CBS News--Vaping among teens, kids "threatens five decades of public health gains," experts say
The American Academy of Pediatrics called Monday for a major new effort to discourage children and teenagers from using e-cigarettes. According to AAP data, last year 20 percent of high school students, and five percent of middle school students, used e-cigarettes; that is a 75 percent jump overall since 2017.
David Morgan CBS News| January 28, 2019, 10:32 AM
The Record—Opinion: On the Parting of the PARCC
Let’s consider combining the best parts of past assessments: SAT/HSPA/ASK with a pencil and paper examination forgoing the computer administration.
Dennis Serano| January 30, 2019
The Atlantic--Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It
Not only does P.E. do little to improve physical fitness, but it can also lead to truancy and other disciplinary problems.
It’s almost too easy to satirize physical education, better known by its eye-roll-inducing abbreviation P.E. From Clueless to Superbad to Spiderman: Homecoming, parodies of gym class are a pop-culture darling. Perhaps that’s because they speak to one of America’s fundamental truths: For many kids, P.E. is terrible.
A recent working paper focused on a massive P.E. initiative in Texas captures this reality. Analyzing data out of the state’s Texas Fitness Now program—a $37 million endeavor to improve middle schoolers’ fitness, academic achievement, and behavior by requiring them to participate in P.E. every day—the researchers concluded that the daily mandate didn’t have any positive impact on kids’ health or educational outcome. On the contrary: They found that the program, which ran from 2007 to 2011, actually had detrimental effects, correlating with an uptick in discipline and absence rates.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/01/why-pe-is-terrible/581467/
Alia Wong| Jan 29, 2019