make covering material difficult.

Other Debates

Other pros and cons exist in the school lunch debate. If a longer lunch allows high school students to leave campus, they might opt for unhealthy fast-food options; on the other hand, this extended time might allow them to seek out healthier dishes than those available in the cafeteria. Those against extended lunches might argue that budget cuts make an extended lunch requiring more skilled cooks and more expensive menu items unrealistic. Proponents might cite the benefit of an extended break for students from the rigors of schoolwork.

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Pros & Cons of Longer School Lunches | Livestrong.com

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The nutrition of school lunches - or lack thereof - is a hotly contested debate as childhood obesity rates have risen in the United States. A part of this debate focuses on the length of school lunch times, whether school lunch times should be extended to give students more time to eat - and eat healthily.

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Most of the kids in the U.S. don't get much time to eat lunch. And by the time those kids wait in line and settle down to eat, many of them feel rushed.

And a recent study suggests that this time crunch may be undermining good nutrition at school.

Eric Rimm, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a group of colleagues observed about 1,000 students, grades 3 to 8, at lunch time in a low-income urban school district in Massachusetts.

The researchers took note of what students put on their trays. And they also trackedwhat was left on their trays at the end of lunch period.

"Kids who had less than 20 minutes to eat were consuming, across the board, less of everything," Rimm told us.

As they report in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, theresearchers saw these students eating 13 percent less of their main entree and 12 percent less of their vegetables. They drank 10 percent less milk, too, compared with students who had 25 minutes or more to eat. They also found more food waste among kids who had less time to eat.

"Many children, especially those from low-income families, rely on school meals for up to half their daily energy intake, so it is essential that we give students a sufficient amount of time to eat their lunches," Juliana Cohen, Rimm's colleague at Harvard and the study's lead author, said in a statement.

And, Rimm adds, giving kids enough time to eat is also important for building healthy eating habits.

"Kids learn a lot at school. They should [also] learn how to eat slowly and enjoy their food," Rimm says.

Yet in many public schools across America, the school lunch hour has shrunk to just 15 minutes.

In a poll conducted in 2013 by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, 20 percent of parents of students from kindergarten through fifth grade told us that their child gets 15 minutes or less to eat. And even in schools that officially have longer lunch periods, the actual time kids get to spend at the table can be far shorter.

One issue driving abbreviated lunch periods: the increased pressure to boost time in the classroom - and standardized test scores. As Julia Bauscher, then-president of the national School Nutrition Association, told us in 2013, the lunch period is often the first place administrators look for extra instruction time.

And there's another factor that may be adding to longer lines and less table time: As we've reported, the number of school children receiving free meals under the National School Lunch program has increased in recent years, according to a report last year from the Government Accountability Office. When we spoke to her in 2013, Bauscher also cited this increased participation as one factor behind longer lunch lines. She oversees nutrition services for Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky, where 70 percent of students participate in meals programs.

Some Salt readers have told us in comments that longer lines may be behind another trend in the school cafeteria: fewer students are buying lunch. As we recently reported, the number of students who pay full price for school meals declined by 1.6 million, or about 5 percent, in recent years. After we posted that story on Facebook, many of our followers told us that long lines and short meal times were a significant factor in why their children were now brown-bagging it.

Brenna Zesiger D'Ambrosio is a Chicago writer and mom with two children in the city's public elementary schools.

She says in her kids' schools, many students opt out of buying school lunch due to time constraints. "They have 15 minutes max for lunch and the line for school lunch takes half of that," she told us via Facebook. "My elementary students cannot eat fast enough and end up hungry (and distracted) later in the day if they choose the school option."

So for her child who is a particularly slow eater, D'Ambrosio says she always packs a lunch from home.

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Kids Who Are Time-Crunched At School Lunch Toss More And Eat Less

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Many public school students get 15 minutes or less to eat. A study finds that kids who get less than 20 minutes for lunch end up eating less of everything on their tray.

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Fresno Pacific University News & Magazine

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Thanksgiving is coming, which means Christmas sales loom on the horizon. This week Scholars Speak offers a two-for-one offer on school dress codes from faculty of the Fresno Pacific University School of Education:

Scott Key opposes school dress codes because they teach students that conformity is more important than adaptability and do not prepare young people for the workplace and its emphasis on flexibility and problem-solving.

Larry Wilder favors school dress codes because they lead to a safer educational environment that increases students' ability to learn, increases equality between the sexes and tolerance among ethnic and social groups.

Pros of school dress code: helping students dress for safety

Each year more and more schools adopt some form of dress code. While some challenges have been made concerning their constitutionality, in general court rulings have supported codes that are instituted properly and can be shown to be rationally related to a legitimate pedagogical purpose. The safety of the children in the schools appears to be the overriding concern considered by the courts.

Public schools have the responsibility to have safe and orderly schools that maintain an environment conducive to learning. The National School Board Association estimates that approximately 135,000 guns are brought to America's 85,000 public schools each day. This is one reason school districts use to implement dress codes. Some schools even require students to have the belt line exposed at all times for fear of guns concealed under clothing. Additionally, educators report a decrease in violence, a reduction of fights in schools and improved student achievement when dress codes have been implemented.

Safety is one reason for a dress code; however, many educators believe that a dress code also promotes a positive educational environment. In an attempt to counter violence, many public schools implement a dress code or require students to wear uniforms. The idea of uniforms even reached the halls of Congress when then-President Clinton endorsed them in his 1996 State of the Union address. After this speech, the U.S. Department of Education disseminated the Manual of School Uniforms to all 16,000 school districts in the nation. The manual stated potential benefits, such as decreasing violence and theft, preventing students from wearing gang-related colors to school, instilling student discipline, helping to resist peer pressure, helping students concentrate on academics and aiding in recognition of intruders.

It is estimated that almost 25 percent of the nation's public schools are expected to have a dress code this year. In September, Philadelphia public school students started wearing uniforms for the first time. They joined districts like Long Beach, Clovis, Fresno, Huston and Dade County, Florida, in having a dress or uniform code. These codes were established because of the success demonstrated by districts with a dress code.

A survey reported by the New York Police Department listed many positive results after a uniform policy was begun in 2000: overall crime was down 14.7 percent and there was an improved sense of belonging and tolerance.

Other results of the research revealed that 68 percent of the parents believed the uniform policy improved overall academic performance. Eighty-eight percent of the parents thought the code reduced teasing between boys and girls. Eighty-four percent felt the uniform code promoted equality between the sexes. Perhaps most revealing was the fact that 80 percent of the girls and 62 percent of the boys reported liking to wear uniforms.

The United States has changed drastically since the early common schools. Horace Mann thought the best school was on a log with the student on one end and the teacher on the other. This was truly individualized instruction. With the number of students growing every year, problems arise. There are more people living in California than live in the entire nation of Canada. One out of every eight students in school in the United States is in school in California. Larger numbers bring different problems from those faced by Horace Mann.

It seems that if a dress or uniform code can possibly improve academic success, reduce violence, increase the safety of students, reduce class/economic envy and improve deteriorating schools, why not implement a code? The public schools must take whatever actions are needed to protect the children. If a dress code helps, then one should be implemented within the constitutional boundaries established by the courts. This issue seems not to be about civil liberties or freedom of speech but about improving our public schools.
Larry Wilder, Ed.D., directs the administrative services program in the Fresno Pacific University School of Education. He served the Clovis and Selma unified school districts in various capacities and spent 19 years at the Fresno County Office of Education, retiring as assistant superintendent
Cons of school dress code: helping students dress for success

The last days of summer saw students and parents shopping for school supplies and clothes from the list given out by their schools. Parents spent precious dollars, being told that this investment would pay dividends in increased student learning.

According to Yolanda Valdez, principal of Dinuba High School, "The dress code sets the tone for the atmosphere on your campus." While there are different types of dress codes, from school uniforms to acceptable attire, the primary rationale is increasing student safety through easing gang tensions. If students feel safe, they will learn more. Yet, perhaps the more important question may be: What are students learning?

Many educators suggest dress codes are intended to teach students what is acceptable in the workforce. This seems reasonable. However, it assumes there are uniform workplace expectations. Work does not only take place in offices and factories. Some employers-some dotcom companies, for example-care less about how their employees dress and more about their work. In addition, as technological advances continue, some traditionalcorporations encourage employees to work at home, with no dress codes required. There are also the people who run their own home businesses.

The lack of uniform approach to acceptable workplace dress does not mean each workplace does not have expectations. Rather, it means students need to adapt, not conform. Students need to learn to dress appropriately based on context. Dress codes do not facilitate this learning. Instead, dress codes teach students that conformity and obedience to authority are most important. Individuality is suppressed. Student voice is suppressed.

These outcomes do not match the qualities employers look for. Employers want adaptable workers adept at creative and critical thinking, good decision-making and effective problem-solving. While schools are charged with helping students develop these qualities, the purpose of schools has changed very little over the past 170 years.

During the early years of our republic, children went to private school, had a private tutor or learned at home. These approaches worked because the population was fairly homogenous, with a common language and set of values. However, increased immigration led many to conclude there was a need for an institution to Americanize children. Horace Mann started public schools to promote a common set of values through a common language used to teach a common curriculum. The structure, rules and expectations of the school also conveyed these mainstream values. Success in school depended on children learning both hidden and taught curriculum.

Today, children from diverse backgrounds come together in the giant melting pot called public schools. Mainstream values are still conveyed through expectations, rules, structure and curriculum. Dress codes are part of the hidden curriculum. It isn't enough for students to graduate with basic and advanced skills. Society expects them to be committed to capitalism and democracy, to hard work, honesty and the American Dream-and to dress appropriately.

Public schools are supposed to prepare students to participate in and contribute to American society. One way to succeed is to assimilate into the mainstream: to develop competence and internalize certain values. This means that conformity is the rule and students fit in or are left behind.

While developing skills and values is a good starting point, should conformity be the goal of public education? No. Our community and nation face many challenges such as discrimination, health care and pollution. New challenges will emerge. We need competent young people to meet these challenges and offer ways to move us toward a more just society. We need schools that help students develop skills-based competencies and critical thinking skills to become agents of change.
Scott Key, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Fresno Pacific University School of Education. Before coming to FPU, he was at the University of Illinois and a member of the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago.
Schools need to move away from conformity to adaptability. Instead of suppressing students, schools should promote the development of individuality and voice to better prepare them for life after school. This means dress codes have no place in schools.

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Thanksgiving is coming, which means Christmas sales loom on the horizon. This week Scholars Speak offers a two-for-one offer on school dress codes from faculty of the Fresno Pacific University School of Education: Scott Key opposes school dress codes because they teach students that conformity is more important than adaptability and do not prepare young people for the workplace and its emphasis on flexibility and problem-solving.

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Does your school have a dress code? What are its rules? Do you consider them fair? Why or why not?

In " Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?," Hayley Krischer writes:

It started with a sunburn.

Lizzy Martinez, 17, a junior at Braden River High School in Bradenton, Fla., had been swimming and tanning all weekend at a water park in Orlando. But when Monday morning came and she had to get dressed for school, Lizzy's bra felt painfully constricting on her burned skin.

So she ditched the bra and purposely chose to wear something dark and loose - a long sleeve, oversize, crew neck gray T-shirt - so she wouldn't draw attention to her chest.

But around 10 a.m., about 15 minutes into her veterinary assistance class, Lizzy was called out of the classroom for a meeting with two school officials, Dean Violeta Velazquez and Principal Sharon Scarbrough. They asked her why she wasn't wearing a bra.

She said she told her school administrators about the sunburn. They insisted that she was violating the school dress code. (The 2017-2018 Code of Student Conduct does not say bras must be worn by female students.) They told her to put on an undershirt because boys were "looking and laughing" at her, a detail she later challenged. "No one said a thing to me until I got to the dean's office," Lizzy said.

She was crying and wanted to go home, so Lizzy's mother, Kari Knop, a registered nurse, was called at work. "I said, 'Lizzy, I'm working,'" Ms. Knop said in a phone interview. "I told her, 'Can you just put the undershirt on and call it a day?'"

Lizzy was embarrassed and angry but she relented. When she returned wearing the undershirt, the school principal had left. The dean, according to Lizzy, instructed her to "stand up and move around for her."

"I looked at her and said, 'What do you mean?'" Lizzy said. "I was a little creeped out by that." The school has a strict disciplinary policy and she didn't want to appear defiant. (School officials refused to comment, except in a statement.)

The dean told her that her nipples were still showing through her T-shirt and she should use bandages to cover them up. "She told me, 'I'm thinking of ways I could fix this for you.' She said, 'I was a heavier girl and I have all the tricks up my sleeve,'" Lizzy said.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

- What do you think about the way Lizzy's school handled her so-called dress code violation? Should it have been considered a violation in the first place? If so, how should administrators have addressed it? If not, why not?

- Do you think Lizzy's story or any of the others in the article are examples of discrimination based on sex? Why or why not?

- In your opinion, is your school's dress code appropriate or too strict? Why do you think so?

- Have you or your classmates ever stood up to practices or policies at your school that you thought were discriminatory? If so, what was that experience like? If not, why not?

- Galen Sherwin, a senior staff attorney at the Women's Rights Project of the A.C.L.U., says that students speaking up against restrictive dress codes is "part of the sea change we're seeing nationwide in speaking up and challenging discriminatory treatment based on sex in all different areas of life." Do you agree that we are in the midst of a watershed moment in our culture? Why or why not?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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Is Your School's Dress Code Too Strict? (Published 2018)

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Does your school have a dress code? What are its rules? Do you consider them fair? Why or why not? In " Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?," Hayley Krischer writes: It started with a sunburn.

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Do Dress Codes Discriminate Against Girls?

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Do Dress Codes Discriminate Against Girls?

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School dress-code controversies have been trending on the web in recent months, fanning a controversy over whether schools are enforcing the rules in ways that discriminate against girls.

In one of the latest episodes, a viral video initially meant to instruct students on the dress-code policy at Marcus High School in Flower Mound, Texas, drew intense criticism last month for depicting only girls as rule violators. In St. Louis, Oakville High School's principal is captured on video apologizing to parents after telling female students they should not show off their bodies for fear of "distracting" male classmates. And a Roman Catholic school in New Orleans came into the internet spotlight when a 6th grader was forced to leave the classroom, in tears, for having braided hair extensions, which were against the school's hair policy.

Schools with strict dress codes often claim that such regulations prevent in-class distractions, create a workplace-like environment, reduce pressures based on socioeconomic status, and deter gang activity. However, in an age of #MeToo and easy internet access, controversy is increasingly cropping up over whether excluding students from the classroom for violating dress codes is worthwhile, and whether such rules are disproportionately enforced against girls, and especially those of color.

The website Change.org now says it's hosting more than 400 open petitions against individual school dress codes. The majority have been created by students, and many of the petitions' titles assert that their schools' dress codes are sexist or unfairly enforced.

"These rules aren't neutral: many target girls, and especially black girls, by regulating skirt length and headwraps," a report on school dress codes in the District of Columbia that was compiled by the National Women's Law Center states. "And the rules aren't applied equally, either. Students report that black girls, and especially curvier students, are disproportionately targeted."

Lost learning time

Nationwide, 53 percent of public schools enforced a strict dress code during the 2015-16 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But, data on who's being punished for dress-code violations and how the penalties are being meted out are harder to come by. The study by the NWLC takes a rare quantifiable look at the issue.

Released in April, it examines the experiences of 21 black girls who attend or attended 12 District of Columbia schools, including charter schools, and analyzes districtwide student-discipline data.

In the one-on-one interviews, all of the girls reported experiencing or witnessing dress-code enforcement in their schools. Common punishments for those violations included missing class time or facing suspension, as a result of hair, makeup, or clothing styles that were deemed inappropriate. Since the report's release, two of the schools have made changes to their dress policies.

"[Dress codes] sit at that intersection where they impact girls differently; they impact black girls differently," said Nia Evans, the NWLC's manager of campaign and digital strategies and education. "And when you add discipline to it, it's really a disaster."

The concern is that students who may already be struggling academically fall farther behind in class when they miss too much time serving suspensions, changing clothes, or waiting while administrators measure their skirt lengths. Nationwide, African-American girls are 5.5 times more likely than their white counterparts to be suspended from school, but it's not clear what proportion of those punishments stem from dress-code issues.

Adrienne Dixson, a professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believes dress codes can prevent self-expression among students. Additionally, girls of color, who are more likely to wear styles such as braids, hair extensions, and Afros, are more likely to be disciplined, as the Louisiana 6th grader was.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, dress codes are legal as long as they do not "treat boys and girls differently, force students to conform to sex stereotypes, or censor particular viewpoints." (This includes protection for transgender, non-binary gender, or any other students who may choose to dress in nontraditional ways.)

In some cases, the protests from students and parents are making an impact.

Victoria Schantz was a senior last year when the Women's Empowerment Club at Indian Trail High School in Kenosha, Wisc., decided to take on the district's dress code.

Schantz, who posted about the protest on the ACLU's website, readily joined in, remembering feeling objectified by her teachers after having been pulled out of class for her clothing, given temporary clothes, and sent home to change on multiple occasions. One day, after being sent home twice-once for wearing a shirt deemed inappropriate and a second time for wearing leggings and a baggy shirt-the school called her mother to tell her that Schantz would have to spend the rest of the day completing her classwork alone in the office.

After reviewing 3,000 petition signatures and discussing the issue at six board meetings and two working sessions, the board agreed with Schantz's club and created a more lenient dress code, which will be implemented this year. Changes include allowing students to wear yoga pants and leggings.

Schools' responses

Like the Kenosha district, many of the schools that have found themselves in the internet spotlight so far this year have issued apologies or scaled back their dress-code policies.

Marcus High School's principal admitted that the video, which was an alternative for the annual fashion show that informs students of appropriate attire, "absolutely missed the mark" by featuring only girls. Oakville High School's principal apologized to parents at an open house for her comments about girls distracting boys, promising that she will issue a similar apology to students during the school day; however, an official public statement had not been released as of press time.

Following a lawsuit brought against Christ the King Parish School by the Louisiana 6th grader's family, the policy prohibiting hair extensions has been rescinded.

While some schools have responded to dress-code controversies with a more lenient dress code or by switching to uniforms, others, such as Alameda High School in California and Evanston Township High School in Illinois, decided instead to reform their codes completely.

The new dress code in Evanston begins by stating that it "supports equitable educational access" and "does not reinforce stereotypes." The code outlines that students cannot wear clothes that depict hate speech, illegal items, or profanity; clothes that reveal undergarments (aside from visible straps or waistbands); and accessories that could be considered dangerous.

