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An article in the July 2016 issue of Pediatrics reports on a successful scaling up of a school-readiness program for pre-school children in Chicago. "This study involved the end-of-preschool follow-up of a nonrandomized, matched-group cohort of 2630 predominantly low-income, ethnic minority children who enrolled in the Midwest Child–Parent Centers (CPC) or alternative preschools in the fall of 2012 in 31 schools in Chicago, Illinois. The program provides comprehensive education, family support, and health services. In the preschool component assessed in this study, 1724 children aged 3 to 4 years in all 16 Chicago centers enrolled in the program. The comparison group included 906 children of the same age who participated in the usual preschool services in 14 matched schools. Relative to the comparison group who enrolled in the usual preschool services and adjusted for covariates, CPC participants had higher mean scores on all performance-based assessments of literacy (59.4 vs 52.4; P = .001), socioemotional development (57.0 vs 51.8; P = .001), and physical health (34.5 vs 32.1; P = .001). They also had higher ratings of parental involvement in school (5.3 vs 4.0; P = .04). Group differences also translated into higher rates of meeting national assessment norms." Read More >>
(This item is among the 5-10 highlights posted for ISHN members each week from the ISHN Member information service. Click on the web link to join this service and to support ISHN)
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Canadians are often smug and complacent about the apparent, relative success that their society enjoys in regard to inter-cultural relations, especially when they look south to their immediate neighbours. However, an international comparison shows that such hubris may be misplaced. An article in the July 2016 issue of Social Science & Medicine "uses the largest nationally representative samples available to compare racial inequalities in health in the United States and Canada. Data were obtained from ten waves of the National Health Interview Survey (n = 162,271,885) and the Canadian Community Health Survey (n = 19,906,131) from 2000 to 2010. We estimated crude and adjusted odds ratios, and risk differences across racial groups for a range of health outcomes in each country. Patterns of racial health inequalities differed across the United States and Canada. After adjusting for covariates, black-white and Hispanic-white inequalities were relatively larger in the United States, while aboriginal-white inequalities were larger in Canada. In both countries, socioeconomic factors did not explain inequalities across racial groups to the same extent.". For school health & development, this underlines the need for data-based analysis and an accurate understanding of the contextual forces at play. Read more>>
(This item is among the 5-10 highlights posted for ISHN members each week from the ISHN Member information service. Click on the web link to join this service and to support ISHN) Commission on Ferguson USA Racism/Unrest Calls for Whole Child, Safe, Healthy, Community Schools9/30/2015 This week saw several news stories on the report of the Commission investigating the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown. The report of the commission, which includes the word "unflinching", recommends that a whole child approach and a revamped school system be included in a focus on youth at the center of the reforms. The school-related actions include; reforming school discipline, providing support services to disadvantaged youth, ending childhood hunger, and several other measures to promote wellness and personal development. Note: In 2010 ISHN worked with the Community Schools movement to develop a consensus statement/adapted approach to schools in disadvantaged communities in high resource countries. Racism and other forms of discrimination were included as one of the many challenges but we also worked from a strength-based viewpoint and identified over 20 programs that can be part of these efforts. We released it at the 2010 School Health Symposium in Geneva. Read more >> (An item from the ISHN Member information service)
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #4, 2015 of The Journal of Primary Prevention describes how adding a food co-op component to a healthy nutrition and physical activity program in schools serving disadvantaged communities can be effective. "The purpose of this study was to conduct a pilot feasibility evaluation of Brighter Bites, a school-based food co-op to provide access to fresh F&V and nutrition education to low-income children and their families. Brighter Bites is a 16-week school-based food co-op consisting of: (1) Weekly distribution of 50–60 servings of fresh F&V; (2) Weekly bilingual parent handouts and recipe demonstrations; and (3) implementing CATCH, a coordinated school health program in schools. Process data using parent surveys, teacher surveys, attendance logs, and produce cost data were used to determine feasibility and acceptability of program. Participants received on average 61 servings of F&V weekly for 16 weeks at the cost of $4.31/family/week. Results showed significant increases in child reported self-efficacy, outcome expectations and attitudes towards consuming F&V (p < 0.05). We found significant increases in child exposure to F&V and child preference of various F&V from baseline to post-intervention (p < 0.05). Parent surveys showed significant improvements in mealtime practices at home: decrease in children eating while watching TV, increase in eating dinner with the family, less fast food, less sugary drinks with meals, more children asking for F&V as snacks. Process data showed 98 % retention rate and high parent acceptability of program components. Brighter Bites is a promising strategy to increase F&V access and education in low-income populations using existing infrastructure of schools and food banks." Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) Asset based youth development approaches are well-recognized in the research and program literature. More recently, attention has been paid to the accumulation of adverse life experiences in childhood and adolescence. It looks like the weight of negative experiences is as powerful as the support of multiple positive factors or assets. An article in Volume 43, 2015 of Journal of Adolescence discusses cumulative experiences with life adversity with a view to iIdentifying critical levels for targeting prevention efforts. The authors note that "This paper aims to assess the role of individual types and cumulative life adversity for understanding depressive symptomatology and aggressive behavior. Data were collected in 2011 as part of the Teen Life Online and in Schools Study from 916 ethnically-diverse students from 12 middle, K–8, 6–12 and high schools in the Midwest United States. Youth reported an average of 4.1 non-victimization adversities and chronic stressors in their lifetimes. There was a linear relationship between number of adversities and depression and aggression scores. Youth reporting the highest number of adversities (7 or more) had significantly higher depression and aggression scores than youth reporting any other number of adversities suggesting exposure at this level is a critical tipping point for mental health concerns. Findings underscore an urgent need to support youth as they attempt to negotiate, manage, and cope with adversity in their social worlds. Read more>>
(From UCLA School Mental Health Project) A new book in January 2015 by the UCLA School Mental Health Project makes a cogent argument for transforming the fragmented delivery of various support services so that they truly support student learning and equitable educational opportunity. The authors begin with this " external and internal barriers to learning and teaching have continued to pose some of the most pervasive and entrenched challenges to educators across the country, particularly in chronically low performing schools. Failure to directly address these barriers ensures that (a) too many children and youth will continue to struggle in school, and (b) teachers will continue to divert precious instructional time to dealing with behavior and other problems...Transforming student and learning supports is key to school improvement. To this end, this book incorporates years of research and prototype development and a variety of examples from trailblazing efforts" They go on to say "Mapping a school district’s existing efforts to address problems yields a consistent picture of many practices and fragmented, piecemeal, and usually disorganized activity (as illustrated below). The range of such learning and student supports generally is extensive and expensive". They also go on to describe the cause and this is where we might disagree: "Underlying the fragmentation is a fundamental policy problem, namely the long-standing marginalization of student and learning supports in school improvement policy and practice. Thus, most efforts to directly use student and learning supports to address barriers to learning and teaching and re-engage disconnected students are not a primary focus in school improvement planning. " In our view, a major cause of the fragmentation is that the mandates and funding of the various health, social and other services is done in a sporadic, competitive and disjointed manner. Part of the transformation will require that health and other ministries re-organize their work so that they are accountable for providing consistent support for students most at risk, rather than always worrying about the optimal health of all students in universal programs. There have often been attempts to insert health outputs and outcomes into school system accountability. In our view, this should be a two-way street, with health and other systems being accountable for a reasonable number of educational outputs, particularly for more vulnerable students. Read more>>
(From the ISHN Member information service) An August 19, 2014 posting to the Teachers Blog from Education Week discusses the "the Unwritten Job Descriptions of Teachers in High-Needs Schools" and thereby underlines one of the challenges and dilemmas of their daily work and professional careers. The author, a woman, discusses her "worst class" and how the pre-dominantly male students in a class in a high needs, ubran school in a poor neighbourhood challenged her, her female co-teacher an dmost other authority figures in the school. She adds " A couple of the guys had terrible tempers, and managing their angry and unpredictable outbursts made me feel like I was walking on eggshells in my own classroom. When the principal and other higher-ups from the Board of Education would come in, instead of feigning interest in the class-work (as most groups of students would have, under those circumstances), they'd ask, "Why are these people here? Tell them to leave," as though we all spoke some other language that our visitors would not understand." She then describes the dramatic changes to their behaviours when a male teacher replaced her female colleague in the team teaching assignment. " In some way, we had become "mom and dad" (albeit, extremely hetero-normatively) for these guys. It was not only evident in their antics of trying to play one of us off the other; the young men in our class could sometimes be calmed down by "man-to-man" talks in the hallway with my team teacher, after which they'd come to me for hugs, band-aids, snacks, what-have-you."Years later, reflecting on that year, the female teacher realized that the students in that class had needed them as surrogate parents and that the real needs of those students were based on the need for secure social attachments with adults. She then briefly cites some of the recent research on this and criticizes the current efforts in the US to see education as a business, as a competition and as a workplace for students rather than a home away from home. Read the blog article here.
