Latest news with #EmilyHanford
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Why Steubenville, Ohio, Might Be the Best School District in America
There's no more fundamental task for a school than teaching kids to read. But what about kids living in poverty? Don't schools need more money, and more staff, to be able to get good results? Well, yes and no. Poverty is certainly correlated to reading scores, and the best evidence suggests money helps boost a range of student outcomes. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter But that doesn't mean the best school district in the country is the most well-resourced or the one with the fanciest buildings or most prestigious alumni. In fact, based on how much students learn — which, in my opinion, is how schools should be evaluated — there's perhaps no better district in the country than Steubenville, Ohio. Last fall, I worked with The 74's Art & Technology Director Eamonn Fitzmaurice to find districts where students had high reading scores despite serving large concentrations of low-income students. We highlighted Steubenville, a high-poverty district in Ohio's Rust Belt, as a true outlier. (In a follow-up piece, we showed that Steubenville was also exceptional at teaching kids math.) But I wanted to revisit the case of Steubenville after it was spotlighted recently on Emily Hanford's award-winning 'Sold a Story' podcast. Are its results just a one-time fluke? And if not — if the results are real — what can other districts learn from Steubenville's success? First, it's quickly apparent that Steubenville is not a flash in the pan. A 2012 Hechinger Report story noted that its success traces back to the early 2000s. Related It's also incredibly consistent over time. I used the Zelma tool from the Education Data Center to look at its recent results. The graph below compares Steubenville's third-grade reading proficiency rates (in blue) to the statewide average (in gray). As the graph shows, Steubenville consistently gets 95% to 99% of its third graders over the proficiency bar. In 2018, it had a bad year, and 'only' 93% of third graders scored proficient. But the district did not suffer much of a drop-off in the wake of the pandemic, hitting 97% in spring 2022. Steubenville's results are also remarkably strong across student groups. Last year, for example, 100% of its Black students, 99% of its low-income students and 92% of its students with disabilities scored proficient in third grade reading. How does Steubenville get such remarkable results? What can other districts learn from its success? It's not that the district has extra money or more staff. Steubenville spent $10,718 per student last year, which was about $1,500 less than the average Ohio district and well below many other districts in America. It also had slightly more students per teacher than other comparable districts. Related Some things Steubenville does have are not easily replicable. As Robert Pondiscio pointed out in a recent column, the district can boast incredible continuity: It has been following the same reading program, called Success for All, for the last 25 years. Teacher turnover is low, and the same superintendent has been in place for a decade. But Hanford found a few things that Steubenville did differently that other schools can learn from. Steubenville, for example, offers subsidized preschool beginning at age 3. And in those early years, teachers regularly remind students to speak in complete sentences as language practice for later, when those kids will start learning to read and write. The district also deploys staff differently than most do. Every elementary teacher, even the phys ed instructor, leads a reading class. And during that reading block — which all students have at the same time — children are grouped with peers performing at the same level, regardless of age. Related Steubenville kids are also practicing constantly, either as part of the whole class or in small groups, where kids work on their fluency skills by reading aloud to each other. That stands in contrast to schools that prefer to give kids silent reading or 'Drop Everything and Read' time, which can be great for kids who already read well but wasteful or even harmful for children who aren't ready for long blocks of independent free reading. Now, it's worth noting that Steubenville's robust education results have not guaranteed kids a path to economic security. Despite its near-perfect early reading scores, strong middle and high school achievement and a 96% graduation rate, the district's post-high school results are only slightly above statewide averages in terms of college-going and completion rates and the percentage of graduates who find 'gainful employment.' But those early adulthood outcomes are at least partly tied to the economic climate in a given community, and it's hard to find fault with anything that the school district itself directly controls. Most districts would envy Steubenville's impressive results.