Essentially, students must wear a shirt, pants, dress, or skirt, and shoes, all of which do not pose a threat to another student or staff member. Everything else is fair game.

"We wanted students to know that your body is your body, and we want you to feel proud and comfortable in your own skin," said Superintendent Eric Witherspoon, who helped reform the dress code.

The new dress code was implemented this past school year and, according to Witherspoon, the school has not received any negative feedback.

"The school did not fall apart, education kept going on, and students did not become more disrespectful," Witherspoon said. "We have students of all different races, body shapes, gender expressions, and backgrounds, and the great thing is that they now are able to express themselves."

Social media posts raise equity questions about dress codes

A flurry of social media posts raise equity questions about schools' enforcement of dress codes:

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Do School Dress Codes Discriminate Against Girls?

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School dress-code controversies have been trending on the web in recent months, fanning a controversy over whether schools are enforcing the rules in ways that discriminate against girls. In one of the latest episodes, a viral video initially meant to instruct students on the dress-code policy at Marcus High School in Flower Mound, Texas, drew intense criticism last month for depicting only girls as rule violators.

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While a dress code is supposed to make the school environment more conducive to learning, it frequently does the opposite. In the past year, schools all over the country made national news for the ways they enforce their dress code- asking a student to put duct tape over the holes in her jeans, suspending a student for a skirt that was too short, or sending a student to the office for not wearing a bra -all of which take the focus off learning and place it on girls' bodies.

At East Longmeadow High School, Massachusetts, six out of the nine dress code regulations targeted female students. The dress code had not been updated since the 1990s. "It was time for us to revisit some of the language," principal Gina Flanagan said.

Many school dress codes use gendered language, such as "girls must not wear spaghetti straps or show cleavage." The reasoning? These things are distracting to other students, particularly males. Girlhood expert Shauna Pomerantz of Brock University says that "dress coding" students for being distracting is a form of victim-blaming.

"It's saying the male response is your fault. Your body is causing negativity," explains Pomerantz. Sexist rules also set a precedent for men, she adds. "It is offensive to men. It suggests they don't have the ability to talk to a female student without going wild."

Marci Kutzer, a fourth-grade teacher at Bertha Ronzone Elementary in Las Vegas, Nevada, says that, while school boards couch dress codes as preparing students for the workplace and adult life, their real purpose is to prevent "distractions."

Kutzer says that sends a powerful message: "A boy's education can be compromised by your gender. Please do what you can to neutralize it." This clearly puts a burden on female students.

Another notorious dress code rule is the "finger-tip policy." Female students must wear skirts or shorts that go past their fingertips. While this seems straightforward, students and parents report that for some, it's impossible to find clothing that complies with the rule.

In Duval County, Florida, Nikki Belsham says that she's been struggling with this rule since she was in school, and now her daughter is facing the same dilemma.

Shopping for her daughter is difficult; while Belsham can find appropriate clothing at the mall, it doesn't pass the test. This is a common problem.

"Take a tall, skinny 12 year old girl-her shorts may not pass this finger length test and would be considered inappropriate for school, even though her butt is covered and the shorts are relatively long," she explains.

Belsham also says that administration won't enforce the rule with boys. "Not one person in administration would even look at or question the length of a boy's shorts."

'White Male Default'

Kutzer says that she will only "dress code" students if their clothing is clearly so tight it is uncomfortable. Her school follows "standard school attire," (SSA) so students wear uniforms. On laundry day, however, some students show up without. Other student's families can't afford to keep up with their growing children, so their uniforms are ill-fitting.

"We are told by our administrators to send non-compliance issues to the office, but I only refer kids who are clearly wearing too tight or uncomfortable clothing, and I send them to the nurse, who keeps a stash of extra clothing for this type of situation," explains Kutzer.

The high school attended by her daughter, however, uses a dress code policy rather than the SSA. Kutzer noticed that it essentially targets female and minority students-the focus being on on parts of the female anatomy, like backs, shoulders, and legs.

"Targeting styles of clothing that are mostly associated with a particular minority group is discriminatory. When styles such as 'sagging pants' are the issue, we are putting a burden predominantly on black males," says Kutzer.

She calls this the "white male default," a common trend for school dress codes. "Dressing as most white young men do seems to be what is encouraged.'

In 17-year-old Maddie Reeser's Baltimore City public school, it's the Black girls at her school who are the most frequently dress coded-a double discrimination. "My white friends rarely get sent to the office, but my Black friends do quite often," says Reeser.

Another student said she brought up this issue to a male administrator, who told her it was "because white girls don't have as much to show." The student says this comment made her feel uncomfortable, let along failing to address the inequality.

Despite the fact that Reeser's school has a uniform, she and her peers still faced the same issues that Belsham described at her Duval County school. "The rule should be based on the clothes, not how they fit, because it's different for each person," says Belsham.

Despite the rules being the same for every girl, teachers end up enforcing the rules more strictly with Black females, and in a way that is humiliating.

Many dress codes can cause black students to fall behind academically, according to a 2018 National Women's Law Center study. Looking at public schools in the District of Columbia, the report found that three in four D.C. public high school dress codes say students can be pulled out of class or school for dress code violations.

"It's outrageous that girls are losing critical class time simply for what they are wearing," said NWLC Education Fellow and report co-author, Kayla Patrick. "This sends a disturbing message to all students: What a girl looks like is more important than what she learns and thinks. No girl should ever have to forfeit her education because her shirt is the wrong color or she has a hole in her jeans."

Making All Students Feel Comfortable

East Longmeadow principal Flanagan said she's tried to target inequalities at her own school by creating a gender-neutral dress code, and by involving students in the dress code process. "Instead of saying no low cut shirts or cleavage, the dress code says all private parts must be covered at all times," she says.

Pomerantz recommends giving students lots of leeway to express themselves with fashion. If something truly crosses the line, there's a way to tell them, without enforcing victim-blaming.

"A question you can ask is 'What is it about dressing this way that's so important to you?'" Pomerantz recommends.

Many schools are looking into updating their dress code policies by making them more gender neutral, gathering student input and changing the wording-just taking the blame off females for "distracting" male students. Kutzer says the SSA at her school promotes equality fairly successfully-at least at the fourth-grade level. The districts hasn't yet introduced the SSA at the high school level.

"We want our kids to feel comfortable when they come to school," says Flanagan. "Who knows? Five or ten years from now we may have to update again to fit the changing times."

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When School Dress Codes Discriminate | NEA

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While a dress code is supposed to make the school environment more conducive to learning, it frequently does the opposite.

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When it comes to education of your child you want to make sure that they have the best education possible. There are 3 choices that you, as a parent, can make for education. Those are public school, private school, and home school.

For many people, private school is out of the budget. While the schools are usually better than public school, they can be very expensive. Depending on the school, it can cost several thousand dollars per school year. That prices it right out of the pockets of many people.

Public schooling is free, and each child is guaranteed to have a free and appropriate education. There are public schools all over, making it easy for your child to get there, plus there is usually transportation, so you don't have to do anything to get your child to school except to get them out to the bus stop on time.

Children who are in public schools can participate in a lot of extra-curricular activities, such as band, sports and clubs. The kids also get a lot of socialization which will help in their later lives. They will encounter a lot of different personality types.

But, for all the things that are going for public schooling, it has a lot of faults. Public schools are geared to teach the average student. That means that students on either end of the scale get neglected. Gifted kids get bored and kids who are struggling keep getting left further and further behind.

Class sizes are often very large. In most schools the class sizes average one teacher to 20 students at the elementary level, and in middle and high school that can go up to 1:30, or more. That means that your kid doesn't get the help that they need when they need it.

Homeschooling is another option for education. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is because their children get the individualized education that the parents want them to. The education is totally geared around the child and will work towards their strengths and help them with their weaknesses. The parents get to spend a lot of time home with their kids, so while the kids are being educated they are also bonding with their kids. The gifted kids get to work as fast as they can, while the kids who are struggling get to spend all the time they need to stay caught up.

But, as good as homeschooling is there are some drawbacks to it. One is that your kids won't be around as many other kids so they won't have that same level of socialization, which could hurt them.

There is some cost associated with home schooling, mostly to buy the supplies that are needed, but they average about $500 a year. But, that allows you to find the curriculum plan that works the best for your child. There are a lot of different plans available.

When it comes down to public school versus home schooling, a lot of the decision comes down to what will work best for you and your kids. Not all kids will work well with home school, and not all parents are cut out for home schooling.

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Education public schools private schools homeschooling homeschool

Blog Writer

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The Many Great Benefits of Home Schooling

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When it comes to education of your child you want to make sure that they have the best education possible. There are 3 choices that you, as a parent, can make for education. Those are public school, private school, and home school. For many people, private school is out of the budget.

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When it comes to your child's education, you want to know that you are making the right choice. But each child is unique when it comes to learning, and the option that might be right for another child might not be the best choice for yours. Many parents who are concerned about the quality of their child's education make the choice to homeschool their kids. If you are thinking about homeschooling as an option, take the time to learn about the benefits of public school over homeschooling - they might just change your mind and your attitude about public school.

This video discusses the pros and cons of homeschooling vs schooling in public school.
What is Homeschooling?
In the simplest of terms, homeschooling is simply schooling your children at home. Homeschooling has become quite the progressive movement in recent years with more and more parents choosing to homeschool instead of sending their children to public school. There are a number of reasons why a parent might choose to homeschool their child - here are a few:

The family might have different religious beliefs than those taught (or not taught) in public school. Homeschooling allows you to choose whether to incorporate religion or not.

Homeschooling might offer more specialized educational attention for special needs children.

Parents may have different educational philosophies than public school administrators and teachers. With homeschooling, you choose what philosophies to follow.

Children may progress faster in a homeschool setting than in a public school.

Schooling at home may promote a closer familiar relationship - many parents find that they enjoy spending extra time with their kids in homeschool.

Public school options in the area may not offer the preferred degree of educational quality.

Homeschool can save time since you don't have to transport your children to and from school every day. The school day can actually be shortened for children.

The homeschool movement really started to gain speed in the 1970s when authors like Raymond Moore and John Holt began writing about educational reform. Homeschooling was a new option in alternative education at the time but, according to the National Home Education Research Institute, there are now more than 2 million children being homeschooled in the United States each year. And that number increases by as much as 7% to 15% each year.
The Pros and Cons of Homeschooling Your Kids
Homeschooling is legal in all fifty states, but there are some requirements you have to meet. Parents are required to choose or create an educational curriculum that meets certain educational standards set forth by the state. As long as those standards are met, however, parents have more educational liberty with homeschooling than with public school. Students may have more opportunities to choose what they learn with homeschooling, and they can learn at their own pace without having to keep up with more advanced students. Homeschool gives parents the opportunity to incorporate religion into their child's education and it may promote a closer family atmosphere as well.

This video looks at which student does better: the one who is homeschooled or the one who attends public school.

One of the major downsides of homeschooling is that it takes a lot of time to plan and implement educational strategies. In most families, one parent needs to make homeschooling the children their full-time concern - it can be very challenging for a single parent to succeed with homeschooling. Because one parent may not be able to work, homeschooling may put a financial strain on the family finances. Homeschooled children may also have more limited access to extracurricular activities including sports, and they may not have the same level of social interaction as they would in public school. There are, of course, workarounds for these things but they are still challenges associated with homeschooling.
The Benefits of Public School vs. Homeschool
Now that you know a little more about homeschooling and its associated pros and cons, you may be wondering how public school stacks up. Each child is an individual with individual needs, so public school may or may not be the best option. However, the only way you'll know this to be the case is to take time to learn about the potential benefits of public school versus homeschooling. Here are some of the top benefits you should consider:

Public school has a built-in structure. Children, particularly young children, thrive on routine and they require a lot of attention and care. If you are trying to homeschool your children while also being a stay-at-home mom, you may find it more challenging than you imagine.

Many public schools offer sports and elective options like art and music - these programs may not be available to homeschool students.

A public school teaches children a certain degree of independence. Depending on the grade, children need to keep track of their own class schedules, find their way from one class to another, purchase their own lunch, and make it to and from the bus every day.

Teachers are public schools are required to carry education degrees and they may have more experience working with and teaching children. Teaching a child is different from parenting a child and many parents struggle to do both.

Public school is typically cheaper than homeschooling. You could spend $1,000 or more on a homeschool curriculum alone, not to mention supplies. For a public school, you have to buy supplies once or twice a year and you can pack your child's lunch to save money.

Children who attend public school have more opportunities for social interaction than many homeschooled students. There are homeschool co-ops that can be helpful, but a public school has built-in social benefits.

Sending your children to public school frees you up to just be a parent. Doing double duty as both teacher and parent can be both grueling and frustrating at times - especially if you have other non-school-age children to care for.

Public school gives you and your child some much-needed time apart which helps to foster your child's independence and gives you a break as well. There is no harm in needing a break from your kids once in a while.

In addition to the benefits listed above, there are some downsides to public school. For example, public school has a more rigorous and regimented schedule than most homeschool programs, and students may not have the same degree of freedom and flexibility to customize their education. But unless you can fully commit yourself to create and implementing a strong homeschool curriculum, your child may be better off in public school anyway.

This video outlines five differences between homeschooling and public school.

While there are many benefits of private school versus homeschooling, every situation is different. A public school could very well be the best choice for your child while homeschooling is a better option for another child. You may even find that one of your children does better in one environment and another child does better in a separate environment. Your job as a parent is to provide for your child's needs to the best of your ability. This often means making compromises or making the best of a bad situation. As long as you keep your child's best interests in mind, you will make the right choice.

Attending public school comes with its own challenges, but homeschooling is not always the better option. Before you decide to homeschool your child, take the time to thoroughly consider your options and explore them from all angles. You may just find that public school is a better option than you previously realized - it is up to you to make the most of it.

Questions? Contact us on Facebook. @publicschoolreview

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What are the Benefits of Public School Over Homeschooling? - PublicSchoolReview.com

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Choosing the right school for your child can be difficult, but homeschooling may not be the better option. Keep reading to learn more.

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Homeschool Educator

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Contributors: Donna Schillinger, Brian D. Ray, Ph.D., Kenzie Knapp, Jeremy Newman

Read ahead:

Okay ... let's take a couple of steps back; this doesn't need to get ugly; both homeschooling and public school have their pros and cons. One of the great things about America is the freedom to choose from a variety of educational choices-a variety that seems to be widening rapidly with the relatively recent additions of charter schools, specialized private schools and public school at home. Despite the many improvements and new options, THSC still believes that the best education is the original model: children learning from loving parents.

Even so, homeschooling may not always be for everyone. In these next few paragraphs, we'll try very hard to be objective about the pros and cons of different educational settings, including public school, private school and homeschool.

If you think homeschooling might be right for you, THSC is here to support that choice with resources such as our free Home Educator Quarterly magazine, our Home Educator Express monthly email, and our free online homeschool group locator. Twice annually, we also offer Called to Teach Homeschool Conventions in Arlington and The Woodlands. These overwhelmingly incredible experiences for homeschooling families include informative and encouraging speakers; more than 200 vendors of homeschooling products and services; and fellowship time designed for children, teens, moms and dads.

And if you need to speak to someone about a specific issue, our stellar Customer Relations Team is just a phone call, email or Facebook message away. If you have a strong desire and determination to homeschool, it can be done! Getting started is easy and THSC will be here for you all the way!

A Spectrum of Schooling Options

From least to greatest, here's how much influence you have over your child's education with different educational options. Be aware that our list is based on rather sweeping generalizations, not any research or technical analysis. Quite possibly, some schools in each of these categories actually belong elsewhere on the spectrum.

Public schooling: Your children are under the care of trained professionals who apply a district-wide or statewide curriculum over which you have almost no influence. Children are educated in groups of approximately 25 and are away from home about eight hours per day (counting the commute) for approximately 180 days of the year.

Private or charter school: Your children are under the care of trained professionals who apply a specific curriculum over which you have almost no influence. However, private and charter schools offer alternatives to public school curriculums. If you choose a private or charter option, it's likely because their curriculum or method of instruction more closely aligns with your own educational philosophy. Class sizes may be considerably smaller. As with public school, children are away from home about eight hours daily for approximately 180 days a year.

Public school at home: Also known as virtual school, your children are under your care but are under the instruction of trained professionals. They apply a district-wide or statewide curriculum over which you have almost no influence. Instruction may be in online groups, but your child is at home with limited in-person exposure to other students. Students may complete their work more quickly, spending as few as four hours daily. Depending on the program, students with special circumstances may have flexibility to complete their work outside regular school hours.

University-Model: This hybrid model is part homeschooling and part private school. Your children are at home for two to three days per week, attending a kind of private school on alternate days. As for curriculum, the choice is yours on home days and you may have some influence on group days. Some programs have trained educators, while some use parents to teach group classes. Most programs have a regular academic schedule, meaning that your child will be away from home about 20 hours weekly.

Unschooling: In this alternative method of homeschooling, your child engages in self-directed learning with varying degrees of oversight by parents or teachers. Since the child is in the pilot's seat, we listed unschooling to the left of other homeschooling types. Typically, the child is at home with parents, schooling as much as the family deems necessary. (Although acceptable in Texas, other states may have minimum attendance requirements.)

Homeschooling: This encompasses many variations, including traditional homeschooling, classical education, Charlotte Mason, unit studies and other types. However, most share the common characteristic of parent-taught education using a curriculum of the parent's choosing. The class size is the number of school-age children in the household. In Texas, parents determine the school schedule. Other states may have statutes requiring a certain number of days or hours.

Homeschool vs. Public School: The Pros and Cons

Let's specifically consider the pros and cons of public school and homeschooling, the two ends of the spectrum.

Public school
Allows both parents to work away from home.

Parents yield much of their daily influence to the public school system.

Free, by law.

Pressure to accept many additional expenses, such as premium school supplies, name-brand clothing, fundraisers, pay-to-play events and extracurricular activities.

Comprehensive curriculum.

Instruction aimed at students of average intelligence. Not much flexibility for students to learn at their own pace. Above-average students are underchallenged, while below-average students sometimes "fall through the cracks."

Your child's care and education is overseen by trained professionals who have undergone background checks.

Some teachers lack passion, talent, genuine care or empathy.

Many opportunities to play with other children.

Spends much time with peers of the same age. Limited opportunities for cross-generational interaction. May be bullied and badly influenced by other children. School shootings are statistically unlikely, but it still worries you.

Pressure to teach for the test.

Homeschooling
Parents have great influence over their child's education, including the selection of materials.

Requires considerable effort and time investment by parents.

You control the complexity and cost of curriculum and materials.

Packaged curriculum. School supplies and extracurricular activities can be expensive.

