Category Archives: Research

Local

YouTube Offers All Schools Education-Only Link, Beefs Up K-12 Content

MindShift Blog
December 12, 2011
Written By

All schools can now use the YouTube educational video site, youtube.com/education, without having to jump over Internet filtering hurdles.
For schools that choose to opt in to the YouTube for Schools Program, YouTube will redirect Web users who go to the site straight over to youtube.com/education. On this portion of the site, all comments are disabled and the only related videos are those that can be found in the Education portal of the site. The option has been created for parents, teachers, and administrators who fear children will be exposed to inappropriate materials on the site.
Continue reading the article on YouTube/education on the MindShift blog.

Local, Youth Media

Progress At Media Academy In East Oakland

Media Academy
12.4.2011

Oakland high school students drop out for many reasons: drugs, pregnancy, problems at home, lack of support, etc. But who better to investigate the contributing factors than Oakland teenagers?

At Media Academy in East Oakland, high school students are  reporting and producing short videos as part of the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs project. KQED’s Caitlin Esch is mentoring students as they report intimate stories that really dig in to factors that lead so many teens to leave high school before graduating.

Last week, students interviewed teen drop-outs about their experiences in and out of high school. In these photos, Ricky Vargas (grey hoodie sweatshirt) interviews Brandan Lem (red sweatshirt and hat) and Ken Perry (blue Abercrombie sweatshirt and black glasses) about their decisions to leave school at 15 and 16, respectively. Lem eventually returned to high school, while Perry did not. Tony Srimoukda was working the camera.

National, Research

How to Identify a High School Dropout Factory

U.S. News and World Reports
November 30, 2011
Written by Jason Koebler
Many of America’s high school dropouts attend schools that graduate fewer than 60 percent of their students. Although the number of these “dropout factories” has decreased from 2,007 in 2002 to 1,634 in 2009, according to a March 2011 report by America’s Promise Alliance, thousands of students still fail to graduate from these high schools.

Follow the rest of this story at: Dropout factories

Local, Research

Health Centers and Full-Service Community Schools

By Katy Murphy
Monday, December 5th, 2011
Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith’s vision of full-service community schools is taking shape on some campuses, thanks to a school-based health center initiative that has picked up steam (and millions of dollars in funding) since 2008. Oakland Unified’s 12th health center opened this week, at the 1,900-student Skyline High School. For more about this article go to Full Service Community Schools.

Local, Research

Midyear “Trigger Cuts” Likely for California Schools

The Education Blog
By Katy Murphy
Originally posted Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

The news today out of the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office was not good for public education in California: The LAO has forecasted that state tax revenues will fall $3.7 billion short of the level on which the June budget deal was based.

About $1.4 billion in automatic, mid-year cuts to k-12 schools and community colleges will be triggered if the shortfall is $2 billion or greater. Steve Harmon, our Capitol reporter, lays it out here.

OAKLAND UPDATE: OUSD spokesman Troy Flint said the district could be forced to absorb midyear cuts of up to $5.5 million, or $190 per student, as a result of the trigger cuts. He said the 2011-12 budget accounts for this possibility. So for this year anyway, he said, “Any impact would be slight and we definitely would not make cuts to schools.” For more about this article go to The Education Blog.

National, Research

Can Tyra Banks Get Kids To School? Seattle Says Yes

First aired on November 9, 2011 from KPLU
For All Things Considered broadcast.

Last month, Tyra Banks and the national Get Schooled Foundation visited 400 students in the Bronx in New York City. Banks is one of several celebrities who record messages encouraging kids to go to school. Seattle is one of the latest cities to try it out — Mayor Mike McGinn’s office is spending nearly $50,000 to coordinate and implement the effort. To hear more about this story go to: Seattle Says Yes.

National

Attendance Works Initiative

Attendance Works is a national and state initiative that promotes awareness of the important role that school attendance plays in achieving academic success. It aims to ensure that every school in every state not only tracks chronic absence data for its individual students but also intervenes to help those children and schools. For more information please visit http://www.attendanceworks.org/

Watch this video about Chronic Absenteeism

http://youtu.be/o342iAzYiHc