This section lists articles and links which may be of interest. They're listed in order of submission, so an easy way to find one in your topic area is to select from the "Categories" list on the right side of the page. Click on the area of interest, and you will get a new list of just those articles in that category. Some of the articles are for the general public, often from newspaper or magazine orticles, while others come from journals or professional publications. A short summary at the top of each listing, as well as the first few paragraphs of the article should help you decide if you want to read it in its entirety. Some listings have links to the orignal article, and you can download some of the articles as well.
Summary The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.
Author Anu Partanen
Citation Atlantic Monthly, December 29. 2011
Link http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West’s reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.
The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known—if it was known for anything at all—as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life—Newsweek ranked it number one last year—and Finland’s national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.
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Summary This article, which references the experiences of many middle schoolers, talks about the challenges facing gay and lesbian students in middle school. While "being young and gay is no longer an automatic prescription for a traumatic childhood," there's still a great amount of verbal and physical harassment (and worse) that occurs. As a a result, many schools form Gay-Straight Alloiances (GSA's), where students discuss school safety, plan events, read up on news, talk about navigating the outside world, and offer support.
Author Benoit Denizert-Lewis
Citation New York Times Magazine, September 27, 2009
Link http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27out-t.html
Austin didn’t know what to wear to his first gay dance last spring. It was bad enough that the gangly 13-year-old from Sand Springs, Okla., had to go without his boyfriend at the time, a 14-year-old star athlete at another middle school, but there were also laundry issues. “I don’t have any clean clothes!” he complained to me by text message, his favored method of communication.
When I met up with him an hour later, he had weathered his wardrobe crisis (he was in jeans and a beige T-shirt with musical instruments on it) but was still a nervous wreck. “I’m kind of scared,” he confessed. “Who am I going to talk to? I wish my boyfriend could come.” But his boyfriend couldn’t find anyone to give him a ride nor, Austin explained, could his boyfriend ask his father for one. “His dad would give him up for adoption if he knew he was gay,” Austin told me. “I’m serious. He has the strictest, scariest dad ever. He has to date girls and act all tough so that people won’t suspect.”
Austin doesn’t have to play “the pretend game,” as he calls it, anymore. At his middle school, he has come out to his close friends, who have been supportive. A few of his female friends responded that they were bisexual. “Half the girls I know are bisexual,” he said. He hadn’t planned on coming out to his mom yet, but she found out a week before the dance. “I told my cousin, my cousin told this other girl, she told her mother, her mother told my mom and then my mom told me,” Austin explained. “The only person who really has a problem with it is my older sister, who keeps saying: ‘It’s just a phase! It’s just a phase!’ ”
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Posted by Mr. Bilides on October 24, 2009.
Filed under:
GLBTQ •
School Climate •
Sexual Identity •
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Summary Researchers and policy makers from Great Britain visited WMS as part of a US study tour to discover what we were doing in the areas of prevention and intervention, specifically anti-bullying.
Author Louise Morpeth
Citation Prevention Action 12 May 2009
School principals in the US have as much autonomy as their counterparts in the UK but their choice of in-class prevention programs is restricted to those proven to work.
In the UK, freedom of choice has given some obscure and dubious inventions a foothold in the curriculum. In the US – and in Washington state – only the 11 that have made the Blueprints for Violence Prevention approved list can qualify.
Among them is The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, developed by Dan Olweus in Bergen, Norway, 25 years ago in the aftermath of three suicides and a national campaign, and now an international brand. In the US, implementation has touched almost every State since impressive trial results in Philadelphia and South Carolina in the mid-1900s.
So what of the progress of school “systems change” on the ground in Seattle?
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Posted by Mr. Bilides on May 14, 2009.
Filed under:
Bullying •
Counseling •
Health •
School Climate •
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