School Survival

If the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent report had been an international comparison of test scores, the media would have gone berserk. Negativity certainly erupts when ODEC releases the results of their Programme for International Student Assessment test, since it generally shows U.S. students performing poorly compared with their peers in other […]

After a state task force delivered a withering indictment of New York’s juvenile prisons, the head of the agency responsible for the prisons reacted by going on a publicity blitz — not to challenge the findings, but to promote them. Gladys Carrión has the support of child-welfare advocates but draws criticism from unions representing workers […]

New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows. Those findings, […]

Hope Witsell was just beginning the journey from child to teen. The middle-school student had a tight-knit group of friends, the requisite poster of “Twilight” heartthrob Robert Pattinson and big plans to become a landscaper when she grew up. But one impetuous move robbed Hope of her childhood, and eventually, her life. The 13-year-old Florida […]

Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, is one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology. Dr. Steinberg, 57, has won the $1 million Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, which will be awarded to him at a ceremony in early December in Switzerland. Here […]

As Thanksgiving preparations shifted into high gear, media outlets large and small have been opining on the importance of gratitude, but, more specifically, they've often targeted their sights on the most ungrateful creature of all: the adolescent. Pointing to the research of Hofstra professor Jeffrey Froh, a number of these reports have suggested that it […]

The mother of a special-needs student says a Lockhart Elementary School teacher's aide left her son in the school's timeout room last year for nearly four hours. The aide went home and forgot about the 9-year-old boy, who sat alone in the dark on the floor of a windowless 3-by-5-foot room before a janitor freed […]

A school is being asked to apologise to the family of a boy it prosecuted for truancy. The boy was diagnosed as having "school phobia", but what exactly is that? Most adults can remember days when they vehemently didn't want to go to school. There would be protestations of illness, and of the danger of […]

Perhaps proving once and for all, that, you can and should teach an old dog new tricks, UCLA scientists have found that middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience were able to trigger key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning after just one week of surfing the Web. The findings, […]

Growing up in a stressful environment isn’t conducive to becoming a well-adjusted adult. Studies have shown that people who were constantly stressed out during childhood have an increased risk of being depressed. How exactly are the two related? Stress at a young age permanently alters the expression of a key gene in the brain, resulting […]