School Climate & Safety

The Absolute Best School Climate Blogging (This Week)

By Ross Brenneman — July 05, 2013 2 min read
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While we hope that Rules for Engagement is your first stop for school climate news, we admittedly can’t get to everything. To help with that, we use Twitter to point you toward non-Rules items. But it’s likely, if you follow us (which you should!), that you’ll still miss some stuff. And if you’re not on Twitter, you miss everything. And either way, even when you’re cognizant of a story, sometimes you just need a little extra pressure to actually read it.

Hopefully, this feature will prove useful. It’s intended to highlight some of the best stuff about school climate that we’ve read this week. We hope it catches on. If you have suggestions for material, use the link at the bottom of the post to send an email, or tweet @Rulz4engagement.

What you might have missed this week:

1. “It is not only the tests that are stressing our students; it is the world they live in. It is not a kind and gentle world.”

Jill Berkowicz and Ann Myers, from the Leadership 360 blog, on whether children grow up too fast and how to prepare them better for adulthood

2. “There are many leaders who say that they want everyone to treat each other fairly, and then indulge themselves by treating their staff and students with a lack of respect.”

Peter DeWitt, from the Finding Common Ground blog, on the discrepancy between what school leaders say they want for school climate, and what they actually implement

3. “If another 17-year-old gets in your face, you might have to be tough. If that’s your automatic response, things won’t go well when your 11th grade English teacher gets into your face over a missing assignment.”

Harold Pollack, of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, in an interview with The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates. The two discussed gang violence and how schools can stage interventions.

4. “I wish I could tell my two daughters that being African-American comes with the same inherent societal privileges that their white classmates enjoy, but I won’t lie to them.”

Marilyn Rhames, from the Charting My Own Course blog, on “feeling black” after a week of race-based news. (OK, it’s technically from last week, but it’s too good to not include.)

5. “The violence split neighborhoods and classrooms among ethnic lines. In school, children who had sat side by side one week were suddenly being told they were enemies.”

Ann T. Skinner, of the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy, as quoted in Lauren Kirchner’s post for Pacific Standard about the effects of political upheaval on children

6. “The movie (unintentionally and casually) seems to make a case that knowledge and learned expertise are fairly pointless.”

Rick Hess, on his Rick Hess Straight Up blog, critiquing missed opportunities to showcase good schooling in the new film “Monsters University”

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Rules for Engagement blog.