Studies can be tailored to individual strengths, accelerating according to ability. Students with learning difficulties can get more individualized attention.

Studies may not be well-rounded if parents shy away from subjects such as foreign language, higher mathematics and science.

Flexibility to align your day with natural rhythms, freedom to travel, control over schooling times, etc.

Parents who are poorly disciplined may neglect their responsibilities.

Your children are safer in your care. You have greater influence over the friendships they make. More opportunities for interacting with adults.

Families must be deliberate about finding opportunities for socialization, particularly in rural areas without a nearby homeschool group.

Testing is optional.

In addition to those listed above, other relevant factors usually just depend on the school in question. For example, you might believe that public schools have more extracurricular offerings such as band, theater and sports. However, most homeschoolers can access these activities through homeschool groups or the community.

In fact, many homeschooled students exceed their public school counterparts in extracurricular involvement. According to the Census Bureau, 57 percent of public school students participate in sports, meaning that almost half do not.

Testing is another "nothing burger." The lack of testing requirements has not hurt homeschool students on the most consequential standardized tests-the SAT and ACT. If anything, income is the best predictor of testing performance.

Not convinced? For a comprehensive look at academic performance by homeschoolers, read " Homeschool Progress Report 2009: Academic Achievement and Demographics."

Even so ...

Do You Wonder if They Might Be Better Off in Public School?

Read this reassuring answer by a homeschool graduate Kenzie Knapp.

"Are there days when you wonder if your children would be better in public school? My mother was a music teacher before having children. Though trained to teach other parents' children, my mother's years in the system taught her one thing: it wasn't for her children. Even so, there were moments when my mother's conviction wobbled, especially in our toddler years. Once, my grandfather called during one of those episodes. Sobbing into the phone, my mother declared, 'These kids would be better in daycare!'

Twenty years later, my mom laughs with us over that statement. But for many mothers, this feeling is anything but funny. Are you one of them? If so, I wish we could sit down for a cup of tea and talk. Among others, I'd like to share the following three reasons why I'm thankful that my all early years were spent at home.

I Needed Her

God was wise enough to give children to parents, not professionals. But since we live in a culture that denies God, parents (especially mothers) are made to feel that they are warping their little ones if not raised by "childhood experts." Don't believe it!

My earliest memories are swaddled in security, tenderness and the assurance that someone was there for me (really two 'someones,' because my dad was also there). I never knew any other reality. Children must grapple with a world of fear, loneliness and betrayal soon enough; let them be rooted in the love, trust and safety that only you can give them. And because only a parent could provide these things, I was better at home.

I Needed Relationships

Relationships are the most important thing that you can give your children. Nothing else can fill the relational need of your child's heart. Deep and lasting relationships are a growing rarity. People want them, but they just don't know how to create them. Maybe you never learned the tools for successful relationships, either.

Dear mama, you can still give your child what you were never given. Because my mother and father were willing to make sacrifices to raise me at home, I witnessed the importance of relationships every day. Of course, there were stressful and less-than-harmonious days. We learned together what makes relationships work. But my parents' unwavering determination to never give up laid a foundation that their children could build on. And since only they could teach me this lesson, I was better at home.

I Needed a Godly Worldview

By far, I'm most thankful that my earliest years were molded in godliness. I learned of a holy God who hated sin, yet wanted to be my Father. I learned that the height of living is obedience to God and loving others as myself. I learned the eternal scoop on life. God was never marginalized to only churchy things. He was real. He was with me every day ... like my mother was. And that is the top reason why I was better at home."

Source: TopMastersInEducation.com

What About Public School at Home?

Texas offers public school at home programs that provide a virtual schooling option to parents. These programs are administered by the public school system. Therefore, parents who enroll their children in these programs should be aware that they require at least four hours of instruction daily. Students must also take the state-mandated tests required of all public school students.

Contact your local school for information on public school at home. There are specific enrollment requirements for each of these services. Parents considering such a program should ask for written requirements and check them carefully before making that choice.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) oversees public school at home programs. The Texas Virtual School Network can give additional information.

But I'm Not a Certified Teacher! Wouldn't My Children Be Better Educated by a Professional?

You might be surprised at the answer. Consider the research on teaching and student performance within the public schools.

Researcher Dr. Herbert Walberg puts it succinctly: "Overall, it appears that certified teachers perform very little or no better than those who are uncertified." Researchers Goldhaber and Brewer say: "Although teacher certification is pervasive, there is little rigorous evidence that it is systematically related to student achievement." Additionally, investigators Buddin and Zamarro recently revealed that "...measured teacher characteristics explain little of the difference" in student scores.

Research on homeschool students suggests the same thing. In our most recent nationwide study, we found that "whether either parent has ever been a certified teacher explains less than one-tenth of 1% of the variance in test scores." Furthermore, homeschool students performed slightly better when neither parent was ever certified!

Even in the public school system, researchers have difficulty finding any significant connection between teacher certification and student achievement in core academic fields. Similarly, there is no evidence that teacher certification is related to homeschool students' performance.

There is much evidence that regular parents who educate their children in a parent-led home environment can and do see a lot of success in their students, without any professional training in "education."

This research from the National Home Education Research Institute is the kind of research that we need in courts and legislatures to make sound policies regarding home education.

Dig Deeper

Since Homeschools Are Private Schools in Texas, Aren't They Regulated the Same Way?

If you seek to be free of government regulation, there's no better choice in Texas than homeschooling.

In Texas, homeschools are considered a type of private school and are recognized as legitimate schools (read more in The Critical Difference). However, there are substantial differences between the regulations applicable to homeschools and traditional private schools. These differences grant freedom to homeschools in many areas where traditional private schools are restricted.

Homeschools

Few regulations:

Requires that parents teach in a bona fide manner and provide a letter of assurance, if requested by the school district.

Requires written curriculum consisting of reading, spelling, grammar, math and a course in good citizenship.

Traditional Private Schools

A little more regulation:

Requires immunizations unless parents have an exemption for health risks or religious reasons.

Must report names of students who are suspected of having infectious diseases.

Must obtain records of anyone under the age of 11 for identification purposes.

No alcoholic beverages within 1,000 feet of school.

Requires all students to have a medical screening.

No guns or other weapons allowed on school premises.

Private schools seeking accreditation:

Require adequate financial resources.

Demonstrate professional management of their resources.

Provide a clearly stated philosophy with objectives that are adequate to implement the philosophy.

Need a physical location and facilities adequate to support the program.

Staff must hold relevant college degrees and be qualified, by preparation or experience, for the positions and work to which they are assigned.

Must have a minimum attendance requirement similar to public schools, either in hours per day or days per year.

Must conduct a self-study and qualitatively assess its strengths and limitations, including achievement of objectives and compliance with state Board of Education rules.

Private elementary schools must maintain student academic records and achievement levels required for promotion, comparable to those in public schools.

Although homeschools are a type of private school, homeschools and traditional private schools are obviously distinct with regard to regulatory burdens. Thankfully, homeschools don't have to follow the same rules that govern traditional private schools. Texas law treats homeschools as a specific type of private school, subject only to their own requirements.

Is Homeschooling About to Become the New Normal?

Teaching Truth in Your Homeschool Curriculum

It's sometimes hard to guess which straw will finally break the camel's back. But other times, the consequences are pretty clear. Our public schools have slowly become more dangerous, secular and liberal. Any remaining semblance of family values seems to be on the verge of death.

What exactly do we expect? Of course, not all public schools or public school teachers are liberal. However, the system itself seems to be a clear platform for liberal and anti-family values.

Exhibit A: The new locker and changing room policy that allows persons of either gender to pick the bathroom or locker of their choice.

Forgive the frankness, but have we gone mad? Free thought and free expression are interesting things. At some point, American culture devolved from respecting minority opinions to believing that we must all agree with minority opinions. In other words, you have the freedom to hold your opinion unless someone else disagrees with it. Reality-even physical, biological and scientific reality-seems to have no bearing on what is true and what is not. Aren't convinced yet? Even our college students can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

This environment surrounds our children. In Fort Worth, it's not enough that children are emotionally and mentally subjected to this via the school culture. We are now physically endangering them to appease our fear of standing up for the truth.

Here at THSC, our position is clear: Parental rights and child safety trump personal opinion. Nobody's desire for acceptance is more important than a parent's ability to protect his or her child.

How Did We Get Here?

Throughout American history, parents' opinions and childhood independence have changed drastically. First, young boys cared for the homestead. Then, they moved to suburban sandlots and visited dime stores. Finally, they played in the neighborhood. Now, parents have been reported for allowing siblings to walk to the park alone. Why is this? Is it because of danger? Or is it because of society's politically correct rules?

Ironically, these pressures to conform are creating new potential dangers. Today's rules prohibit a fair and objective citizen from noting clear physical differences and potentially inappropriate (or even threatening) situations.

In the last decade, simply allowing children to go to the changing room by themselves created disagreements. At what age is he or she old enough? Is it okay if the parent can see the door? But this year, those disagreements became a national controversy. It's no longer just about childhood independence. It's about common sense and addressing threatening, inappropriate situations. Can a 12, 13, or even 14-year-old girl know what to do if she encounters a man who believes that he's a woman? For decade, we have depended on our girls to accompany the little ones to the locker room while Mommy supervises the toddler in the shallow end of the pool. Must the girls now must be accompanied as well?

How is our nation even considering allowing grown men into the same locker room with a girl?

Christians, what are we doing?

Seeing the Truth for What It Really Is

Is truth really this fragile? Can we not see what we are doing to the next generation? They are about to grow up with no sense of reality, no concept of what is true or false, and no way to determine the appropriateness of their surroundings. Can they no longer be sure that plain physical truths are actually true?

We are all standing here watching the emperor waltz around naked, while telling our children that he is wearing clothes.

On issues like these, it is difficult for me to find the proper balance between calling out the emperor out in front of everyone and trying to help him with clearly serious issues. At time, we all accept different lies about ourselves and life. Someone who doesn't know whether he is a man or a woman is not a greater sinner than the rest of us. We can't refuse to extend a helping hand simply because someone sins differently than we do.

But when someone's decisions are putting your wife, sister, daughter or mother at risk, how do you defend simple reason without losing your chance to reach those people?

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

It's More Than Policy and Laws

Ultimately, this is more than a simple policy problem. Even if we win the policy fight, the battle will continue all the same. We must teach the truth as well as defend it.

It's amazing how much time Jesus spent on earth simply teaching. Did he fend off attacks? Certainly. Did he call out those who were promoting lies? Absolutely. Did he stop there? Definitely not.

Homeschooling is one of the last opportunities to teach our children the unpolluted truth. If the public schools continue down their current path, Christians, conservatives and those who simply fear for their child's safety are going to start withdrawing their children. In the very near future, homeschooling could become the new normal for many families.

For now, we must not only continue the fight to defend parental rights and simple truth, but also take the time to teach those truths to others.

You don't become a girl or a boy by merely believing that you are one. Your decision to live with another person of the same sex does not make that relationship a marriage. Other human beings don't wait birth and your acknowledgement to actually become alive.

However, the people who believe all those things simply sin differently than you do. They are not any less human or any less redeemable as a result.

What is and what you believe are not the same, and you will someday be held responsible for the difference between those two things.

And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Don't lose heart. Past generations have dealt with lies that were as large or even greater, and God has pulled them through. We are still here.

***

Donna Schillinger homeschooled her two children for 11 years. She is president of the Micah 6:8 Initiative in Rogers, Ark., which addresses food and housing insecurity in Northwest Arkansas.

Jeremy has served as the Policy Director for THSC since 2013. In 2022, he became THSC's first Deputy Director. He teaches Lincoln-Douglas debate in the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association (NCFCA). He currently lives in Fort Worth with his wife, Addi, and two sons, Wyatt and Declan.

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Homeschool vs. Public School: The Ultimate Showdown

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Contributors: Donna Schillinger, Brian D. Ray, Ph.D., Kenzie Knapp, Jeremy Newman Read ahead: A Spectrum of Schooling Options Homeschool vs. Public School: The Pros and Cons Do You Wonder if They Might Be Better Off in Public School? What About Public School at Home? Wouldn't My Children be Better Educated

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20 Minute Lunches- not good for students 

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20 Minute Lunches- not good for students 

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The amount of time schools allocate for lunch can be just as important as the food they serve-and the 25 minutes to half hour the typical school sets aside is often too short, say the School Nutrition Association and an expert who has studied the issue.

By the time students walk to the cafeteria, maybe run to the bathroom, and wait in line for their food, they often don't have enough time to eat all of their meal-especially the healthy, more fibrous parts-which can have long-lasting effects on their academic performance and behavior.

And low-income students who rely on school-provided meals can be especially affected by rushed lunch periods because of the time they spend in line waiting to be served.

But many principals find it hard to balance the time needed for instruction in the classroom with breaks like lunch and recess.

"Days are really tight anyway," said Heather Jones, the principal of Trailside Elementary in Anchorage, Alaska. Her school started offering longer lunch periods this year as part of a district pilot program.

"Staff understand that the movement and break time is important," Jones said. "But students also have to be taught what they need to move up to the next grade."

The median length of school lunch periods has largely stayed the same over the past decade, according to the School Nutrition Association. But that obscures the problem: With growing student populations, many schools are cycling more students through the cafeteria which means less time for eating, said Gay Anderson, the president of the School Nutrition Association.

Pair that with the fact that federal standards for healthy school lunches have tightened up, and students simply aren't left enough time to chew all those fibrous fruits and vegetables, said Anderson, who is also the director of nutrition at the Brandon Valley school district in South Dakota.

"Across the country we're hearing, a lot of those fresh fruits and veggies, which are great to add to our program, need more time to consume," said Anderson. "When you think about eating an apple versus a canned pear-those types of textures, those things make a difference."

At minimum, students need 20 minutes to sit and eat, said Anderson, excluding time walking to the cafeteria and standing in line. The School Nutrition Association is lobbying the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to officially recommend just that, citing research on students' eating patterns and nutritional needs.

15 Minutes to Eat?

Students who get less than 20 minutes to eat leave a lot of food uneaten on their trays, said Juliana Cohen, a public health and nutrition professor at Merrimack College and Harvard University's school of public health. That's what she found in a 2015 study when she analyzed 1,000 students in a low-income, urban school in Massachusetts during their lunch periods. Cohen reckons students need at least 25 minutes of seat time.

Sixty-five percent of the students in the study had less than 20 minutes to eat their lunch and those students consumed significantly less of their entrees, vegetables, and milk compared to students who had at least 25 minutes to eat. They ate 13 percent less of their entrees, 12 percent less of their vegetables, and drank 10 percent less of their milk, Cohen found. Students were also much less likely to select fruit for their meal.

Seventeen percent of students in Cohen's study had even less time-under 15 minutes-to eat.

Too-short lunch periods disproportionately harm low-income students for whom school lunch may be their most reliable and hearty meal of the day.

"They are more likely to receive a school meal and they will be standing in that line," said Cohen. "And they also rely on school meals for half of their daily calorie intake. They especially need that time to eat their food."

But when it comes to setting the daily schedule, lunch time is frequently whittled away in order to provide more instructional time. Experts like Anderson and Cohen said that principals shouldn't view lunch and instructional time as an either-or proposition-lunch doesn't take away from academics, it enhances them.

"Research suggests that when students eat healthier food it is associated with improved executive functioning-working memory, impulse control, everything we think of when we think of making a student successful," said Cohen.

Proper nutrition helps prepare students for test-taking, said Anderson, and also means fewer students visiting the school nurse for ailments caused by hunger such as headaches.

"We have to work together on this as a whole community," Anderson said. "The nutrition piece is a very valuable piece in getting the child educated."

Balancing Breaks With Instruction

At Trailside Elementary, it's too early to tell what the effects of the slightly longer lunch periods will be, but so far Jones has received positive feedback from students, teachers, and especially parents. The Anchorage school district started the pilot program just this year-in response to a petition from parents.

Lunch period was increased from 20 to 25 minutes, while recess time was upped from 20 to 30 minutes. The five minutes Trailside allocated for transitioning from recess to lunch remained the same.

Participating in the pilot program was voluntary, and Jones was eager to give it a try.

Even though her teachers appreciate the value of giving students more time to run around and eat, losing 15 minutes of instruction time leaves them feeling a bit squeezed.

"Especially those older kids, it's hard to get the academics in," she said. "Something has to give, because we didn't expand the school day."

So, what can schools do?

While there are no federal guidelines for how long schools should give for lunch time, there are best practices.

Anderson suggests having more grab-and go-options-so students can just walk up and grab, say, a pre-packaged salad with chicken, an apple, and a carton of milk. She also suggests letting students eat in their classroom, so precious time isn't spent walking to the cafeteria, waiting in line, and finding a seat.

In Houston's school district, the director of nutrition began experimenting with "family style" lunch service in classrooms, where students and teachers eat together. The in-classroom dining gives students as much as 30 minutes to eat by eliminating the walk to the cafeteria and wait time in line. In one elementary school that piloted the approach in the youngest grades, the principal was able to move the lunch period for preschool, kindergarten, and 1st grade from 10:30 to noon.

Other strategies schools can consider to get students to the tables to eat more quickly are adding additional lines and automated point-of-sale services where they simply have to swipe a card to pay for their food, said Cohen.

There are other scheduling decisions schools can make to ensure students eat more of their meals, said Cohen, such has not scheduling lunch before 11 a.m. and holding recess before lunch-not after.

"It allows students to focus on their meal and not be rushing through their school meal because there's an incentive to go out and play faster," she said.

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Why 20-Minute Lunch Periods Aren't Good for Students

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The amount of time schools allocate for lunch can be just as important as the food they serve-and the 25 minutes to half hour the typical school sets aside is often too short, say the School Nutrition Association and an expert who has studied the issue.

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Homeschool vs Public School | Classical Conversations

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Deciding between homeschool or public school? Here are several reasons why you should choose to homeschool!

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Parents outraged by viral photo of student’s ‘pathetic’ school lunch

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Is a hot dog bun with cheese a satisfying meal?

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If later school start times are better, why aren’t they more popular?

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Germantown, Tenn., schools changed their start times last year, but not everyone is convinced the outcome was worth the extra expense.

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Sleeping in probably sounds like a no-brainer to most teenagers, but their parents aren't so sure that it's worth starting school later to get the extra shut-eye.

Half of parents with teenagers whose schools start before 8:30 am said they would like schools to start after that, according to a survey released Monday by C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Michigan. The later start time was recommended last August by the American Academy of Pediatrics, with the goal of at least 8 1/2 hours of sleep a night for teens.

The pediatricians say more sleep will improve mood and academic performance, and reduce the risk of traffic accidents and obesity.

