District Administration is a product magazine covering education for grades K-12 district leaders. Founded in 1986, it is a monthly publication, published by Professional Media Group L.L.C. The editor is Judy Faust Hartnett.
Imagine: You're standing behind a camera in outer space and watching Earth rotate in front of you. The camera zooms away, Earth gets smaller, without warning, an orange/reddish light shoots past you. You hear a loud "boom" as the entire planet explodes...
Take a troubled urban school district with almost two dozen non-performing schools, impoverished students and racial imbalance and what do you get? A recipe for educational disaster? No. A challenge, says Eric J. Smith, superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg...
"We ain't where we supposed to be." When a teacher walking through the hallway at Newson Park Elementary School of Newport News (Va.) City Public Schools overheard these words, she pulled the third-grade culprit out of line and told him that "ain't"...
Nearly one-third of high school students binge drink--or, in plain language, drink to get drunk--at least once per month. Teen Tipplers: America's Underage Drinking Epidemic, released by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia...
Long, long ago, in some mythical classroom of the lost world, if you wanted to know how well a student was learning, you'd just ask the teacher. Teachers then not only had eyes in the back of their heads, but powerful eyes all around that could...
M-Systems, www.diskonkey.com, Hardware, $49.99-$199.99 (8MB-256MB available) What's smaller than a pen, fits on a key chain, and allows you to move documents and other files seamlessly between home and work, as well as between a Mac and a PC?...
Images of students fleeing deadly shooting sprees in 1998-99 in Colorado and Arkansas set a new tone in classrooms nationwide. Then there was the plot in 1999, to kill six faculty members in a small Kansas City school. It was foiled by police....
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is donating $40 million to create 70 special high schools for the disadvantaged. Saying that the last years of high school are often "squandered academically," and that too many disadvantaged students drop out...
The National Science Foundation has arguably done more to improve K-12 science, mathematics and technology education in the United States than any other sponsoring agency. Starting decades ago, the NSF funded the development of large-scale programs...
On the front seat of a New Orleans taxi was a television the cabbie managed to watch while driving. The TV was tuned to an infomercial for a miracle home food dehydrator. The show demonstrated all of the ways in which this amazing technology would...
What is insane? In Niagara Falls, N.Y., residents are used to crazy behavior. Besides the disconcerting monthly suicides, there are the stunts. People have walked tightropes over Niagara Falls, gone over in barrels, big plastic balls, kayaks, even...
This letter was supposed to update on the education of my five-year-old, Ethan. I introduced you to Ethan in November when I chronicled the decision my wife and I made to send him to a Montessori school and delay kindergarten for a year. But...
Schools fail. This is a hard fact for school districts across the country. Districts are desperate for ways to bring failing schools and the students who drop out of them back into the educational fold. One approach that seems to be working is the...
Did you ever wonder how Stevie Wonder can play just one keyboard and yet produce an orchestra of sounds? The easy answer is because of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface. The MIDI is essentially a networking protocol that allows musical instruments,...
Q: Where should environmental studies fit into the school curriculum? A: Environmental education [fits] nicely into any component of a classroom curriculum, as the umbrella from which all subjects can be taught or as a part of social studies,...
The recession has hit many industries, including technology. Even though economic indicators point to an upcoming recovery, there are still many displaced professionals. It hasn't escaped the notice of several district human resource directors that...
It happens in many districts. Students lie about where they live in order to be educated in a better school district. Such was the case in Mainland Regional High School District in Linwood, N.J. There school Superintendent Edwin Coyle went above...
It's an age-old tradition, something that has been around since the beginning of modern man. Some experts say it is the core of any violence prevention or safety technique around. It's talking. "Having alarms, lights, cameras, ... that is fine,"...
Earlier this year, a superintendent in Prince George's County, Md., was fired by the school board, temporarily reinstated after a Sunday evening circuit court session and redeemed by an antiquated state law. This all happened during 10 whirlwind...
I was sitting in my 12th grade physics class, carving my initials into the top of my desk. It wasn't that I believed physics to be irrelevant; to the contrary, though I knew little about physics, I concluded that it had to be important. After all,...
Education officials await a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to determine if they can test students for drug use. Of course, schools already have the OK to test student athletes, but the outcome of the current case, heard in March, will determine if schools...