Education

The Absolute Best School Climate Blogging (This Week)

By Ross Brenneman — December 14, 2013 1 min read
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Good-looking students, bigoted adolescents, and the son of Jafar—here’s what you might have missed in news and thoughts related to student engagement, school climate, and the world that affects them.

“The seemingly contradictory conclusions that overall crime and victimization in schools are going down and that our society is more concerned about school safety are actually both true and can co-exist.”
—University of Southern California professor Ron Avi Astor, on what it takes to create safe schools for children

“That’s right: in the 90s, you could get paid by rating the attractiveness of confidence-compromised adolescents.”
—Gawker’s Sarah Hedgecock, writing on a new study that says attractive students get better grades

“I’d plead with him to live up to his potential. He’d look at me blankly, as if to say ‘Why so serious?’”
—Christina Vercelletto, for XOJane, describing her child with special needs in an open letter to his school principal

“The school’s criticism is of inappropriate language and sexually suggestive behavior, and their interests are not in educating girls on race and gender or punishing them for bullying, but in upholding the institution’s reputation as Sydney’s best girls’ school.”
—The Balder & Dash blog’s Jemima Bucknell, on “Ja’Mie: Private School Girl,” an Australian TV show about a man acting like a teenage girl

“While I’m pretty excited by the idea of discovering what those famous baddies’ babies are up to, I don’t have a whole lot of faith that this will be any good.”
—Crushable’s Jill O’Rourke, about a new planned Disney show that will see whether the offspring of Disney’s most famous villains can redeem their families in high school

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