But just 40 percent of the parents said they thought the shift would mean kids would get more sleep; 20 percent said they thought it would improve academic performance.

The survey doesn't clarify why parents aren't so keen on later starts for middle school and high school. But 22 percent of the 636 parents surveyed said they thought the later start would not allow enough time for afterschool activities.

About half of the parents who favored later start times said they thought the shift should be made only if it didn't impact the school budget.

Sounds like a ringing endorsement of "Hmm," doesn't it?

But it turns out that just 20 percent of the parents had heard about the pediatricians' new policy. Once the surveyors explained it, 71 percent of parents said they agreed with it.

So maybe what we have here is a need for some education, at least when it comes to pediatricians and parents.

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Many Parents Aren't Sold On Later School Start Times For Teens

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Sleeping in probably sounds like a no-brainer to most teenagers, but their parents aren't so sure that it's worth starting school later to get the extra shut-eye. Half of parents with teenagers whose schools start before 8:30 am said they would like schools to start after that, according to a survey released Monday by C.S.

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Great Site with lots of debatable topics!

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Great Site with lots of debatable topics!

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Our 100 Most Popular Student Questions for Debate and Persuasive Writing

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Here are the 100 most-commented-upon questions we’ve ever asked that call for persuasive writing.

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Standardized testing has ignited a national debate in the last few years (or decades), and many parents feel understandably concerned about their children being judged on the basis of tests that, in some cases, don't seem to reliably correlate with actual learning or with successful college and career outcomes.

In the United States, both public and private schools use standardized assessments each school year. In public schools, students must undergo many tests to ensure they are meeting state or federal standards. Private schools have more leeway, although at Whitby we do require our students from Grade 2 on to complete the Comprehensive Testing Program from the Educational Records Bureau and the International Schools Assessment from the Australian Council for Educational Research.

At Whitby, we believe that standardized testing can benefit students-as long as it's looked at in the right light. Below we'll discuss some of the benefits of standardized assessments, as well as some of the ways standardised assessments can be negative for students.

The Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing

Pro # 1. Standardized testing is a metric for learning

When Whitby students are assessed through standardized testing, we gain a valuable metric we can use to check the quality of our curriculum. With exams created and given by an independent organization, standardized test scores are useful because they come from a neutral source and give us data that we can compare to other independent schools across the United States and with other international schools across the globe.

Pro # 2. Standardized testing helps pinpoint areas for improvement

When we receive standardized test data at Whitby, we use it to evaluate the effectiveness of our education program. We view standardized testing data as not only another set of data points to assess student performance , but also as a means to help us reflect on our curriculum. When we look at Whitby's assessment data, we can compare our students to their peers at other schools to determine what we're doing well within our educational continuum and where we need to invest more time and resources.

Pro # 3. Standardized tests can help schools evaluate progress

Assessment data is also useful for year-over-year internal comparisons. We compare data over a number of years to find trends-and then trace any changes back to their source. If the math scores of our fourth grade students suddenly jump, we want to identify what change led to the improved performance, and how we can continue to implement this within our curriculum. We're also able to use a student's historical assessment data to monitor their progress and uncover any challenges they may need to overcome (as well as identifying places where they have already improved and excelled.)
Now let's take a look at what we view as the most concerning aspects of standardized assessment:
Con #1. Test scores can impact confidence

A big disadvantage of standardized testing is that it's easy to interpret a student's score as the sole judgement of that student's ability. We're constantly emphasizing at Whitby that the number is only one point of data within an array of internal assessments across many subject areas that provide us with information on a student's learning progress. There are many cases where students have demonstrated clear understanding within a subject or concept through various assessments, but aren't as skilled at taking multiple choice tests. Nevertheless, it can be hard on a student if they feel that they didn't perform as well as they'd like. In worst case scenarios, instead of determining the entire picture of learning through a review of all assessment data with their teachers, a student might determine their success based on a standardized test score that is taken once a year..

Con #2. There's pressure to "teach to the test"

When standardized exams become all important in a school or district, it has a massive impact on teaching and learning. Educators frequently start "teaching to the test" if they feel that their evaluations (and jobs) solely depend on how well students perform. Educators may also stop trying new techniques and teaching methods in the classroom. With every minute counting on the way to their students' next exam, teachers will worry that an untested method will backfire and their students will score worse than before. This comes at the cost of inquiry, engagement, creativity and risk taking in student learning.

Con #3. Scores don't provide a true picture of a student's ability

Far too many people wrongly assume that standardized testing data provides a neutral authoritative assessment of a child's intellectual ability. Cultural factors, unfamiliarity with testing methods, test anxiety, and illness can wreak havoc with how well a student performs. For that reason, it's important to dig deeper when looking at a student's test scores. Does a low score indicate a lack of knowledge about the subject or a problem with taking the standardized test? For example, an excellent writer could struggle with picking out the right answer in a multiple choice grammar and punctuation test. Yet that same student could excel at composing well-thought out, logical essays about the literature they read and enjoyed in class.

It's also easy to assume that students who score high in math are good at processing information and reasoning abstractly, but that's not always the case. In fact, researchers have found that high standardized scores have little correlation with memory, attention and processing speed. High test scores could simply mean a student excels at rote memorization and multiple choice test taking.

Our Final Assessment

Standardized testing is truthfully a very difficult issue, because we do need internal and external assessments to measure student success. Assessments are useful when they're used as data to help schools improve the quality of the teaching and learning. They become harmful, however, when tests are used to judge students' natural abilities and when educators are put under pressure to "teach to the test." Schools and parents should always look at standardized tests not as a value judgement on the student, but as an additional data point that can provide some perspective on student learning.

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The Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing

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Standardized testing has ignited a national debate in the last few years (or decades), and many parents feel understandably concerned about their children being judged on the basis of tests that, in some cases, don't seem to reliably correlate with actual learning or with successful college and career outcomes.

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Bless the tests: Three reasons for standardized testing

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It takes more than a “gut feeling” to know how a school is doing

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Every state uses standardized tests to find out how students in public schools are doing. Federal law requires it. But why? And how do standardized tests actually help students? The short answer: Standardized tests are a spotlight that helps education leaders see what effect schools are having on students. With that information they can make changes to address students' needs. Like any spotlight, state tests cannot shed light on the entire scene, but they can illuminate some of the trouble spots and positive signs along the path to providing a better education.

Stressed-Out Students Is Not the Goal
It's not hard to find stories of parents and students who feel the pressure during testing season, or those who are concerned about how much time test prep takes away from class time. But the purpose of state tests isn't to test individual students (or to stress them out); it's to check the education system as a whole. The results are a reflection on school leaders at the local, district and state levels. It's also important to note: Not all tests are from the state. Individual schools, teachers and school districts may issue their own tests that have nothing to do with the state-required one. Those tests may come with their own set of consequences. Schools don't always make it clear which is which, so if you're not sure, ask your principal.
Standardized Tests Have an Indirect, but Important Impact on Students
Standardized tests help principals and other school leaders figure out which groups of students are struggling and gives them the evidence they need to push for changes. Before we had standardized tests, some might have been able to intuitively sense which students were falling behind, but they didn't have much in the way of hard evidence to back it up. Without evidence, it's hard to justify the sometimes uncomfortable changes needed to help students. And as someone once said, if nothing changes, then nothing changes. The impact on your student may not be direct, and it may not be immediate, but it still matters. Lower-income families, Black, Hispanic, Latino and Native American students, students with disabilities and those learning English as a second language are all groups of students who tend to struggle the most in our public schools. Add them all up, and in many areas that's a majority of the students in almost any given district. White students who are comfortably in the middle class are performing better than those groups on average, but that doesn't mean they're doing well. Take White eighth-grade students, for example, whose families make enough to pay for school lunch (in other words, they don't qualify for a free and reduced-price lunch program). For the last decade, only about 44 percent of those students have met the proficiency standard in reading. Without standardized tests, we wouldn't know any of that. And without knowing, education leaders couldn't effectively make decisions on new programs, teacher and staff changes, or where to target additional funding to produce better outcomes for kids. Pretty much nobody likes to take tests, but almost everyone agrees we need to know how well schools are doing. And while there are some valid criticisms about the limitations of tests, clearly having an imperfect test is better than no test at all. Just like having a spotlight is better than feeling our way in the dark.

Lane Wright is Director of Strategic Growth at Education Post. In addition to this role, he tells stories that help families understand how their schools are doing, how to make them better and how policy plays a role. He's a former journalist and former press secretary to Florida's governor, and he's got a knack for breaking down complex education reform policy issues into easy-to-understand ...

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Does Standardized Testing Help Students?

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Every state uses standardized tests to find out how students in public schools are doing. Federal law requires it. But why? And how do standardized tests actually help students? The short answer: Standardized tests are a spotlight that helps education leaders see what effect schools are having on students.

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Critics of standardized testing say scores merely reflect family income and other factors beyond schools' control-while also narrowing the curriculum and warping instruction. Still, the tests have value, and there's much more that schools could do to address the inequities they reveal.

"Standardized tests are best at measuring family income," education-reform opponent Diane Ravitch has opined. "Well-off students usually score in the top half of results; students from poor homes usually score in the bottom."

Similarly, an education policy analyst told the Washington Post earlier this year that test score gains at some high-poverty D.C. high schools didn't mean much-and neither, presumably, did the fact that at some other high schools fewer than five percent of students scored at or above the proficient level.

"People want to read into these test scores lessons about what the schools are doing," he said. "But these scores, even the growth scores, depend a great deal on students' opportunities to learn outside of school. If we address the poverty and racism, then we will see these test scores increase."

At the same time, many parents and teachers have charged that testing has distorted the curriculum, caused students unnecessary anguish, and taken valuable time away from instruction. The replacement for No Child Left Behind, the Every Student Succeeds Act, was supposed to ease up on testing. Anti-testing agitation has died down, but in most cases the pressure on schools to raise scores remains as high as ever.

Critics of testing make some valid points. Test scores are highly correlated with family income, and the gap in scores has grown along with income inequality. And there's no doubt that testing in reading and math has squeezed other subjects -like history, science, and the arts-out of the curriculum. Teachers have also adapted their instruction to mirror the kinds of questions that appear on the tests.

But we don't need to wait until poverty and racism have been "addressed" to do something about the test-score gap. If schools want to narrow gaps-and the underlying inequities they reveal-they simply need to stop looking to the tests as a guide to what and how to teach. Instead, they need to reintroduce the subjects they've jettisoned in a futile effort to boost scores.

It's important to understand what standardized tests-and especially reading tests-are actually measuring. Most educators, along with most members of the general public, assume that reading tests assess skills. The tests consist of passages followed by questions designed to measure students' comprehension: Which part of the passage supports this claim? Which statement below best summarizes the passage's main idea?

Educators under pressure to raise scores drill students in these supposed skills for hours every week, using a variety of unrelated brief passages. Often the texts students use to practice the "skills" are geared to their individual reading levels, which may be well below the reading level of the grade they're in.

But the passages on the tests are usually at what is deemed to be grade level. And they don't relate to anything students have actually learned in school, because the test designers have no idea what topics different schools are covering-if, given the narrowing of the curriculum to reading and math, they're covering any topics at all. So the designers include passages on a random variety of subjects.

To demonstrate comprehension skills, students first need to have enough background knowledge to understand the passages. In fact, studies have shown that the key factor in reading comprehension isn't abstract skill but relevant knowledge-which means that reading tests primarily measure knowledge, not skills.

That brings us to why students from higher-income families generally score better. It's not just because they have more money. For a variety of reasons-like level of parental education and exposure to enriching experiences-children from wealthier families are more likely to pick up the kind of knowledge necessary to understand the passages on reading tests.

But contrary to what critics like Ravitch argue, schools are not powerless in the face of this unequal distribution of knowledge. If they turn away from the fruitless effort to build abstract comprehension skills and toward building students' knowledge of history, science, and the arts, an increase in comprehension-and test scores-will eventually follow. The earlier that process begins, the greater the chances of success. (Math tests are a somewhat different story, but lack of background knowledge and vocabulary can certainly interfere with students' ability to understand word problems.)

There's an important caveat: it's impossible to predict what topics will be covered on a standardized reading test, so the specific knowledge a student acquires in school may or may not help. Eventually, students can amass enough knowledge and vocabulary to understand almost any passage that shows up on a test, but it's hard to say exactly when that point will be reached.

One way around that problem is to make the topics on tests more predictable, so that teachers can give all students a fighting chance at understanding the passages. One state, Louisiana, is now experimenting with reading tests aligned to the state's own English and social studies curriculum. Alternatively, test designers could announce in advance a list of topics the reading passages will draw on. Unless teachers have a sense of what topics to cover in school, the tests will continue to penalize kids who haven't been lucky enough to acquire much knowledge elsewhere.

Test scores provide a valuable general barometer of how much knowledge different groups of students have been able to accumulate. But there are reasons to build knowledge that are more important than test scores. The more knowledge you have, the better able you are to understand high school- and college-level texts-or newspapers, or on-the-job instruction manuals. People with more knowledge have a better chance of getting good jobs and exercising their responsibilities as citizens.

The question is whether standardized tests are more of a help or a hindrance in addressing the gap in knowledge. On the one hand, the tests uncover inequities that are masked by schools' grading systems, thereby holding educators' feet to the fire. It's not as though schools were doing a great job of building knowledge, or equalizing access to it, before high-stakes testing came along.

On the other hand, because of widespread misunderstanding about what the tests measure, testing may have made the situation even worse. When educators feel they're being evaluated on the basis of their students' skills, it can be hard for them to take in the message about the importance of building knowledge.

There's no ideal solution, but here's what I recommend: Keep giving tests, but make the topics of reading passages more predictable, thereby providing an incentive for teachers to cover content and not just "skills." Alternatively, ease up on using test scores to rate schools and evaluate individual teachers. Either of these measures could give educators breathing room to consider whether what and how they teach is providing all students-and especially the most vulnerable-with the knowledge they need and the skills that can only develop in tandem with it.

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Critics of standardized testing say scores merely reflect family income and other factors beyond schools' control-while also narrowing the curriculum and warping instruction. Still, the tests have value, and there's much more that schools could do to address the inequities they reveal.

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This boy at the starting blocks is ready to race. He's really fast. He is, in fact, the fastest runner on the team. To make sure that no one's feelings get hurt and that he is able to fit in socially, his coach has him wait every 100 meters for everyone else to catch up, and then he's allowed to go another 100 meters. Everyone on the team finishes the race together with identical times. The team never wins any races, and no one knows how fast this kid can really go (because they don't let him run his fastest race), but everyone likes him at the team parties. And that's the important thing, right?

This scenario may sound ridiculous, but it is far less ridiculous than the entrenched practice of putting students in grade-level bands with no thought to any other criteria than chronological age. The only thing that approaches it in absolute stupidity is the refusal to acknowledge that there is a cheap, easy, and effective solution. Disclaimer: I accelerated all of my children with universally positive results, so I don't even pretend to be neutral about this.

Very few things in gifted education are a panacea. The closest we get is acceleration. At the same time, few things in gifted education are less well-understood than the idea that students should be allowed to progress at their own pace of learning, rather than by their birthdays.

Reading an post called Against Acceleration (which I hesitate to even link to, actually) has brought this to the surface for me, and I want to discuss the how's and why's of doing acceleration right (and why we should). So all of those opposed to acceleration: I'm calling you out.

First, we have to look back at why school is set up the way it is: it is designed to create good employees. To this end, students are compartmentalized by chronological age (down to the day, in most instances). Many schools' hackles get raised when the suggestion is made that the child may benefit from learning at a level above that of the other kids who were born during the same twelve-month band.

What is truly ridiculous is that the date of school admission varies from state to state, so that a four-year old in California with an October birthday can start Kindergarten, while a child in Texas born the same minute has to languish in preschool. Where is the reason in this?

Until the entire system is fixed, acceleration corrects this error. Your birthday shouldn't be a limitation. It's just a starting point.

Next, people who are opposed to acceleration nearly always point out the socialization aspects. They worry that somehow the accelerated child will commit some social faux pas at the third-grade equivalent of a cocktail party. This is the argument that makes the very least sense to me. While acceleration isn't necessarily going to fix students' social challenges, it doesn't make a child fit in any better if they are forced to remain in a classroom in which they are head and shoulders above their age-group peers cognitively. Newsflash: other kids notice. I know: I taught third grade.

If a child is struggling socially, address that. Don't punish a child academically because of social challenges. We would object strenuously if a teacher attempted to lower a child's grade because he or she didn't have friends in the class, yet forcing the child to stay in the "right" grade does just that. Kids can find age-group-peer friends outside of school as well, if that is a concern. Scouting, sports, arts, and other activities all ensure that kids can form friendships.

Oh, and have you ever noticed that almost everyone has social challenges of some kind in school? I enter into evidence: 7th grade. I rest my case. Those girls in the picture don't like her any better because she stayed in a grade that's too easy for her.

Keeping a child in an inappropriate academic placement will not necessarily result in friends. Do I really have to say that?

Another issue the keeps people from embracing acceleration is that they have the mistaken notion that it is nothing more than "skipping" a grade. There are multiple forms of acceleration, and they can be used in combination. AP classes are a form of acceleration, but everyone likes those. Why do they not have the same bias against them as other forms? Essentially, the student is "skipping" the high school version of the class and going straight to the college level.

Acceleration can mean going to a different grade for a single class. It can mean doing two years' worth of subject in a single year (Let a child move at his or her own pace? Blasphemy!). It can mean AP classes. It can mean moving ahead a grade.

One of my sons whole grade accelerated first grade (in full disclosure, he attended first grade for two painful weeks) and then single subject accelerated math and science. He graduated from high school at 17 with 74 hours of AP credit (and a prom date, for those who are worried about his social development). I asked him recently if he wishes he'd stayed at the "right" grade level, he said he couldn't imagine having to stay in school another minute more than he did. Another son single subject accelerated in math and took loads of AP courses. The other son ate a high school combo meal of AP and dual credit courses. All of this is acceleration.

The boys in this picture were accelerated and lived to tell the tale (and dance the Haka - blame their Aussie dad and too much watching of Aussie Rugby League).

I'm not saying that every child should accelerate. The Iowa Acceleration Scale can help schools and parents evaluate whether acceleration is right for the child.

It is not the duty of gifted children to make people comfortable. It is their job to learn. It is the adults' job to make sure that they have an appropriate education placement so that can occur. Acceleration can do that cheaply, easily, and with a minimum of stress on everyone when it is done appropriately. But you don't have to take my word for it.

The Institute for Research and Policy on Acceleration invites students to share their own stories about acceleration, and you can read them here.