New York Times
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
5 Podcasts Where Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction
There's an overwhelming amount of news to keep up with right now, and it can sometimes feel impossible to look away or take a break. Getting absorbed in a truly compelling story can be a great antidote to doom-scrolling, and if focusing on fiction isn't working, you can try a crazy-yet-true audio narrative. These five shows all center on stories so shocking, unbelievable and full of twists that it's hard to believe they're nonfiction. 'Noble' 'It takes 28 gallons of fuel, and a spark, to burn a human body.' So begins the attention-grabbing opening to 'Noble,' which describes the process of cremation in grueling detail to set up the story about to unfold. In February of 2002, investigators acting on an anonymous tip discovered a pile of more than 300 corpses abandoned in a wooded area of Noble, Ga., a tiny rural town in the Appalachian foothills. This horror movie scene was found on the grounds of the Tri-State Crematory; it turned out that the owner had been improperly disposing of bodies for years, while assuring grieving families that their loved ones had been cremated. In a sensitive eight-part series, Shaun Raviv, an Atlanta-based journalist who has written for Wired and The Washington Post, unravels the emotional and legal details of this disturbing saga through interviews with investigators, experts and family members. Noble also uses this singular story as a jumping-off point to explore deeper questions about what the living owe the departed, and our ambivalent relationship to death. Starter episode: 'The Gas Man' 'Sold a Story' For decades, a staggering number of top-rated primary schools across the country have failed to effectively teach children how to read. That sounds like it can't possibly be true, and yet over 13 detailed episodes, this American Public Media podcast lays out how a deeply flawed teaching method took hold despite having been widely debunked by cognitive scientists. This approach (known as the 'whole language' method) encourages children to decode words by understanding the overall meaning of a text rather than learning words by sounding them out (known as phonics), and the conflict between the two sides is so fraught that it's been called 'The Reading Wars,' and demands for reform have mounted nationwide. In 'Sold a Story,' Emily Hanford speaks with educators, linguistics experts and parents to weave together an exposé of this systemic failure and its ramifications for children. Starter episode: 'The Problem' 'Kill List' In 2020, Carl Miller, a technology writer, received a tip about a murder-for-hire service operating via the dark web, where customers could anonymously order hits and pay using bitcoin. The first six episodes of this gripping series from Wondery outline the investigation that followed, as Miller and his small London-based team try to track down who is behind the kill list and find out if it's a real crime syndicate or an elaborate scam. The show then shifts focus into more episodic storytelling, with each of the 12 additional installments spotlighting one of the people whose names ended up on the list. (There were more than 100 names.) Alongside its obvious themes of cybercrime and the internet's capacity to erode our empathy, 'Kill List' is about toxic masculinity — a large majority of these kill orders are traced back to abusive or spurned male partners. It's also a deeply humanistic podcast, anchored by Miller and his colleagues' reflecting on the human toll of responsibly reporting these kinds of stories. Starter episode: 'The Hack' 'Inconceivable Truth' The growth of affordable DNA testing over the past couple of decades has allowed people to unlock the secrets of their ancestry, but the process sometimes comes with an unexpected twist ending. Finding out that your presumed father is, in fact, not a biological relative is common enough that there's a genealogical term for it: a non-paternity event, or N.P.E. Matt Katz, an investigative reporter, grew up with an unreliable, often absent father whom he found both fascinating and frustrating, until he dropped out of the picture altogether. After spending years unsuccessfully trying to track down his father, he took a DNA test which revealed the truth. In this unguarded, compassionate series, Katz's very personal story intersects with a broader one about the widespread impact of New York's largely unregulated artificial insemination industry during the 1970s. Starter episode: 'Warren' 'The Superhero Complex' During the early 2010s, dozens of people in downtown Seattle experienced a scene right out of a movie. Just as they were on the verge of witnessing or becoming victims of a crime, a masked man swooped in to intervene. This mysterious figure wore a hooded rubber mask and a skintight black-and-gold suit, went by the moniker Phoenix Jones and seemed to be motivated by a desire to make the streets safer. But after Jones became a local celebrity, and started a local citizen patrol group called the Rain City Superhero Movement, things became a lot more complicated. David Weinberg, the host of 'The Superhero Complex' leaves no bizarre stone unturned in his chronicle of the rise and fall of Seattle's self-styled vigilante. Starter episode: 'Out of the Shadows'
