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News & Updates

16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian

The Marginalian was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings. Substack was a decade and a half beyond the horizon of the cultural imagination. The infant universe of social media was filled…..

In Major Shift, Gates Foundation Will Plow Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Into Improving Math Education Nationally

By  Alex Daniels OCTOBER 19, 2022 The Chronicle of Philanthropy The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will spend more than $1 billion on a sweeping national plan to improve math education over the next four years. Its goal: to help students succeed…..

Mental Health Is Political

By Danielle Carr Dr. Carr is an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at U.C.L.A. Sept. 20, 2022 What if the cure for our current mental health crisis is not more mental health care? The mental health toll…..

The Minister for Exams

When I was a child I sat an exam. This test was so simple There was no way I could fail. Question 1. Describe the taste of the Moon. It tastes like Creation I wrote, it has the flavour of…..

Montgomery audit finds school system lacking clear approach to anti-racism

By Nicole Asbury October 11, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. EDT Washington Post Students of color in Montgomery County have a less satisfactory experience within the school system compared to their White peers, according to results of a months-long audit released Tuesday. The results proved…..

Meeting the Mental Health Challenge in School and at Home

By Eilene Zimmerman  NYT Oct 6th 2022 From kindergarten through college, educators are experimenting with ways to ease the stress students are facing — not only from the pandemic, but from life itself. Last year, Leticia Guerrero-Castaneda’s 11-year-old son, Isaiah, was struggling. He was in…..

Living In White Spaces: Suburbia’s Hidden Histories

By David S. Rotenstein from the Metropole THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE URBAN HISTORY ASSOCIATION In 2009 I learned about one African American woman who briefly lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb. She worked for a white physician’s family. Lucille Walker’s…..

More states are allowing children to take mental health days

More states are allowing children to take mental health days By Andrea Atkins October 2, 2022 at 7:24 a.m. EDT Washington Post With child mental health problems on the rise in the past few years, a growing number of states have…..

Experts say schools could recover pandemic losses by 2028. What then?

Doing better than before the pandemic would require more effort than we seem capable of giving Perspective by Jay Mathews  Washington Post Oct 2nd 2022 When will the U.S. education system return to the learning levels of 2019? One headline summed up the problem this way:…..

Student absenteeism skyrocketed in the pandemic as test scores plunged

The rate of missing students appears to have doubled By Donna St. George  Washington Post September 29th 2022 Chronic absenteeism in public schools surged during the pandemic, which experts say helps explain a historic plunge in student test scores. At least 10.1 million students were chronically…..