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The Advantages of Acceleration - Gifted Guru

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This boy at the starting blocks is ready to race. He's really fast. He is, in fact, the fastest runner on the team. To make sure that no one's feelings get hurt and that he is able to fit in socially, his coach has him wait every 100 meters for everyone else to catch up, ...

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Acceleration: Is moving ahead the right step?

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Gifted students can struggle when they are accelerated without effective study habits, access to similarly talented peers and a supportive family or encouraging mentor, such as a teacher or counselor.

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Why waiting to buy a cell phone is a mistake 

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Why waiting to buy a cell phone is a mistake 

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When to Buy Your Child a Cellphone (Published 2010)

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A study found that 75 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds in the United States owned a mobile phone. Parents say they generally buy their child a phone for safety reasons.

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Editor's Note: Delaney Ruston, MD, is a primary care physician and documentary filmmaker. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.

Not too long ago, one of my daughter's middle-school teachers told me that my daughter was spending a lot of time on her phone during class. As a mother, this was concerning. But I was not surprised. I am a physician and filmmaker who dedicated my time to make the documentary " Screenagers: Growing up on in the Digital Age " precisely because I know how strongly tech tempts youth and how confused we are as a society about what to do about that.

This month, the Screenagers team and I completed a survey of people who had seen or were interested in the topic of our film to gather data on middle-school phone rules. More than 1,200 middle school parents in the United States responded. While parents who are on our email list and who responded to the survey may be more concerned about their kid's cell phone use than the general parent population, two particularly striking findings emerged:

● 55% of the parents who responded to our survey said their children's middle schools now allow cell phone use, with public schools being more likely than private schools to allow it.

● More than 80% of parents do not want their kids to use cell phones during school.

Recently, France announced it is banning cell phones in school for all students age 15 and under, starting next fall. From our survey, it seems that many US parents may be in favor of similar restrictions in the classroom. And it's not only parents who support "away for the day" policies, which require students to leave their phones out of reach - so does science.

We know that the frontal lobe - the part of the brain responsible for impulse control - is not fully developed in middle school-aged children. When we expect kids to learn how to handle phone use in places like classrooms, we are setting many of them up for failure.

According to the students, teachers and administrators whom we spoke to for the film, many students are getting in trouble in schools across the country for being on their phones in class when they're not supposed to.

Despite searching, I have never seen a study on the impact of access to phones on middle schoolers' academic achievement, but a 2012 study, published by the Communication Education journal, on college students is discouraging. Students who interact with their cell phones in class perform worse on tests - often a full letter grade or more. In fact, just having phones within reach, can cause academic performance to decline, whether they're used or not.

In a 2017 study, participants completely turned off and silenced their phones. While they performed memory tasks, some were allowed to keep their phone, and some were told to put it in the other room. Those who had the phone with them did significantly worse. The mere presence of smartphones reduces available cognitive capacity. In other words, the attention and energy it takes to not check a phone seems to cause "brain drain."

Visit any middle school where cell phones are allowed at lunch or break and you will see heads down everywhere you look. Kids I've met through Screenagers tell me how they retreat into their phones to avoid feeling anxious while socializing.

While cyberbullying gets a lot of attention, too many students face micro emotional hits when they are left out of group chats or see photos to which they compare themselves and feel inferior. When this happens during the school day, it can make it very difficult to focus on school work.

A 2016 study published by the Pediatrics journal found that the increasing rates of depression in adolescents, especially in girls, correlated with the use of mobile phones and texting apps. Meanwhile, youth who spent more time on social media - often accessed through smartphones - have a greater likelihood of being unhappy.

Importantly, it's been found that face-to-face time with friends strongly correlates with less depressive feelings. Creating environments where kids disconnect from their devices and interact in person would be a smart public health move.

Schools that changed their policy from allowing cell phones to prohibiting them saw student test scores improve by 6.41%, according to a 2015 study from the United Kingdom.

In the US, administrators of schools that have adopted "away for the day" policies have reported improvements in students' emotional well-being too. Matthew Burnham, a middle school principal in El Cerrito, California, told us, "When we took the phones away, we had very little pushback from the kids, and all of those distractions and problems went away."

That's a marked improvement.

So why do some middle schools allow students to have phones all day? One reason could be that they don't want the burden of enforcing the policy. But the reality is that when solid systems are in place middle schools should not be overburdened.

Schools could also believe that parents want to be able to contact their children all day. But our data shows this is not the case. When kids and parents don't rely on constant communication, they instead must plan for the day ahead of time, and this can help kids to develop valuable executive-functioning skills.

It is time we follow France's lead and do what is best for our middle school students today. That means require all middle school students to put their phones "away for the day."

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Smartphones aren't a smart choice in middle school | CNN

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Editor's Note: Delaney Ruston, MD, is a primary care physician and documentary filmmaker. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. Not too long ago, one of my daughter's middle-school teachers told me that my daughter was spending a lot of time on her phone during class.

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When Maggie Moore, a suburban Denver mom, was literally weighing her packing options for a family trip, she was stumped by her 4-year-old son's stack of favorite books. He had dozens, and she knew they'd be too heavy to take along. But they would be away for a few weeks - how could she bring only a few?

That's when she reluctantly bought a Nook, loading titles for both of them onto it. She wasn't a big fan of the extra screen time it would mean for her preschooler, but Moore justified the purchase as a stopgap solution. What happened next surprised her: From the moment her son held the device and began to scroll through a book, he was transfixed. "He was in heaven," says Moore.

Once products targeted primarily at adults, e-reading devices have expanded to include a younger audience: children.

"We are not going to stop this train," says psychologist Jim Taylor, Ph.D., author of Raising Generation Tech. But should we try to slow it down? When it comes to the youngest readers, some experts are skittish about putting tablets into tiny hands. Parents are conflicted, too - 68 percent prefer that their 6- to 8-year-olds read print books, Scholastic found. Since there's not much research out there, it may be years before we understand the impact of tech devices on young readers.

Still, there are signs that e-readers can have a positive effect on newbie readers, especially when it comes to targeted learning based on each child's ability. But don't give those storybooks the heave-ho just yet. "It doesn't have to be an either-or. You don't build a house with only one tool," says Otis Kriegel, a fifth-grade teacher in New York City and the author of Covered in Glue: What New Elementary School Teachers Really Need to Know. Here's how you can inspire your reader with both options.
PLUS: 7 BOOKS TO TEACH KIDS ABOUT DIVERSITY Print May Be Better For...
The hands-on experience. Some experts, including Taylor, worry that devices can distance little kids from the real world. If they're only exposed to e-readers, kids lose the tactile experience of handling a traditional book, turning its pages, or sharing their faves with friends. "Technology is a beautiful box but it is still a box," he says.

Falling in love with reading. Cuddling with a parent over a book or gathering around the teacher for storytime helps kids associate reading with nurturing. "These reading experiences can set the stage for later reading success," says Julia Parish-Morris, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who studies how young children interact with e-books. While she thinks e-books are great for independent readers, she's not as sure how good they are for preschoolers and kindergartners. Her research has found that parents often become more controlling, concentrating more on what their child is doing with the device instead of talking about the story.

Focusing a child's attention. The music, animation, and games that are loaded into kids' e-books can end up being more distracting than useful, says Lisa Guernsey, director of the early education initiative at the New America Foundation. "The technology is so exciting that the conversation focuses on what button to push instead of the content," she says. What's better is when those bells and whistles lead back to the story, instead of just entertaining.
PLUS: AUTHOR'S TIPS ON HOW TO GET KIDS TO LOVE TO READ Digital Matches Print For...
Boosting early reading skills. For the past four years the Center for Literacy at the University of Akron has been studying how to integrate e-readers into classrooms. Jeremy Scott Brueck, director of the school's Digital Text Initiative, found that animation and audio in e-books did seem to help young kids identify printed words. When Brueck tested pre-K students, a third knew the words before reading the story with a grown-up on an e-reader. After reading the e-book, the number shot up to 54 percent. It's unclear whether the results would have come out the same with traditional books; it might have been the shared reading experience - a known vocabulary-builder - rather than the device that helped kids learn. But what they did find: "The kids were extremely engaged," says Brueck.
Digital May Trump Print Because...
It's more interactive. While add-ons can distract, they are extremely useful for beginning readers, who can zoom in on unfamiliar words or click links that help make connections to their world, says Guernsey. Plus, the touchscreen or buttons on an e-reader can hone a preschooler's fine-motor skills.

It's more rewarding. When kids see printed words light up as they sound out the words, they're encouraged. Kim Floyd has been teaching kindergarten in Napa Valley, CA, for 24 years and using iPads loaded with books for the last three. The proof of e-reading success is in front of her every day when she sees how excited her students are the second she pulls out the tablets. Because the devices help children understand words by highlighting and defining those they struggle with, their vocabulary increases. Her kindergartners have vocabularies more typical of second graders, she notes. Floyd even studied the vocab-building phenomena for her master's degree last year, testing pre-kindergartners who were not native English speakers and had no preschool experience. By the end of three weeks, their vocabularies had jumped from roughly 200 words into the thousands.

It caters to a kid's unique learning style. Floyd also likes that the anonymity of the device helps struggling readers feel less embarrassed. "It lets children find a book that fits their interest and skill without the entire class knowing what they are reading," she says. Erika Alexander, a suburban Detroit mother, agrees. Her fourth-grade son is a reluctant reader, even though books were part of his routine when he was younger. Recently when they were shopping, he picked up a Nook that was loaded with a graphic novel. Attracted at first to the gadgetry, he stood in the aisle and inhaled the story. Alexander still plans to encourage a love of old-fashioned books. But she also recognizes that her son is a visual person, and a high-tech device hooks him in ways that were missing before.
The Bottom Line...
Kids have a lot to gain from both reading tools. Even though she's a huge e-reader fan, Floyd believes that children should be exposed to print first or at least simultaneously. Her students switch off easily, and there are surprisingly few squabbles over who gets the iPad. "After the novelty wears off, they become nonchalant," she says. Plus, technology will never replace good parenting and good teachers. So when you read to your child - regardless of whether it's a traditional or e-book - keep the conversation lively. Talk about what he sees on the page. Ask what he thinks will happen next. Because as researchers and educators all agree, the most important app, especially for little kids, is human.
PLUS: HOW TO GET YOUR CHILD TO READ CONSISTENTLY

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E-Books vs. Print: What Parents Need to Know

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When Maggie Moore, a suburban Denver mom, was literally weighing her packing options for a family trip, she was stumped by her 4-year-old son's stack of favorite books. He had dozens, and she knew they'd be too heavy to take along. But they would be away for a few weeks - how could she bring only a few?

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Pros and Cons

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Conventional wisdom says that loaning Apple's bestselling iPad to college students would be a popular move. A seven-week-long study by the University of Notre Dame found that students did indeed like learning with the tablet computers, but that they used the devices differently than was expected. The students also identified some drawbacks of bringing iPads into the classroom, such as the difficulty of taking notes on the tablet.

The study kicked off in Aug. 2010 under Notre Dame management professor Corey Angst. Students in Angst's fall semester undergraduate "Project Management" course were each given an iPad to do reading and other coursework.

The original idea was to use the iPads as e-readers, in place of traditional textbooks. But over the course of the semester, Angst found that the iPad was even more useful as an information aggregation tool. Groups working on projects could pull out their iPads to brainstorm and save their results on an online file storage site like Dropbox. The next time they met, group members could easily access the saved files without emailing revisions back and forth. Since everyone had the same device, groups didn't need to worry about technical issues or compatibility problems.

The students, who were either juniors or seniors, found the iPads helpful in five ways. In a series of surveys conducted throughout the semester, most students said the iPads encouraged exploration of additional course topics, helped them manage their time, provided new functions/tools for learning, increased their learning and made their courses more interesting. Though they were not instructed to do so, most students also said they used the iPads to do reading for other courses and leisure reading.

Not everyone was a fan, however. Some students cited what Angst characterizes as "technical and behavioral challenges". In the study, more than half the students reported feeling frustrated when highlighting text and taking notes within e-books on the iPad. Another drawback was the fact that multiple "windows" or files couldn't be kept open, side-by-side, on the iPad, unlike a full-fledged computer.

Students also indicated that they considered the device, which starts at $499, expensive. More students preferred to be loaned an iPad and purchase the corresponding e-books (and eventually return the iPad) than buy the iPad outright (and own it).

At the same time, the students said they were "willing to wait for improvements" to the device, leading Angst to conclude that overall impressions of the iPad were "very favorable". When asked how they felt about giving up their iPads at the end of the course, about 65% of the students said it would be difficult to relinquish the device.

Notre Dame plans to keep studying iPad usage through the fall. (Acknowledging the small size of his study sample - approximately 40 students - Angst notes that further research is needed to better understand how iPads affect learning.) Graduate students are also part of the test group. This semester, students in the university's law school are using the iPads.
Are iPads or other tablets useful additions to classrooms or is it still too early to incorporate them? Let me know in the comments below. The full study can be read here.

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Conventional wisdom says that loaning Apple's bestselling iPad to college students would be a popular move. A seven-week-long study by the University of Notre Dame found that students did indeed like learning with the tablet computers, but that they used the devices differently than was expected.

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Library. Courtesy of <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/davehamster/6500506967/in/photolist-69eLHE-ci8s7s-bpxvhG-dAZxeX-aUqNfk-4FqFGV-zeT59-bk94WJ-cmYE8b-ghnoDc-oqWKWd-7JYMRm-6uVJeH-dUnj3M-7Pesb4-9u2j95-7owadv-7R4PS3-pTt34v-gigtVU-em7YVf-b6cUjp-aDHjXF-a2gCWj-3kftSZ-d6T7us-dB5Vtf-dnwzKB-aHZcSP-bpCgvC-majnde-9uPVG8-dPJysu-q4nxum-L3F6f-9tYiGt-gfcwyT-efCHiF-gfbHGN-efCGG4-4FnsKY-8qKovN-akFR3u-qkS3BQ-787Wt9-e4w7BP-pXrB9q-m7NPcv-5PSe3G-3GwEF/">David Merrett</a>

You got an e-reader over the holidays. What should you load it up with?

Beach reads? Sure. "Ulysses"? Probably not.

We know a lot about the pros and cons of reading a hard-copy book vs. reading electronically. The problem is, many of us refuse to listen.

Don't get me wrong: Digital reading has some real advantages. Ask people what they like most about reading on digital screens (a question I've put to several hundred university students in the United States, Germany, Japan and Slovakia), and you hear over and again about convenience: "easy to carry" and "compact." We also know electronic texts (especially when they are open-access or donated) are vital for democratizing learning opportunities. Just look at projects like the Digital Public Library of America or Worldreader.

More points for digital reading: e-books tend to be cheaper than print versions (though outside America, tax structures sometimes complicate the comparison). There's also the environmental argument. Think of the trees!

Yet the soundness of this case is arguable. The earth metals we're using up to build e-readers and tablets are not just rare but highly toxic. And think about all that energy needed to run servers and cooling fans. And remember, trees are a renewable resource.

Then, there's the appeal of a hard copy. What fascinates me is how many people - from teenagers to millennials to those of a certain age - prefer print when reading both for pleasure and for school or work. Drawing examples from my own research, some of the reasons are aesthetic ("charm of actually turning pages" and "scent of a new book"). Others involve a sense of accomplishment ("able to see how much I read"), ease of annotation ("I can write on the pages"), and navigation ("easy to locate where I was"). In contrast, I hear abundant complaints about eye strain and headaches when using screens.

Much of what students liked about reading print involved their minds. They said "it's easier to focus," "my spatial memory works best," and "feel like the content sticks in my head more easily." Some also acknowledged they took more time with printed text and read more carefully - not really a surprise, since digital screens encourage scrolling and hasten us along to grab the next Web site or tweet.

But the real nail in the coffin for one-size-fits-all electronic reading is concentration. Over 92 percent of those I surveyed said they concentrate best when reading a hard copy. The explanation is hardly rocket science. When a digital device has an Internet connection, it's hard to resist the temptation to jump ship: I'll just respond to that text I heard come in, check the headlines, order those boots that are on sale.

Readers are human. If you dangle distractions in front of us (or if we know they are just a click or swipe away), it's hard not to take the bait.

Which brings us back to question of what sorts of readings it make sense to do onscreen and which to reserve for paper. If digital interruptions don't threaten your enjoyment or understanding of a text (but here, you have to be honest), then medium may not matter. Casual reading like Baldacci? If you break to check sports scores, little harm done. Just don't expect to understand much of Joyce this way.

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The case against e-readers: Why reading paper books is better for your mind.

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You got an e-reader over the holidays. What should you load it up with? Beach reads? Sure. "Ulysses"? Probably not. We know a lot about the pros and cons of reading a hard-copy book vs. reading electronically. The problem is, many of us refuse to listen.

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According to a new study, older people are able to read text off the iPad much faster than if they were using a "real" book. In fact, the iPad proved easier for reading than even e-readers like the Kindle.

The study was performed by a research team from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, in Germany. "E-books and e-readers are playing an increasingly important role on the worldwide book market," the researchers said in their report.

"However, readers can be particularly skeptical when it comes to e-books and electronic reading devices. The objective of the study was to investigate whether there are reasons for this skepticism."

Reading a Screen Vs Book: Negative Effects?

All in all, the study found that elderly people read text from an iPad three times faster than if they were reading a physical book. Researchers came to this conclusion by studying readers' eye movements and brain activity, as well as the way people processed the information before them. (Source: dailymail.co.uk)

The most surprising part of the study suggests that even though the participants said they preferred reading a physical book, all showed much better progress while using an Apple iPad. In fact, this was a large part of the study from the beginning -- to figure out why people prefer to have a book rather than an electronic device in their hands.

Since the researchers hypothesized that this position was associated with a belief that reading from a screen has negative effects (or negatively affects the reading experience), they believe the results prove that one can read just as easily, if not more conveniently, from a screen.

"This study provides us with a scientific basis for dispelling the widespread misconception that reading from a screen has negative effects," the researchers said.

No Difference for Young People

The study also found that the speed at which one reads a traditional or e-book can depend on their age.

While young people tended to read both electronic and physical text at about the same pace, elderly people read off their iPads three times faster than a traditional book. (Source: mirror.co.uk)

The findings can only help sales of the ubiquitous iPad, which already has a stranglehold on a still-emerging tablet market.

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iPad vs Book: Study Probes Effects of Screen Reading

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According to a new study, older people are able to read text off the iPad much faster than if they were using a "real" book. In fact, the iPad proved easier for reading than even e-readers like the Kindle. The study was performed by a research team from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, in Germany.