All this is not very new, any teacher can tell you about the kids in their class with the same needs. What was significant to me in reading the blog commentary was how the writer argues that " For teachers, this represents an added layer of responsibility, one for which we can't expect recognition within our formal evaluations, but which is nonetheless a vital component of doing our jobs well...particularly in high-needs schools in poor areas, where children are often coming from unsteady home lives.' While respecting and even agreeing that view as a former teacher, I am struck by the constant barrage of attacks on teachers these days. More testing, more accountability for students progress regardless of their effort or their families contribution, introduction of term-limited teacher licenses, unilateral legislative attacks on their bargaining agents, reductions in their pensions and so on. In what other profession, in what other industry, in what other corporation would the authorities really expect their employees to stay faithful to their altruistic, additional, uncompensated roles and additional unrecognized responsibilities, especially when assigned to the worst assignments?. Really. And then we have the well-meant, checklists, teacher-proof instructional programs and the fix-the-teacher "professional" development programs from the health and social program advocates constantly knocking on the school door.... This article and our additional comments here present one of the aspects of our global discussion of why the health and social sectors need to step back from their current appeals to schools and seek a new path that can lead to a systematic and teacher aware approach to the integration of these programs within the constraints, concerns and core mandates of education systems. Join us in our on-going, International Discussion Group and series of global symposiums. (An item from the ISHN Member information service) In 2013, up to $75 billion dollars was invested by the governments of 169 countries into school feeding programmes. It is estimated that for every $1 spent feeding school children, $3 are generated for the local economy. On January 22, a special meeting of global leaders in school feeding met in the UK parliament to discuss how governments are increasingly using school feeding programmes as a means to both improve educational outcomes and at the same time improve agricultural economies. The real impact that a successful HGSF programme can have was provided by keynote speaker, H.E Raul Argebesola, Governor of Osun State in Nigeria who said that since the launch of his State’s school meals programme (known as O’Meals) which feeds over 250,000 children every school day, enrolment has increased by 24%. The O’Meals programme provides employment to over 3,000 women and purchases food from over 1000 local farmers. Key resources published as part of this parliamentary event include: Rethinking school feeding executive summary, State of School Feeding Worldwide 2013 and a HGSF Working Paper Series #1
Read more>> (An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #6, 2013 of the H=Journal of Extension reports on a partnership program involving Extension programs (rural community development organizations) and local schools to encourage rural students to attend college. The article reports that "Rural high school graduates are less likely to graduate from college than their urban counterparts, mostly because they are less likely to attend college. Creating a climate of success for rural youth in Northwest Ohio is the goal of the College Readiness for Rural Youth initiative. Due to the large geographic area targeted, Extension has engaged collaborating partners to develop and facilitate "bridging" programs to support academic success and transitions to college for rural youth in the region". The program has linked the College Readiness for Rural Youth program with the OSU Extension program entitled Real Money—Real World (RMRW). RMRW is a successful financial literacy program 4-H professionals use in Ohio in partnership with local schools. The article concludes that "This program serves as an "on the ground" approach to developing the skills and abilities necessary for youth planning to enter post-secondary education to succeed at a higher level. The support and guidance through this bridge program has built the foundation needed to allow for students to envision college opportunity as an attainable goal. The approach is adaptable to fit the needs and demographics of diverse youth groups." Read more>>
The Capacity Challenge:What It Takes for State Education Agencies to Support School Improvement12/27/2013 (From the Education Commission of the US) Do state education agencies (SEAs) have the capacity to deepen their work improving outcomes for students? The answer from a long list of policy advocates and observers is “no”—or at least not without significant changes to the way they currently function. This project sought to more systematically examine SEAs’ existing capacities to understand the seriousness of the problem and the strategies state chiefs are using to confront it. The 10 states we analyzed represent a variety of approaches and political contexts for the work of reform, as well as varied records on student achievement. For each of these states, we asked: • What are the primary obstacles that inhibit SEAs from supporting school and district improvement? and • What levers can chiefs utilize to transform their agencies into more effective drivers of reform? Read More>>
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