Top ten stories from Hechinger — Kindergarten through high school highlights
It’s been a busy year for The Hechinger Report’s k-12 team. Two of our staff members published books on education. We set up our Mississippi bureau. We added two new blogs – Digital EDU andEducation by the Numbers. And we kept traveling around the United States to document the country’s triumphs and struggles in education.
There was a lot to report. In 2013, the Common Core State Standards were introduced into more classrooms – and controversy around them grew. New teacher evaluation systems began to have real consequences. The country continued to struggle with large inequalities in wealth and opportunity and poverty continued to plague too many schools nationwide.
Here are our top 10 stories from 2013:
Students at Merit Prep, a charter school in Newark, work on computer programs tailored to their individual levels. (Photo by Jackie Mader)
Students at Newark’s Merit Prep are part of an educational experiment known as blended learning that combines computer software, individual instruction and small-group learning. Early in 2013, the school found itself embroiled in a controversy over how much children should be taught by computers. New Jersey’s biggest teachers union sued to shut the school down, arguing that charter schools couldn’t emphasize online instruction until the New Jersey state legislature evaluates and approves it.
Hechinger’s Sarah Garland traveled to St. Lawrence, a remnant of the land bridge that spanned the Bering Strait thousands of years ago, where half of students drop out of high school, and only 2 percent graduate from college. Two schools there have received federal funding to improve, but they still struggle with difficult questions. How should teachers make school relevant to kids who