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This site was archived on Nov. 28, 2022. A reconsideration of the topic on this site is possible in the future.

Textbook publishing in the United States is an $11 billion industry, with five companies - Cengage Learning, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and Scholastic - capturing about 80% of this market. Tablets are an $18 billion industry with 53% of US adults, 81% of US children aged eight to 17, and 42% of US children aged under eight, owning a tablet. As tablets have become more prevalent, a new debate has formed over whether K-12 school districts should switch from print textbooks to digital textbooks on tablets and e-readers.

Proponents of tablets say that they are supported by most teachers and students, are much lighter than print textbooks, and improve standardized test scores. They say tablets can hold hundreds of textbooks, save the environment by lowering the amount of printing, increase student interactivity and creativity, and that digital textbooks are cheaper than print textbooks.

Opponents of tablets say that they are expensive, too distracting for students, easy to break, and costly/time-consuming to fix. They say that tablets contribute to eyestrain, headaches, and blurred vision, increase the excuses available for students not doing their homework, require costly Wi-Fi networks, and become quickly outdated as new technologies emerge. Read more background ...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 4

E-textbooks on tablets cost less than print textbooks.

According to the School Library Journal, the average price of a K-12 print textbook is approximately $70 compared with $45-$55 for a 6-year subscription to a digital textbook. E-textbook prices continue to drop with VitalSource reporting, on average, a 31% drop in price between 2016 and 2018. Tablet prices also continue to drop, making them increasingly affordable. Tablets cost on average $489 in 2011 compared with $299 in 2018.
Read More

Pro 6

Tablets contain many technological features that cannot be found in print textbooks.

Tablets give users the ability to highlight and edit text and write notes without ruining a textbook for the next user. Tablets have a search function, a backlighting option to read in low light, and a built-in dictionary. Interactive diagrams and videos increase student creativity, motivation, attentiveness, and engagement with classroom materials.
Read More

Pro 7

Print textbooks are heavy and cause injuries, while a tablet only weighs 1-2 pounds.

Pediatricians and chiropractors recommend that students carry less than 15% of their body weight in a backpack, but the combined average weight of textbooks in History, Mathematics, Science, and Reading/Language Arts exceeds this percentage at nearly all grade levels from 1-12. According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, during the 2011-12 school year more than 13,700 kids, aged 5 to 18, were treated for backpack-related injuries. The rate dropped to 6,300 in 2016 - a 54% decrease - thanks in part to the increasing use of tablets.
Read More

Con 4

People who read print text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read digital text.

The brain interprets printed and digital text in different ways, and people generally read digital text 20-30% slower than print. According to Pulitzer Prize winning technology writer Nicholas Carr, peer-reviewed studies show that reading hyper-linked text may increase the brain's "cognitive load," lowering the ability to process, store, and retain information, or "translate the new material into conceptual knowledge." In addition, students who type lecture notes instead of write their notes by hand tended to write more, process less, and perform worse on recall tests.
Read More

Con 6

Manufacturing tablets is environmentally destructive and dangerous to human health.

According to the New York Times, the "adverse health impacts from making one e-reader are estimated to be 70 times greater than those from making a single book." One tablet requires the extraction of 33 pounds of minerals, 79 gallons of water, and 100 kilowatt hours of fossil fuels resulting in 66 pounds of carbon dioxide. Print books produce 100 times fewer greenhouse gases. Two gallons of water are required to make the pulp slurry that is pressed and heat-dried to make paper, and only two kilowatt hours are required to form and dry the sheets of paper.
Read More

5. During the 2011-12 school year more than 13,700 US children, aged 5 to 18, were treated in hospitals and doctors' offices for backpack-related injuries (5,000 in emergency rooms) such as contusions, sprains, fractures, and strains to the back and shoulders; in 2016, the number had dropped to 6,300 - a 54% decrease - thanks in part to the increasing use of tablets.

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Tablets vs. Textbooks - 15 Pros and Cons

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Proponents say tablets help students learn more material faster. Opponents say tablets are too distracting and easy to break.

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Apple's Web site makes the iPad sound like a gift of God for graphics, but the company hardly mentions the iPad's main purpose for some of us: reading books. Nor I have ever heard of anyone who switched on a new iPad, saw the screen, and exclaimed: "What a pleasant way to read! Surely I ought to empty my bookcases and put all of my books onto this."

I suspect the marketing moguls at Apple do not care much about reading books, because if they did, they could set it up to induce that reaction. Indeed, after fiddling with the settings and buying some cheap apps, my wife Daphne and I both find ourselves preferring the iPad to paper. Not only do we buy ebooks by choice, we have even found ourselves buying ebooks to replace hardcovers on our shelves, because reading on the iPad is quicker and easier.

We have optimized the iPad for reading by working with our knowledge of visual perception. Daphne is a prominent visual scientist and I have worked and written with her extensively. In this article I shall share our approach.

Black on White - To begin I feel obliged to point out the obvious - or at least what ought to be obvious but appears not to be in the curious world of Web designers: our brains are built to read black on white, not white on black. From the first day of life we prefer dark-on-light and the preference never stops. It is built into the brain. However old you are, and however much experience you have had viewing photographic negatives or working on ancient video terminals, your visual system will still find it easier to process black on white.

This preference does not stem merely from custom and familiarity. You can see this in the pictures below, where all of the colours are bizarre. The colours are so bizarre that familiarity is not a factor, yet the dark-on-light portrait on the right is easier to identify. Although light type on a dark background may look spiffy, and you may have managed to get used to it, it is intrinsically more difficult to read.

Unless you want to read in the dark, don't waste your time with white type on black. If you see a Web page designed that way, tap Safari's Reader button - the stacked bars that sometimes appear at the left end of the address field. However, that button is often unavailable or fails to capture the whole page, so it is sensible to set up an alternative to keep at hand, a "bookmarklet" that runs a JavaScript to redisplay the page sensibly. Bookmark some page - any page - and put the new bookmark in the Favorites bar. Now
edit it. Change the bookmark's name to "Clarify" and change its URL to this text:
javascript:styles='*%20%7B%20color:%20black%20!important;
%20background-color:%20white%20!important;%20background-image:
%20none%20!important;%20%7D%20a:link%20%7B%20color:%20%2300007F
%20!important;%20%7D%20a:visited%20%7B%20color:%20%23007F00
%20!important;%20%7D%20a:hover%20%7B%20color:%20%23FF0000
%20!important;%20%7D%20a:active%20%7B%20color:%20%23FF7F00
%20!important;%20%7D';%20newSS%20=%20document.createElement('link');
%20newSS.rel%20=%20'stylesheet';%20newSS.href%20=%20'data:text/css,'
%20+%20escape(styles);%20document.documentElement.childNodes%5B0
%5D.appendChild(newSS);%20void%200

Tapping this Clarify bookmark will not bring up a new Web page. Instead, it will usually (JavaScript permitting) reload the current page with black type on a plain white background. This makes almost any white-on-black Web page easier to read unless it depends upon white graphics or white controls. It ought to work in any browser on any device.

Brightness - I now hear somebody grumbling in the background: "But the white screen of an iPad is hard on my eyes." Yes indeed, it can be hard on the eyes. It must be tamed. Paper reflects about 90 percent of whatever light strikes it, but the iPad's glow is constant and often brighter than anything else indoors. It must be matched to the ambient brightness. Unless you are outside, when the screen may not be bright enough, you will likely need to reduce the iPad's screen brightness by a lot. iOS's automatic screen dimming can do this to a certain extent, but I frequently find my finger fiddling with the brightness slider in Control Center.

Tint - Diagrams of the brain are usually overly simple. They show one function here, another function there, and no interaction between them. The reality is complex. Neurons fire more like shotguns than rifles, so neuronal activity spreads broadly. To one extent or another, different parts of the brain commonly interact.

One such interaction is between areas perceiving colour and areas perceiving lines. These interactions can affect reading. Unfortunately, this is a topic that has seen extravagant claims, sloppy research, and scientific interest damped by patents in North America. However, some good research has come out of the UK, largely by Arnold Wilkins. Wilkins has shown convincingly that real interactions do exist, and these interactions affect a large minority of the population. Little else is known for sure but:

Coloured overlays can help many people read the printed page.

Tinted computer screens can help many people read a display.

Tinted eyeglasses can help many people read anything and/or can lessen migraines.

The tint will be unique to the individual.

To see if you may be helped by a tinted screen, I created this test using colours that Wilkins suggested. It's a rough electronic equivalent of a test he developed using transparent plastic overlays. Click through its different colours. If one of them makes the text clearer or more stable or easier to read in any other way, then tint your iPad's screen. Don't expect to duplicate the colour of the test exactly - it's just a starting point - but fiddle with the hue and intensity sliders in Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations > Color Filter.

Most likely you'll see no difference on the test, but if a colour makes the text stabler or clearer or easier to read, you might also benefit more generally from tinted eyeglasses, especially if you get migraines from time to time. In the UK, many opticians prescribe and dispense tinted lenses inexpensively under the National Health Service, based on technology that Wilkins developed at Cambridge University. Outside the UK this technology is available sparsely, but a sales force set up by Helen Irlen is ubiquitous. See Cerium and Irlen.

Matching Light - If you see no difference with the colour test above, you can still make reading more comfortable by matching the colour of your screen to the colour of the ambient light.

To see how much ambient light varies in hue, take a look at the photo below. It shows the light I see in the background while reading in my easy chair. Cloudy days see all of the window shades up and all of the colours cool; sunny days see all the shades down and all the colours warm; nighttime sees no sunlight at all, just light from lamps that are warmer still. The colour of light doesn't matter at all when reading paper, because paper always reflects the ambient tint, but if a screen glows a different colour than the background, it will distract.

Apple's True Tone control in Settings > Display & Brightness is supposed to modify the display's colour to match the ambient light. It provides a modest improvement, but the iPad's default tint is unlikely to be ideal. You can tickle this default in Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations > Color Filters. For me, what works best is to slide the hue slider rightward one-eighth of the way.

Also, True Tone never makes the screen warm enough to match artificial lighting at night. To warm the screen more at night, I schedule Settings > Display & Brightness > Night Shift to sunset-to-sunrise, and I slide its colour-temperature slider two-thirds to the right.

Reading - When you look around the world, your eyes do not see all that you perceive. You stare for a half-second or so at one spot then move your eyes suddenly to another. While you fixate on a spot, your eyes see a small spot of sharp lines surrounded by a ring of blur; between the fixations your eyes see nothing. Almost all that you perceive, your brain infers from rings of blur.

This holds when you are reading too, which has significant implications for the layout of a page. The illustration below shows circles of text your eyes might see clearly enough to read while scanning the first paragraph. At the bottom, I've copied the text from the first paragraph contained within each circle. This is the information your eye might have picked up.

Here is the same text laid out in a column. Here each circle presents more of the text, and the circles overlap, so more of the meaning comes through.

Of course, in neither layout could your brain process all of the text at once. In both layouts, your eyes will zigzag across and down the page. However, every fixation on the vertical layout feeds the brain more information than any fixation on the horizontal, making the words easier to process.

On the other hand, these are individual words and meaning comes more from phrases than from words. Phrases are the molecules of language, words are merely atoms. Thus, the optimal width of a column is determined by how clearly it presents phrases, not words. This varies with the complexity of the text.

At one extreme is
a modern newspaper.
Newspaper prose
builds simple words
into short phrases,
so narrow columns
display them well.

In contrast, the considerate cadences,
the sesquipedalian and Latinate vocabulary,
and the archaic usages and structures
of Georgian literature - all of these several
attributes condense and assemble themselves
within the brain most sensibly and clearly
when traced by the eye across broader lines.

Newspapers and magazines often use columns appropriately but books seldom do. That's because the layout of a printed book is optimized not for readability but for sales. A publisher can sell X copies if he can keep the price to $Y, but that requires using a small, thin font at its default spacing with minimal margins, and filling the page with text. Moreover, to sell in a shop the book needs to look attractive, so the text will be justified neatly on the right.

None of this is good for reading. A larger and possibly thicker font would be more legible. The default spacing of type is the minimum possible but reading comfortably requires some space between the lines. Justifying the right edge of text requires varying the spacing between words and letters, a variation that's a form of noise the brain needs to ignore.

On an iPad, I can adjust all of those parameters and more, not with iBooks but with the third-party app MapleRead. I can also switch off hyphenation so that the eye does not need to process broken words. The next two screenshots show how I set it up for two different books: a serious history (horizontal) and a modern novel (vertical). The font is Futura. To my eye, Futura is the clearest for full pages of text on an iPad (although not on my Macintosh), but your eyes will differ, so experiment with different fonts. Some of Arnold Wilkins's work suggests that Verdana would be a good font to try.

MapleRead is designed to read books in EPUB format. That is the standard, generic format for ebooks, the format used by virtually every source of ebooks other than Amazon. Amazon uses the Mobi format for its Kindle books. Both formats are similar under the hood but Mobi is locked to Amazon's products, so if an ebook
I want is available only from Amazon, I convert it to EPUB.

I convert Kindle books on my Mac in a cross-platform shareware product called Calibre. Calibre also stores my books on my computer, where they are automatically backed up, and sends them to my iPad either by mail or over the Web.

Neither Calibre nor MapleRead will open any book that is protected by digital rights management (DRM). However, anyone living outside the United States may legitimately search for a Calibre plug-in that will automatically remove DRM from ebooks, and then may legally download and use any such plug-in he may find on any ebook that he buys. That is my situation living in Canada.

Unfortunately, in the United States, the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act applies. This law not only forbids U.S. residents full and free access to their electronic purchases, it also forbids U.S. publishers like TidBITS from describing workarounds. Thus, I may not discuss here my own legal attempts to remove DRM. I may state, however, that, whether or not I have easily found DRM-removal tools for most ebooks, I have found no way to remove the DRM from ebooks purchased through Apple.

On the other hand, DRM is irrelevant to classic literature. A vast number of books that are in the public domain can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg. (It's worth checking Project Gutenberg's Canadian and Australian sites, too, since I have found books there that are not on the U.S. site and vice versa.) You can also download complete works of many classic authors for a few dollars from Delphi Classics. I find Delphi's editorial work to be well worth the money.

EPUB is the most practical format for reading most books but only PDFs will do a good job with pictures. Also, many ebooks and nearly all journal articles are available only as PDF files. PDF basically gives you a printed page in electronic form, so a PDF file is almost always most legible when printed on paper. That said, skimming and reading PDFs on the iPad can save a lot of time and trees. Calibre can extract the text from a PDF and convert it to EPUB format, but the result is usually grotesque. I prefer to leave them as they are, but I do usually magnify the pages and read them not in iBooks but in DjVu. This app
lacks gimmickry that gets in the way of reading and, unlike most other PDF readers, it maintains its magnification across pages.

System Settings - A winter wonder of downtown Toronto is women wearing high heels to walk on ice and snow. Nothing could be less sensible but thus does appearance sell clothing - and iPads. Just look at this clever animation! So what if the needless movement distracts you. You no longer need to read, just as you no longer need to walk.

Many of these graphical high heels are built into iOS and cannot be changed - for example, the login screen, where the virtual keyboard shows grey characters on grey instead of black on white. However, some of them can be changed and may improve your book-reading experience. Here is a list of some additional settings that make the iPad less spiffy but easier to use. All are buried in Settings > General > Accessibility:

Bold Text > On

Button Shapes > On

Increase Contrast > Reduce Transparency > On

Increase Contrast > Darken Colors > On

Reduce Motion > On

On/Off Labels > On

Finally, you might try the $4.99 keyboard PadKeys. As you can see in this comparison with Apple's default keyboard (top), PadKeys (bottom) is easier to see. The letters are a little larger, but more importantly they are not crowded by symbols. When your eye is searching for a letter, Apple's grey symbols create visual noise, the visual equivalent of hearing other people talking while you're trying to hold a conversation. Also, PadKeys makes the numbers and punctuation marks much larger and black instead of grey.

PadKeys is also easier to use because its layout more closely approximates a conventional keyboard. It even includes left-right cursor-control keys plus buttons for undo, redo, and paste.

Like Apple's keyboard, PadKeys lets you type alternate characters by flicking your finger, but PadKeys has you flick your finger upward rather than downward - toward the character you want, not away from it. This feels more natural. You can also drag your finger from key to key if you prefer, although that requires teaching PadKey's autocorrect dictionary that you usually mean, for example, "dessert" rather than "desert". I prefer to type with one or two forefingers and forgo the keyboard's attempts to help me choose and/or spell my words.

I suggest setting PadKeys to use the bold theme with All-Caps Keycaps and Dark Mode switched off, and with Show Shift Hints switched on.

[If you found the information in this article valuable, Charles asks that you pay a little for it by making a donation to the aid organization Doctors Without Borders.]

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Better than the Printed Page: Reading on an iPad - TidBITS

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The iPad is a great tool for reading electronic books, but its default settings and apps are unlikely to be ideal for your eyes. Charles Maurer draws from research into vision and perception to suggest how to tweak your iPad's display to be more legible.

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Many parents worry about how exposure to technology might affect toddlers developmentally. We know our preschoolers are picking up new social and cognitive skills at a stunning pace, and we don't want hours spent glued to an iPad to impede that. But adolescence is an equally important period of rapid development, and too few of us are paying attention to how our teenagers' use of technology - much more intense and intimate than a 3-year-old playing with dad's iPhone - is affecting them. In fact, experts worry that the social media and text messages that have become so integral to teenage life are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.

Young people report that there might be good reason to worry. A survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health asked 14-24-year-olds in the UK how social media platforms impacted their health and well-being. The survey results found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all led to increased feelings of depression, anxiety, poor body image, and loneliness.

Indirect communication

Teens are masters at keeping themselves occupied in the hours after school until way past bedtime. When they're not doing their homework (and when they are) they're online and on their phones, texting, sharing, trolling, scrolling, you name it. Of course before everyone had an Instagram account teens kept themselves busy, too, but they were more likely to do their chatting on the phone, or in person when hanging out at the mall. It may have looked like a lot of aimless hanging around, but what they were doing was experimenting, trying out skills, and succeeding and failing in tons of tiny real-time interactions that kids today are missing out on. For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person.

"As a species we are very highly attuned to reading social cues," says Catherine Steiner-Adair, EdD, a clinical psychologist and author of The Big Disconnect. "There's no question kids are missing out on very critical social skills. In a way, texting and online communicating puts everybody in a context where body language, facial expression, and even the smallest kinds of vocal reactions are rendered invisible."

