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Reactions to a dean’s letter against shielding students from controversial or offensive ideas To the Editor: Re “University of Chicago Rebels Against Moves to Stifle Speech” (front page, Aug. 27): To those academics who oppose content warnings in the classroom: We are not seeking to diminish your freedom of expression. We do not want to limit in any way your conversations or hinder the dialogues in which you might engage. All we ask for is the courtesy of a chance for our peers to brace...

Philadelphia — First you get your coat. I don’t care if you don’t remember where you left it, you find it. If there was a lot of blood you ask someone to go quickly to the basement to get you a new set of scrubs. You put on your coat and you go into the bathroom. You look in the mirror and you say it. You use the mother’s name and you use her child’s name. You may not adjust this part in any way. I will show you: If it were my mother you would say, “Mrs. Rosenberg. I have terrible, terrible...

"I couldn't really relate to that," Peter Robinson said of his fellow inmate. "I know what loss feels like, though." Like the other prisoner, Robinson struggles with mental illness; he has bipolar disorder and depression. The men talked for a long time. They came to focus on the message of the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. "The things I can't, you've just got to...

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, wrote in her annual message this year that “Building a Culture of Health in America…is much like assembling a quilt. It requires many hands working together. And often, the most unlikely pairings create the most evocative designs.” Over the next few months, the Shared Learnings series will explore the unconventional partnerships that lend power to the 14 community ACE & resilience networks participating in...

Hi, Coach! Congratulations on your recent induction into The Des Moines Sunday Register Iowa Sports Hall of Fame. The honor, of course, is well-deserved. I’ve written many times that you and your friends and longtime assistants, Jan Jensen and Jenni Fitzgerald, are some of the finest people I’ve ever met. I wanted to take a moment to tell you why. We met when I was 19 years old, a sophomore at Drake University during the 1994-95 academic year. I was the sports editor of the student...

The precocious teen who’s too cool for school—earning high marks despite skipping class—is a pop-culture standard, the idealized version of an effortless youth for whom success comes easy. Too bad it’s largely a work of fiction that belies a much harsher reality: Missing just two days a month of school for any reason exposes kids to a cascade of academic setbacks, from lower reading and math scores in the third grade to higher risks of dropping out of high school, research suggests. A new...

Trauma-Informed Instruction: The new foundation for a positive school climate Please join us for a free one-hour webinar next week on Trauma-Informed Instruction for K-12 educators and administrators. We hope you'll consider joining us on Wednesday, September 7th at 2:00pm Eastern. In this webinar, Leora Wolf-Prusan, Ed.D. (School Climate & Student Support Specialist at WestEd) and Lara Kain (Senior Director of Transform Schools at Los Angeles Education Partnership) will discuss: The...

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Amy Kennedy, education director of the Kennedy Forum, speaks to more than 300 teachers and staff of the Plainfield School District during their orientation Monday morning. Jaclyn Diaz/NorwichBulletin. Editor’s note: Amy Kennedy spoke at the May 17, 2015 pre-premiere of “Paper Tigers” —a joint event of ACEs Connection and the Kennedy Forum. PLAINFIELD (CT) - While some students are concerned about the right answer on a test or making the basketball team, other students deal with more...

This story is part of a series from NPR Ed exploring the challenges U.S. schools face meeting students' mental health needs. Every year, thousands of children are suspended from preschool. Take a second to let that sink in. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 6,743 children who were enrolled in district-provided pre-K in 2013-14 received one or more out-of-school suspensions. And that's just public pre-K. Still more children were likely suspended from the nation's many...

“I’m tired of all the shootings,” yelled Zaair, a high school sophomore at Barringer High School in Newark, New Jersey. A small group of students were in the middle of an important brainstorming session. “Yeah, me too. It’s all over the place,” said another student. They were discussing ideas for a ServiceWorks community project. Other options had come up, but talk kept coming back to gun violence. It’s a grave topic with an enormity that can be hard to grasp, much less address. And the...

At Bell Central School Center in Pineville, rated “distinguished” in the Kentucky accountability system, principal Greg Wilson said parents of misbehaving students often request that their children be paddled instead of getting suspended and losing time in the classroom. Corporal punishment, or paddling, is fading as a disciplinary method in Kentucky public schools, dropping from 3,075 incidents in 2005 to 574 in 2015, according to the latest available data. But Bell County is among 25...

Childhood bullying inflicts the same long-term psychological trauma on girls as severe physical or sexual abuse, suggests a new survey of college students. The study, which involved 480 college freshmen through seniors, indicated that the detrimental effects of bullying may linger for years, negatively affecting victims’ mental health well into young adulthood. While most of the scholarship on bullying has focused on kindergarten through 12th-grade students, the struggles revealed by college...