Community

First some background. When I was eleven I was given an IQ test. I must have passed since I was sent to a different kind of school, than most of my classmates. This was post-war England and someone in the British Government had woken up to the fact that Britain had lost an enormous number of men between 1914 and 1945 and urgently needed to train replacements.

John McLaughlin, Ph.D. joined me for coffee to discuss Autism screening and the recent article in TIME about when parents should have their children evaluated. McLaughlin also discusses the efforts of communities to spread awareness through campaigns and the struggle so many are having to effectively reach audiences representing increased funding, new research and options for treatment. He specifically talked about the effective campaigns for the Dyslexia and Autism communities respectively and openly discussed his belief that society is struggling with the pathology of individualism. Learn more from our coffee session below! 

Thought leader and community advocate Bill Milliken took time (see interview below) to share his thoughts on education reform today and how we are currently impacted by yesterday’s lessons. Milliken has worked to integrate mentorship into the dropout recovery discussion ever since his first “street academies” opened up in the early 1960’s. 

When schools and parents let students follow curiosity and design real-world experiences, they discover creativity that can’t be taught — only inspired.

In this country, President Obama signed a new education law last week. Much of the focus has been on testing and a debate over whether the law moved too far away from rigorous standards. But one group celebrating the law advocates for arts education. NPR’s Elizabeth Blair explains why.

By Antonio Gois
Tying teacher pay to student test scores. Creating public schools of choice with private operators. Setting common standards for all students. Those issues probably are familiar to any American reporter who covers education.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the privacy of citizens in an age when websites, email providers and software makers suck up and store information on users, started the Spying on Students Campaign to make sure student information stays secure.

England’s private schools are struggling to attract pupils. Although the number of school-age children has risen since 2008, independent schools have barely grown. As a result, the proportion of children at such schools has slipped from 7.2% to 6.9%, with absolute numbers falling everywhere apart from the prosperous south-east (see chart). Why are English parents—a famously pushy bunch—increasingly reluctant to pay for their children’s education?

Teachers in England are among the best paid in the world – but they fall far behind those in Luxembourg, where those in the profession can expect to get paid more than £60,000 a year.