Lowering the risks

Certainly speaking indirectly creates a barrier to clear communication, but that's not all. Learning how to make friends is a major part of growing up, and friendship requires a certain amount of risk-taking. This is true for making a new friend, but it's also true for maintaining friendships. When there are problems that need to be faced - big ones or small ones - it takes courage to be honest about your feelings and then hear what the other person has to say. Learning to effectively cross these bridges is part of what makes friendship fun and exciting, and also scary. "Part of healthy self-esteem is knowing how to say what you think and feel even when you're in disagreement with other people or it feels emotionally risky," notes Dr. Steiner-Adair.

But when friendship is conducted online and through texts, kids are doing this in a context stripped of many of the most personal - and sometimes intimidating - aspects of communication. It's easier to keep your guard up when you're texting, so less is at stake. You aren't hearing or seeing the effect that your words are having on the other person. Because the conversation isn't happening in real time, each party can take more time to consider a response. No wonder kids say calling someone on the phone is "too intense"- it requires more direct communication, and if you aren't used to that it may well feel scary.

If kids aren't getting enough practice relating to people and getting their needs met in person and in real time, many of them will grow up to be adults who are anxious about our species' primary means of communication - talking. And of course social negotiations only get riskier as people get older and begin navigating romantic relationships and employment.

Cyberbullying and the imposter syndrome

The other big danger that comes from kids communicating more indirectly is that it has gotten easier to be cruel. "Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years contemplate saying to anyone's face," says Donna Wick, EdD, a clinical and developmental psychologist. She notes that this seems to be especially true of girls, who typically don't like to disagree with each other in "real life."

"You hope to teach them that they can disagree without jeopardizing the relationship, but what social media is teaching them to do is disagree in ways that are more extreme and do jeopardize the relationship. It's exactly what you don't want to have happen," she says.

Dr. Steiner-Adair agrees that girls are particularly at risk. "Girls are socialized more to compare themselves to other people, girls in particular, to develop their identities, so it makes them more vulnerable to the downside of all this." She warns that a lack of solid self-esteem is often to blame. "We forget that relational aggression comes from insecurity and feeling awful about yourself, and wanting to put other people down so you feel better."

Peer acceptance is a big thing for adolescents, and many of them care about their image as much as a politician running for office, and to them it can feel as serious. Add to that the fact that kids today are getting actual polling data on how much people like them or their appearance via things like "likes." It's enough to turn anyone's head. Who wouldn't want to make themselves look cooler if they could? So kids can spend hours pruning their online identities, trying to project an idealized image. Teenage girls sort through hundreds of photos, agonizing over which ones to post online. Boys compete for attention by trying to out-gross one other, pushing the envelope as much as they can in the already disinhibited atmosphere online. Kids gang up on each other.

Adolescents have always been doing this, but with the advent of social media they are faced with more opportunities - and more traps - than ever before. When kids scroll through their feeds and see how great everyone seems, it only adds to the pressure. We're used to worrying about the impractical ideals that photoshopped magazine models give to our kids, but what happens with the kid next door is photoshopped, too? Even more confusing, what about when your own profile doesn't really represent the person that you feel like you are on the inside?

"Adolescence and the early twenties in particular are the years in which you are acutely aware of the contrasts between who you appear to be and who you think you are," says Dr. Wick. "It's similar to the 'imposter syndrome' in psychology. As you get older and acquire more mastery, you begin to realize that you actually are good at some things, and then you feel that gap hopefully narrow. But imagine having your deepest darkest fear be that you aren't as good as you look, and then imagine needing to look that good all the time! It's exhausting."

As Dr. Steiner-Adair explains, "Self-esteem comes from consolidating who you are." The more identities you have, and the more time you spend pretending to be someone you aren't, the harder it's going to be to feel good about yourself.

Stalking (and being ignored)

Another big change that has come with new technology and especially smart phones is that we are never really alone. Kids update their status, share what they're watching, listening to, and reading, and have apps that let their friends know their specific location on a map at all times. Even if a person isn't trying to keep his friends updated, he's still never out of reach of a text message. The result is that kids feel hyperconnected with each other. The conversation never needs to stop, and it feels like there's always something new happening.

"Whatever we think of the 'relationships' maintained and in some cases initiated on social media, kids never get a break from them," notes Dr. Wick. "And that, in and of itself, can produce anxiety. Everyone needs a respite from the demands of intimacy and connection; time alone to regroup, replenish and just chill out. When you don't have that, it's easy to become emotionally depleted, fertile ground for anxiety to breed."

It's also surprisingly easy to feel lonely in the middle of all that hyperconnection. For one thing, kids now know with depressing certainty when they're being ignored. We all have phones and we all respond to things pretty quickly, so when you're waiting for a response that doesn't come, the silence can be deafening. The silent treatment might be a strategic insult or just the unfortunate side effect of an online adolescent relationship that starts out intensely but then fades away.

"In the old days when a boy was going to break up with you, he had to have a conversation with you. Or at least he had to call," says Dr. Wick. "These days he might just disappear from your screen, and you never get to have the 'What did I do?' conversation." Kids are often left imagining the worst about themselves.

But even when the conversation doesn't end, being in a constant state of waiting can still provoke anxiety. We can feel ourselves being put on the back burner, we put others back there, and our very human need to communicate is effectively delegated there, too.

What should parents do?

Both experts interviewed for this article agreed that the best thing parents can do to minimize the risks associated with technology is to curtail their own consumption first. It's up to parents to set a good example of what healthy device usage looks like. Most of us check our phones or our email too much, out of either real interest or nervous habit. Kids should be used to seeing our faces, not our heads bent over a screen. Establish technology-free zones in the house and technology-free hours when no one uses the phone, including mom and dad. "Don't walk in the door after work in the middle of a conversation," Dr. Steiner-Adair advises. "Don't walk in the door after work, say 'hi' quickly, and then 'just check your email.' In the morning, get up a half hour earlier than your kids and check your email then. Give them your full attention until they're out the door. And neither of you should be using phones in the car to or from school because that's an important time to talk."

Not only does limiting the amount of time you spend plugged in to computers provide a healthy counterpoint to the tech-obsessed world, it also strengthens the parent-child bond and makes kids feel more secure. Kids need to know that you are available to help them with their problems, talk about their day, or give them a reality check.

"It is the mini-moments of disconnection, when parents are too focused on their own devices and screens, that dilute the parent-child relationship," Dr. Steiner-Adair warns. And when kids start turning to the internet for help or to process whatever happened during the day, you might not like what happens. "Tech can give your children more information that you can, and it doesn't have your values," notes Dr. Steiner-Adair. "It won't be sensitive to your child's personality, and it won't answer his question in a developmentally appropriate way."

In addition Dr. Wick advises delaying the age of first use as much as possible. "I use the same advice here that I use when talking about kids and alcohol - try to get as far as you can without anything at all." If your child is on a social media platform, Dr. Wick says that you should friend them and monitor their page. But she advises against going through text messages unless there is cause for concern. "If you have a reason to be worried then okay, but it better be a good reason. I see parents who are just plain old spying on their kids. Parents should begin by trusting their children. To not even give your kid the benefit of the doubt is incredibly damaging to the relationship. You have to feel like your parents think you're a good kid."

Offline, the gold standard advice for helping kids build healthy self-esteem is to get them involved in something that they're interested in. It could be sports or music or taking apart computers or volunteering - anything that sparks an interest and gives them confidence. When kids learn to feel good about what they can do instead of how they look and what they own, they're happier and better prepared for success in real life. That most of these activities also involve spending time interacting with peers face-to-face is just the icing on the cake.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does social media affect behavior negatively?

How does social media affect social skills?

How does social media affect teenagers' mental health?

Is social media harmful?

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How Using Social Media Affects Teenagers - Child Mind Institute

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How does social media affect teens? Experts say kids are growing up with more anxiety and less self-esteem due to social media. Read advice for parents from specialists in our article.

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My oldest daughter got a smart phone when she entered middle school. She was soon begging for her own Instagram account. Everybody has one, Mom. Even if everyone had one, I was reluctant to give in. So many articles I have read argue that middle schoolers aren't mature enough to handle social media interactions. There are already all sorts of age restrictions for social media. But some experts suggest that middle school is exactly the right time to introduce kids to social media.

Dr. Bradford Brown, Professor of Educational Psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, encourages parents to provide middle schoolers social media access if they request it.

During this stage of adolescence, parents are better able to guide kids on how to use social media appropriately.

"Parents have much more control earlier," Brown says. "Kids from 11 to 13 are not as creative with workarounds as they're going to be from 16 to 18."

With regard to social media usage, parental involvement can take different forms. Parents can give kids access to their own social media accounts so that they can monitor all activity. Or the parent and child can open an account together. Sharing an account makes sense for kids under 13, the minimum age for most platforms. Kimberly Hudson, mom of two teens and the Director of the Center for the Study of Boys at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, VA, doesn't allow her kids to sign up for a social media account before the minimum age because they would have to misrepresent themselves. "The fact that he has to provide his age opens up an important conversation about honesty," Hudson says.

If their kids are old enough to have their own accounts, like mine was when I eventually gave in, parents can stay involved by following their child's account and reviewing posts and responses. "They can then engage in conversation about what's healthy and unhealthy," Brown says. "Kids need conversations, though, not lectures."

Parents need to talk to kids openly, and without judgment, about what other kids are doing on social media. And about the consequences of their actions.

This kind of monitoring helps to mitigate the potential negative consequences of social media, including online aggressive behavior and inappropriate offline interactions. Parents' biggest fear-kids interacting with unknown predators-is realized less frequently than media might suggest. "Those interactions are becoming rarer as young people become more attuned to using privacy features," Brown says. "Our research shows that most young people interact online with the same individuals as they interact with offline."

There are obviously disadvantages to social media use. There are also benefits, however, such as being able to keep in touch with friends more easily. My daughter uses her account to stay connected to friends from the town where we used to live. The messaging feature enables her to contact local friends she doesn't see every day. The benefit of maintaining these kinds of connections is reflected in the results of a recent survey conducted by Common Sense Media.

The majority of teens surveyed described social media usage as positive. Many of them claimed social media helps them feel less lonely, less depressed, and more confident.

Just as middle schoolers are still trying to figure out in-person social interactions, they are also working to navigate their online presence. As a result, they tend to be fairly conservative in terms of their social media usage. "They act more as consumers than producers," Brown says. So allowing access to social media during middle school enables kids to become familiar with the environment (and the rules) before they reach the stage when they are more likely to post frequently.

As with all things, parents need to take cues from their kids to determine readiness. If a kid's in-person interactions suggest they are ready for the responsibility, there are compelling reasons for allowing middle schoolers to use social media with guidance. "If parents wait until ninth grade, their kids are going to be naïve about expectations surrounding social media," says Brown. For good or bad, social media has become a key component of social engagement. It will eventually be a part of every child's interactions. Helping them learn to navigate social media in middle school can build their confidence and strengthen their connections through positive online interactions.

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Should Your Seventh Grader Have Instagram?

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My oldest daughter got a smart phone when she entered middle school. She was soon begging for her own Instagram account. Everybody has one, Mom. Even if everyone had one, I was reluctant to give in. So many articles I have read argue that middle schoolers aren't mature enough to handle social media interactions.

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Key points

A tween's underdeveloped frontal cortex can't manage the distraction nor the temptations that come with social media use.

The average teen spends nine hours a day connected to social media.

Spending more non-tech time together can help slow down kids' social media usage.

This guest post is by Melanie Hempe, BSN, founder of ScreenStrong.
I really love middle school kids. I have two of them! If you have been through middle-school parenting, you may have noticed what I see: Strange things seem to happen to a tween's brain the first day they walk into middle school.

One might sum up their main goals in life this way:

To be funny at all costs. (Hence, the silly bathroom jokes, talking at inappropriate times in class, and the "anything it takes to be popular" attitude.)

To focus on self - their clothes, their nose, their body, and their hair.

To try new things. They are playing "dress up" with their identity, trying on things to see what fits. They are impulsive and scattered, they are up and they are down, and it even seems that they have regressed in their development on their quest for independence.

As the parent, you are changing, too, as you enter the stage of parenting when you quickly depart from the naïve platform of "My child would never..." to the realization that, "I'm sure my child did that. I'm sorry, and please excuse his behavior, he is going through a phase."

Your list of daily parenting instruction may include statements like:

"If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all!"

"How many times do I have to tell you not the use that word?"

"Stop flipping that bottle!"

"Stop burping the ABCs!"

"You're acting like a 2-year-old."

"What were you thinking?"

Then it happens: Maybe because we are exhausted from their constant begging for a phone, or because we think that all their friends have one, or because we want to upgrade ours to the latest model...we cave. We act on impulse. Our brain seems to regress like theirs, and we give them our old smartphone.

And with that one little decision comes the world of social media access-something we haven't thought about and something none of us is prepared for. Because the midbrain is reorganizing itself and risk-taking is high and impulse control is low, I can't imagine a worse time in a child's life to have access to social media than middle school. Here are just a few reasons why:

1. Social media was not designed for them. A tween's underdeveloped frontal cortex can't manage the distraction nor the temptations that come with social media use. While you start teaching responsible use of tech now, know that you will not be able to teach the maturity that social media requires. Like trying to make clothes fit that are way too big, they will use social media inappropriately until they are older and it fits them better.

2. Social media is an entertainment technology. It does not make your child smarter or more prepared for real life or a future job; nor is it necessary for healthy social development. It is pure entertainment attached to a marketing platform extracting bits and pieces of personal information and preferences from your child every time they use it, not to mention hours of their time and attention.

3. A tween's "more is better" mentality is a dangerous match for social media. Do they really have 1,456 friends? Do they really need to be on it nine hours a day? Social media allows (and encourages) them to overdo their friend connections like they tend to overdo other things in their lives.

4. Social media is an addictive form of screen entertainment. And, like video game addiction, early use can set up future addiction patterns and habits.

5. Social media replaces learning the hard social "work" of dealing face-to-face with peers, a skill that they will need to practice to be successful in real life.

6. Social media can cause teens to lose connection with family and instead view "friends" as their foundation. Since the cognitive brain is still being formed, the need for your teen to be attached to your family is just as important now as when they were younger. Make sure that attachment is strong. While they need attachments to their friends, they need healthy family attachment more.

7. Social media use represents lost potential for teens. While one can argue that there are certain benefits of social media for teens, the costs are very high during the teen years when their brain development is operating at peak performance for learning new things. It is easy for teens to waste too much of their time and too much of their brain in a digital world. We know from many studies that it is nearly impossible for them to balance it all.

How Can Kids Slow Down?

First, we need to slow down and rethink what we are allowing our kids to do. We need to understand the world of social media and how teens use it differently from adults. Here are a few tips that work well for many parents.

1. Delay access. The longer parents delay access, the more time a child will have to mature so that he or she can use technology more wisely as a young adult. Delaying access also places a greater importance on developing personal authentic relationships first.

2. Follow their accounts. Social media privacy is a lie: Nothing is private in the digital world, and so it should not be private to parents. Make sure privacy settings are in place but know that those settings can give you a false sense of security. Encourage your teen to have private conversations in person or via a verbal phone call instead if they don't want you to read it on social media.

3. Create family accounts. Create family accounts instead of individual teen accounts. This allows kids to keep up with friends in a safer social media environment.

4. Allow social media only on large screens. Allow your teens to only use their social media accounts on home computers or laptops in plain view, this way they will use it less. When it is used on a small private phone screen they can put in their pocket there are more potential problems with reckless use. The more secret the access, the more potential for bad choices.

5. Keep a sharp eye on the clock; they will not. Do you know how much time your child spends on social media a day? Be aware of this, and reduce the amount of time your child is on social media across all platforms. The average teen spends nine hours a day connected to social media. Instead, set one time each day for three days a week for your child to check their social media. Do they benefit from more time than that?

6. Plan face-to-face time with their friends. Remember that they don't need 842 friends; four-to-six close friends are enough for healthy social development. Help them learn how to plan real, in-person, social get-togethers such as a leave-phones-at-the-door party, a home movie night, bowling, board games, cooking pizza, or hosting a bonfire. They crave these social gatherings so encourage them to invite friends over and help them (as needed) to organize the event.

7. Spend more real non-tech time together. Teens who are strongly attached to their parents and family show more overall happiness and success in life. They still need us now more than ever. It is easy to detach from them: Teens can be annoying! But attaching to family allows them to detach from the social media drama. Your child needs to feel like they can come home and leave the drama of their social world behind for a few hours. They want you to help them say no to social media and yes to more time with the family. They are craving those moments to disconnect, so make plans and encourage this at home.

Don't give that smartphone all the power in your home; help tweens choose healthier forms of entertainment. They have the rest of their life to be entertained by social media, but only a limited time with you. Go to ScreenStrong.com to learn more.

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Why Social Media Is Not Smart for Middle School Kids

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Tweens' brains are simply too immature to use social media appropriately.

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Gender Segregated Schools- Just the facts

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Gender Segregated Schools- Just the facts

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Download a PDF brochure >> Have studies proved that segregating students by sex leads them to do better in school?
No. Some studies find that students in coeducational schools do better than students in single-sex schools.

Some studies find the opposite. Many studies show no difference between the two. The U.S. Department of Education recently undertook an extensive review of the data and concluded that the results were "equivocal" - in other words, there is no clear evidence that students are more likely to succeed in single-sex schools.

At the same time it was undertaking this review, the U.S. Department of Education was seeking to change federal rules to allow more schools to segregate students by sex. If the evidence showed sex segregation led to student success, the U.S. Department of Education would likely have been eager to publicize this information as part of this effort. But the evidence did not.
Even if single-sex education doesn't always lead to better student outcomes, isn't it a step in the right direction?

To improve public education, we should focus on what we know works - smaller classes, more parental involvement, and more funding - rather than making our kids part of a social experiment.

There's no reason to think so. Researchers have investigated why students do especially well in some sex-segregated programs, despite the face that many studies show sex segregation has no effect on student achievement. They have concluded that those singles sex schools that foster high levels of achievement aren't successful because they are segregated. Instead, these particular schools are successful because they have small classes, qualified teachers, parental involvement, adequate funding, and a focus on core academics. Of course, these factors foster success in coeducational classrooms too.

Because sex segregation doesn't itself promote student success, instead of spending the resources, time, and effort on the social experiment of segregating public schools by sex, the better educational approach is to focus on what we know works, including smaller classes, more parental involvement, and more funding. These are the keys to success for students.
How does coeducation benefit students?
When students socialize, compete, and collaborate with students of the other sex at school, they are more prepared to succeed in the world. Real life is not separated by gender, and young people need to learn, work, and play in all different kinds of situations, with all sorts of different people. One of the strengths of public schools is the opportunity they provide for students of different sexes, races, and religions to learn from each other. Indeed, these lessons are some of the most important that schools teach. Sex-segregated education goes in the wrong direction, by diminishing real diversity in education.

