Who You Know: Relationships, Networks and Social Capital in Boosting Educational Opportunity for Young Americans

Writing for Brookings, Reeves and Deng explore the importance of social capital  for promoting educational opportunities and outcomes. The main messages of the paper are as follows: Social capital = relationships that uplift. Social capital is described, defined and measured in a wide variety of different ways. But there is a broad agreement that it Read more about Who You Know: Relationships, Networks and Social Capital in Boosting Educational Opportunity for Young Americans[…]

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How Do You Keep 21st Century Students Engaged? By Building Up Their ‘Vocational Selves’

Writing for The 74, Bruno Manno explores programs that help nurture students’ occupational identities and vocational selves. Excerpts from the piece appear below: New partnerships are emerging across the U.S. that create innovative educational approaches to preparing America’s young people for jobs, careers and further education, helping them develop an occupational identity and vocational self. Read more about How Do You Keep 21st Century Students Engaged? By Building Up Their ‘Vocational Selves’[…]

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The Impact of Poverty on Education

AdvanceED has released a collection of articles and videos exploring the impact of poverty on education.  It is AdvanceED’s hope that “Education Advantage,” a three part video series on poverty and education, will spark conversation and action in education reform. This video series includes: The Poverty Paradigm (Video 1) Separate but Not Equal (Video 2) Read more about The Impact of Poverty on Education[…]

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Resources on the Social Side of Education Reform

The folks over at Shanker Blog have been writing recently about how education reform cannot happen in a vacuum. Schools and the people in them are inherently social, so approaching education reform through a social lens makes sense. Here is a piece from one of their recent blogs: For the past few months, we have Read more about Resources on the Social Side of Education Reform[…]

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Do Students Learn More When Their Teachers Work Together?

Research suggests that teachers’ social capital – their relationships, networks and collaboration – may be just as important as their human capital, or individual ability. Generally, education policy focuses either on in classroom factors or out of school factors. The thinking goes that in order for students to improve, they need better instruction and/or better Read more about Do Students Learn More When Their Teachers Work Together?[…]

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Staff Matters: Social Resilience in Schools

In a recent article in the Shanker Blog, Esther Quintero discusses how teachers are coping with the increased uncertainty in the education world that is a result of the lack of “coherent education infrastructure” in the U.S.  In response to this uncertainty, teachers are becoming more reliant on collaboration and close-knit social networks from which Read more about Staff Matters: Social Resilience in Schools[…]

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The Missing Link in School Reform

In an article published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, author Carrie R. Leana argues that education reforms have yet to identify a major component to boosting student achievement:  teacher collaboration.  She calls these patterns of teacher interaction “social capital,” the quantity and quality of which can measurably affect school improvement. Leana asserts that the Read more about The Missing Link in School Reform[…]

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