For more information about sex segregation in public schools, contact the ACLU Women's Rights Project:
125 Broad Street, 18 th Fl.
New York, NY 10004
(212) 549-2644
womensrights@aclu.org
www.aclu.org/womensrights

NOTES

¹ U.S. Department of Education, Single-Sex Versus Coeducational Schooling: A Systematic Review (2005).

² American Association of University Women, Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls (1998).
Download a PDF brochure >>

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Download a PDF brochure >> Have studies proved that segregating students by sex leads them to do better in school? No. Some studies find that students in coeducational schools do better than students in single-sex schools. Some studies find the opposite. Many studies show no difference between the two. The U.S.

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Last October, more than 450 public school teachers, principals and central administrators from across the United States - as well as from Argentina, Bermuda, Canada and Poland - came together in Atlanta, Georgia, for the fifth annual convention of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.

Dozens of presentations extolled the superiority of gender-segregated classrooms and entire schools, with lecture titles such as, "Burps, Farts and Snot: Teaching Chemistry To Middle School Boys," and "Just Don't Say 'SEX' - tips on how to implement single-gender programs in conservative, rural communities."

Attendees ranged from Chicago and Philadelphia inner-city high school teachers to elementary school principals from small towns in Idaho and Indiana. They represented a fraction of recent converts to the Single Sex Public Education (SSPE) movement, which has expanded at a remarkable pace.

In 2002, only 11 public schools in the United States had gender-segregated classrooms. As of December 2009, there were more than 550.

The movement is based on the hypothesis that hard-wired differences in the ways that male and female brains develop and function in childhood through adolescence require classrooms in which boys and girls are not only separated by gender, but also taught according to radically different methods.

For example, SSPE doctrine calls for teachers in male classrooms to be constantly moving and speaking in a loud voice, even to the point of shouting, while teachers in female classes should be still and use a calming tone. This differentiation stems from the central tenet of SSPE ideology that young males thrive on competition and confrontation, while young females require a more nurturing and cooperative learning environment.

"When most young boys are exposed to threat and confrontation, their senses sharpen, and they feel a thrill," explains Dr. Leonard Sax, the founder and executive director of the National Associate for Single Sex Public Education. "When most young girls are exposed to such stimuli, however, they feel dizzy and yucky."

In a landmark essay published in the Spring 2006 edition of Educational Horizons, just as the SSPE movement was gaining strong momentum, Dr. Sax detailed the different ways elementary school teachers should address their students in gender-segregated classes. "[The teacher] may move right in front of a boy and say, 'What's your answer, Mr. Jackson? Give it to me!' Far from being intimidated, boys are energized by this teaching style. With girls [teachers should] speak more softly, use first names, terms of endearment and fewer direct commands: 'Lisa, sweetie, it's time to open your book. Emily, darling, would you please sit down for me and join us in this exercise?'"

The title of Dr. Sax's essay was "Six Degrees of Separation," a reference to the SSPE guideline that while the perfect ambient temperature for a male classroom is 69 degrees Fahrenheit, females learn most effectively at 75 degrees.

Heroic Behavior vs. Wedding Cakes

Separating boys and girls is a longstanding tradition at private and parochial schools. The concept began to gain traction in American public schools earlier this decade as schools began to experiment with SSPE in oft-desperate attempts to reduce disciplinary problems and improve test scores. The Department of Education accelerated the trend in 2006 by altering the Title IX provision of the No Child Left Behind Act to ease restrictions on gender-segregated education in public schools.

Since then, advocates like Dr. Sax, a child psychologist who never set foot in a classroom as a teacher, have stepped up their promotion of SSPE as a panacea for public education. With scant evidence backing them up, they herald SSPE as the most effective way to narrow the achievement gaps between rich and poor students and black and white students that persist eight years after the passage of No Child Left Behind.

Although SSPE programs are now in place at schools in 39 states and the District of Columbia, they are particularly popular in urban districts with large minority populations, and most concentrated in the Southeastern U.S. South Carolina has 173 SSPE schools, by far the most of any state.

Last year, the largest school system in Alabama, the Mobile County Public School System, with 66,000 students, implemented SSPE programs in eight of its 93 schools with no parental notification. The most extreme program was at Hankins Middle School in Theodore, Alabama, where boys and girls ate lunch at different times and were prohibited from speaking to one another on school grounds.

Hankins teachers were directed to create "competitive, high-energy" classrooms for boys and "cooperative, quiet" classrooms for girls. Boys were to be taught "heroic behavior." Girls were to learn "good character." Sixth-grade language arts exercises called for boys to brainstorm action words used in sports. Girls were instructed to describe their dream wedding cake. Electives were gender-specific. Boys took computer applications. Girls took drama. No exceptions.

Mark Jones, whose son Jacob attends Hankins, said that when he complained to the principal about the changes, she told him they were necessary because "boys' and girls' brains were so different they needed different curriculum."

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Gender Segregation: Separate But Effective?

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Last October, more than 450 public school teachers, principals and central administrators from across the United States - as well as from Argentina, Bermuda, Canada and Poland - came together in Atlanta, Georgia, for the fifth annual convention of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.

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The start of a new school year means the return to daily homework, anoften dreaded task and the root of parent-student strifethat leaves some parents of elementary school students wondering if it's worth it. The answer, experts say, is complicated.

Some point to studies that find that appropriate take-home work in the right amounts can enhance younger students' learning and prepare them for a routine of studying as they get older. But others say homework has little to do with academic achievement in elementary school and can get in the way of other life experiences like spending time with family and much needed downtime for often over-scheduled kids.

"There's no one answer," said Susan Goldman, professor of psychology and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-director of the UIC Learning Sciences Research Institute. Homework "has to be taken in the context of who are the kids, who are the teachers, what kind of instructional time do they have in school and what kind of support do kids have for getting work done."

"It's a complex kind of situation," Goldman added.

Homework isn't effective if the student doesn't understand the lesson during class time, she said. And often homework requires support at home, which isn't practical for all students, Goldman said. However, if the homework has a clear purpose to all involved - parents, teachers and students - the child can benefit.

While the benefits of homework continue to be debated, there are clear camps on each side: Some tout an often cited 10-minutes-per-grade-level- per-daystandard, while others shun homework altogether.

Education consultant James Gray instituted a no-homework policy at Hamilton Elementary School in Lakeview four years agowhen he was principal of the Chicago public school.

"My perspective changed a lot after I had my own kids," said Gray, whose two oldest children still attend Hamilton. He recalled a time when his daughter and wife were arguing about violin practice, reminding him of the family conflicts over homework time. While his daughter wasn't required to play violin, many students are required to do homework.

"It made me think a lot about what schools do to families," he said. "I heard from parents over the years about this massive fight that happens at night. It creates this antagonistic relationship between parent and child."

"It didn't seem worth it for what schools are trying to get out of homework," Gray added.

After researching and finding little evidence that primary-level students benefit academically from homework, Gray decided to do away with homework at Hamilton in 2014. At first the policy applied to kindergartners through second-graders. Then it expanded through fourth grade and remains in place at the school, even though Gray left at the end of the 2016-17 school year.

"Kids can become disenchanted with school easily," Gray said, explaining the additional family and relaxation time at night is actually better for young students.

"Learning happens all the time at home, whether you're cooking a meal, playing a game or reading a book," he said.

Gray's policy was well-received, he said. While he was expecting some backlash, it didn't come.

"Parents would tell me, 'We played Clue last night, and it was so nice to sit down for an hour,' or, 'My child sat down and read a book on his own without being prompted.'"

Gray said he heard from parents and educators in other schools in Chicago and across the country wanting to create their own no-homework policies.

"I'm hoping (Hamilton's policy) sticks around," he said.

But others say homework shouldn't go away completely, even for younger students.

Harris Cooper, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, has studied the correlation between homework and academic success. He said all students should have some homework, but the amount and type of homework should vary depending on age and developmental level.

Cooper said he believes in the 10-minutes-per-grade-level-per-daystandard. Too much homework can bore students and take away from other valuable experiences, like after-school clubs and playtime, he said.

"This is not rocket science," he said. "You may have brought home a pre-test for spelling on Thursday before you take a test on Friday, and you did better because you brought the pre-test home."

While homework is not a significant predictor of academic success in early grades, Cooper said, it does create good study habits that will help students as they get older

"Is (homework) going to cause a great leap in (students') achievement? No it is not," he said. "What it's really doing is shaping their behavior, so they begin to learn how to study at home."

Cooper said homework also provides an opportunity for parents to tune into their child's academic abilities and challenges. Instead of relying on a teacher to tell them, parents can see for themselves where their child might be struggling. It also can spark greater communication among parents, teachers and students, he said.

"With all young children, assignments should be short, simple and lead to success," he said.
kthayer@chicagotribune.com Twitter @knthayer
[ Why it's so hard to help with your kid's math homework ]

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Should kids have homework? The great debate.

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As back to school season looms, an age old question remains: Should kids have homework? The answer, experts say, is complicated.

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Second grade teacher Brandy Young gained national attention in 2016 when a note she wrote to her class parents was posted on social media.

"There will be no formally assigned homework this year... rather, I ask that you spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success," she wrote. "Eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside, and get your child to bed early."

Two years later, Young is teaching second grade at a new school, A.G. Elder Elementary School in Joshua, Texas. She is still not assigning formal homework - though she has tweaked her policy a lot, she told TODAY Parents, since she wrote that note.

The no homework policy has worked great, she said, but it has been a learning process for her. Young found out that some of her students really do want homework, for one thing. She will also send work home with a child who needs more practice on a specific skill from time to time, but when she does, she communicates with the parent and sends an answer key to ensure the practice will be effective.

"Also, not assigning homework doesn't change the fact that the kids who need extra practice the most usually don't have the necessary support at home," said Young, who has three young boys of her own with her husband Klint. "It's a battle that educators are used to fighting, and it isn't going away any time soon."
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Young said her experiences in the classroom for the past two years have only reinforced the idea that effective teaching is all about relationships.

"I want my students to know that I care about them at every second," she said. "I want parents to trust me and let me into their family. I want open communication lines between us so that I can better understand their children and help them succeed."

For that to be possible, Young said, "Student work, regardless of when and where it's done, should be meaningful, engaging, and relevant. No packets ever. Period." Her second grade students approach learning enthusiastically as a result - even at a Title 1 school where nearly 70 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced lunch prices.

"Kids can conquer mountains when given encouragement, choices, and support!" said Young. "They want and need to be nurtured as a whole child. I believe the no-packet theory supports that effort."

Young was not the first nor the last teacher to implement a classroom policy eliminating homework. In 2017, Marion County, Florida, School Superintendent Dr. Heidi Maier announced she was banning homework for the 31 elementary schools throughout her school district. At the time, Maier said her plan called for "no traditional homework, no work sheets, no endless pages of workbooks. Instead, our children are reading aloud with their parents at least 20 minutes a night."

A year later, the Ocala Star Banner reported that under pressure from her teachers - 86 percent of whom did not support the ban - and school board members who called the policy "micromanaging" and blamed poor test results in part on it, Maier loosened the guidelines. She is asking that any homework be "meaningful" and not "busy work."

However, Alfie Kohn, author of "The Homework Myth," told TODAY Parents, "It is important to realize that no research has ever found any advantage to any kind of homework before kids are in high school - and newer studies are questioning whether it's necessary even in high school."

Kohn - who has written 14 books covering parenting and education and lectures on those topics at universities, parenting groups, and corporations - is a well-known critic of homework. He said that though some defend the concept of homework as having non-academic advantages like teaching kids responsibility, work habits, or independence, "To the best of my knowledge, not a shred of evidence supports those claims."

What evidence does show, he said, is the disadvantages of homework, some of which parents are already familiar. "It causes frustration, unhappiness, and family conflict; it often makes children less excited about learning and leaves them with less time to pursue other interests and just enjoy their childhoods," he observed.

"But we seem to assume it's worth it to force them to work a 'second shift' after they get home from a full day in school," he said. "We take on faith that the academic benefits must outweigh the substantial costs."

Though many parents support homework, others say they would love for their children's teachers to adopt no-homework policy. Omaha, Nebraska mom Ashley Austrew said she is relieved her first grade daughter has less homework this year than she did in kindergarten.

"Her only homework is whatever she doesn't get done in class, which I believe is the teacher's way of saying she doesn't give homework," she told TODAY Parents. "I am a fan of no homework policies because I think its mostly busy work at this age level and they work hard enough all day."

Julie Burton from Overland Park, Kansas, said she gets annoyed with her fourth grade daughter's math homework even though it is usually just one sheet a night. "If she ever has a question, sometimes we are stumped too," she said. "I feel bad emailing a teacher in the evenings. I'm slightly annoyed at homework in general because I don't know what the teacher taught."

Kohn said that even small amounts of homework can still be frustrating and damaging to children's attitudes about learning for reasons like Burton's. "The bottom line is that research fails to support the practice of giving any amount or any kind of homework to a 12-year-old, let alone to a 6-year-old," he said. "Making kids unhappy about learning is more likely to undermine than to promote academic excellence."

He encouraged parents to speak up on behalf of their children. "If your child's teacher never assigns homework, take a moment to thank them for doing what's in your child's best interest - and for acknowledging that families, not schools, ought to decide what happens during family time," he added. "If your child is getting homework, organize a bunch of parents to meet with the teacher and administrators - not to ask, 'Why so much?' but, given that the research says it's all pain and no gain, to ask, 'Why is there any?'"

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Why some elementary schools are getting rid of homework

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Second grade teacher Brandy Young gained national attention in 2016 when a note she wrote to her class parents was posted on social media. "There will be no formally assigned homework this year... rather, I ask that you spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success," she wrote.

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Is Homework Good for Kids? Here’s What the Research Says

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My daughter's school uniform, required by the public magnet middle school where she began sixth grade last week, is perfectly nice. It's not so much a single uniform as a broad wardrobe of coördinated prep-wear: skirts or pants, paired with piqué polo shirts, all in "goldenrod yellow," navy, or white, topped off by a fleece zip-up (on which the school crest is optional). For her first day, she chose the navy skirt with the white polo. As she walked to the corner to catch the bus, I was reminded of a time when our schools were orderly, our teachers respected, and our children all above average.

That was an imaginary time, of course, but nostalgia for it has helped to create the modern school-uniform movement, which has won the kind of broad-indeed, nearly uniform-support that exists for no other educational policy, or social policy, that one can think of. Although there isn't a scholarly consensus that uniforms do anything to improve student achievement or school climate, about one-fifth of all public-school students now wear them. They are one of the few interventions on which charter-school advocates and anti-charter activists agree.

Even the students have gone along, in one of the great surrenderings of liberty in modern history. For, although we think of uniforms as a reclamation of the olden days, they are relatively new in this country. Against British Commonwealth traditions, we were the free and easy New World, the country where children dressed themselves. For the most part, the appearance of students was governed only by the nagging of parents ("Get a haircut!"); informal norms (T-shirts were for athletics, not the school day); and deference to teachers and principals, who had wide discretion to tell a boy that he looked like a hoodlum, or tell a girl that her hemline was inappropriately short.

In the sixties, students fought for more autonomy in dress, to signal allegiance to a particular band or clique or general attitude toward the world. They saw dress as a mode of expression in schoolyard politics, and in world politics: in 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court upheld high-school students' rights to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. That case was the capstone for an emerging jurisprudence of freedom-in-attire, coming after court decisions in New York and Idaho striking down bans on women wearing pants, and a decision in New Hampshire ending a ban on bluejeans. These cases helped solidify a trend toward more freedom for young people to dress how they wished. And so it was, from the nineteen-seventies into my childhood, in the nineteen-eighties.

Then Bill Clinton happened. In 1996, Clinton, running for reëlection and eager to shore up his conservative credentials, championed mandatory school uniforms "as the kind of small-bore, low-cost, common-sense policy initiative that might appeal to a broad cross-section of voters," as the legal scholars Deborah M. Ahrens and Andrew M. Siegel write, in their forthcoming paper "Reconsidering the Constitutionality of Student Dress Restrictions." Clinton plugged uniforms in his State of the Union address that year and had his Department of Education issue a manual for schools that were transitioning to require uniforms. While some schools had experimented with uniforms in the eighties and nineties, it's clear, Ahrens and Siegel argue, that "the modern enthusiasm for uniforms can be traced pretty directly to the 1996 Clinton administration initiative."

Expecting some pushback, the Department of Education issued guidelines for making the new uniform policies able to withstand lawsuits. Except the free-expression lawsuits never came. As with other policies favored by conservatives, such as law-and-order policing and mass incarceration, Clinton's support gave cover to liberals, desperate for any policies that might help the inner cities, to join the act. As one might expect, school uniforms, while growing in popularity everywhere, have really become a feature of poor schools. According to a 2016 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, school uniforms are required at fifty-three percent of schools where three-quarters of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. But, of schools where fewer than a quarter of students are so eligible, only four per cent require uniforms.

These uniforms have become a rich revenue source for kiddie-clothing companies like French Toast, which has a verbose Web site dedicated to their magical properties. One typical section makes the argument that "school uniforms bring an image of success to students and teachers." But that depends how one defines success. In Silicon Valley, on Ivy League campuses, and even in a growing number of white-shoe firms, the rule is to dress down. While once upon a time each profession had its uniform-the gray-flannel suit, the white coat-today, the most successful people wear what they want, especially in the more creative industries.

On the Web site for my daughter's school, the hyperlink "Click here for more information about student uniforms!" redirects to Lands' End. Once known for its middle-quality oxford button-downs, Lands' End has become a major player in the school-uniform game, and not by accident. It has aggressively formed partnerships with school systems, often becoming their main uniform purveyor, and it has helped fund some of the questionable research adduced to show that uniforms improve schools. In 2013, Lands' End helped pay for a survey by the National Association of Elementary School Principals that found that eighty-five per cent of principals "and other school leaders" believed that uniforms improved classroom discipline.

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Mark Oppenheimer writes about the rise in popularity of school uniforms, and whether uniform policies positively or negatively affect students.

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School Uniforms: Why Students Should Wear Them

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Learn why students should wear school uniforms. If your school district is discussing a school uniform policy, French Toast is available to assist.

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Start high school later for better academic outcomes

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Many proposals for improving student performance involve very costly interventions. And while quite a few of these costly interventions surely pass benefit-cost tests, they can be extremely challen…

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Learn how later school start times may help adolescents get enough sleep.

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Good Reasons Why School Should Start Later

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Are there good reasons for starting school later? Yes. There are many benefits of starting school later; especially for middle school and high school students.