AdLit News Headlines

The new film “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” is shining a spotlight on Judy Blume, author of the original novel. Many of her books deal with issues of sexuality and adolescence rarely found elsewhere when Blume was writing. That brought contention, including bans, that are once again front and center. Jeffrey Brown discussed this with Blume for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

U.S. Department of Education hopes its ‘Career Z Challenge’ will allow more students to get college credit, apprenticeships and industry credentials.

New York City’s public libraries last week avoided deep budget cuts that would have reduced hours, but educators say the dearth of public school librarians affects many students.

We’ve put together multimodal lists of recommendations — including nonfiction, graphic novels, documentaries, and more — that educators can feature in classrooms and libraries alongside the exemplar texts. Our aim is to inspire educators to breathe fresh life into lessons around these works by giving students new context to understand why these classics are still relevant today.

The latest test results continue a nearly decade-long decline. Try a sample quiz to test your knowledge.

A school district in San Antonio, Texas, has built an entire high school dedicated to raising the next generation of teachers. It’s a bold experiment that could pay off big if shortages continue.

Teacher staffing levels for English learners swing widely across the country and shortages abound, but appropriate class size can hinge on many things.

Station-based book study can help build students’ background knowledge for a unit as they survey content before direct instruction.

The whole setup feels more tech startup than high school classroom. And in many ways, it is. The Synergy program at Mineola High School in Mineola, N.Y — for now, an alternative offshoot of the only high school in this nearly 3,000-student Long Island district — is the brainchild of Michael Nagler, the superintendent of the Mineola school district. He designed the model with his school-hating, computer science whiz teenage son in mind.

The provider shortage is real, but teens can be empowered to step up for each other.

The changes aim to measure mastery and account for hardships at home, though teachers say some students are gaming the system.

For readers who enjoy or want to explore reading novels in different formats, here are 15 titles about AAPI characters or by AAPI creators to recommend for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. 

Proponents say the laws aim to give parents control over their children’s education. But many educators say the rules have brought chaos and fear.

Liza Burrell-Aldana, principal of Mount Vernon Community School in Alexandria, is The Washington Post’s Principal of the Year.

Jonathan Cornejo, a Los Angeles high school senior and son of a single immigrant mother, got into his dream University of California campus but couldn’t afford to go. Then strangers stepped up.

Middle school is a unique and often difficult time. Students go from the comfort and familiarity of spending all day with one teacher and one group of students to having six teachers and a wide range of classmates. For many students, this can feel like going from being a big fish in a small pond to the small fish in a big pond. Additionally, adolescence brings many physical and psychological changes. This trifecta of challenges helps explain why in the middle school years we lose many kids to drugs, violence, and despair. Forming diverse student groups can be an asset.

In “The Manifestor Prophecy,” 12-year-old Nic Blake draws supernatural strength from her “Remarkable” African American forebears.

It’s tough to keep kids reading at this age, but frankly, the publishing industry could be doing more to help. Where have all the 13- to 15-year-old main characters gone? While there are a plethora of 12-year-old main characters who are finishing elementary school or starting middle school, we really need more stories for our upper middle school readers. 

There is a new book, titled “Schools of Opportunity: 10 Research-Based Models of Equity in Action,” that describes in detail how some successful schools approach their work with students. This excerpt from the book focuses on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Early College in far northeast Denver with its students in grades 6-12, and its approach to student wellness through supports and services that are largely nonacademic.

Study of social media platforms deepens our picture of the struggles faced by teen girls.

Amid the national uproar about whether to allow students access to a wide variety of books, the superintendent of a Virginia school district this week proposed a sweeping solution: Get rid of school libraries altogether.

Hint: It’s not just the screens.

Making a short video can be a powerful opportunity for students to explore a reading in a different way from writing an essay.

American Library Association identified 1,269 efforts to censor books and resources in U.S. libraries.

Seattle Public Schools filed a lawsuit in January. In recent weeks, school districts in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida have followed.

The Northern Virginia high school student’s winning science project used GPT-3 to examine who gets humanized and who doesn’t when it comes to media coverage of homicide victims.

Everyone is going through something, right? As this appears to be the case for so many of us, escapist reading is definitely in order. Here are some cozy fantasy books for kids to help you escape, too. 

Black and Latino students are often underrepresented at selective schools, according to districts.

The provider shortage is real, but teens can be empowered to step up for each other.

Artificial intelligence might be able to drive cars, treat disease, and train your front door to recognize your face. But can it crack the toughest nut in literacy: Helping kids comprehend what they read?

Penny Kittle shares a lesson plan that uses very short mentor texts to foster students’ love of writing and confidence in their work.

The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists say the impact could be dire.

A soon-to-come legislative package rethinks how Oregon teaches its youngest learners to read and write.

For the first time in four years, thousands of New Jersey students will take the state’s high school exit exam this week as a graduation requirement. The testing comes as some states roll back the mandate and concerns persist about the test’s usefulness and ability to measure college readiness.

Food is powerful: regardless of one’s age, gender, race, nationality, food has the ability to bring us all together. That’s the idea behind a new cookbook called Tasting History, a project spearheaded by Lowell High School history teacher Jessica Lander. We speak with Lander, as well as two students about their dishes, and their stories.

Behind the scenes, one publisher went to great lengths to avoid mentions of race, even in the story of Rosa Parks.

How do you know you really know something? That’s part of what cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham explains in his new book, “How to Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy.”

This fun, fast-paced activity guides middle school students to share their reading recommendations, and it can be adapted to suit a variety of literacy activities.

In some places, the practice is off-limits, recognized as not only counterproductive but damaging.

This fun, fast-paced activity guides middle school students to share their reading recommendations, and it can be adapted to suit a variety of literacy activities.

Middle and high school teachers can address distressing events in ways that support students and help them process their reactions.

Over the last five years, as part of our annual Student Podcast Challenge, the Education team at NPR have created and gathered resources to help students and teachers produce their own podcasts.

Isolating kids from their peers is unjust.

To mollify parents and obey new state laws, teachers are cutting all sorts of lessons.

A new study suggests it is not ADHD alone that causes school attendance problems. For parents and clinicians, this research encourages investigating other mental health factors when helping students with ADHD and school attendance problems.

This report aims to put the spotlight on education within a war zone as the war in Ukraine enters its second year. 

How can adults help adolescents manage the mismatch between their normal drive for autonomy, identity, and independence, and what school asks of them?

Before Colin Kaepernick was the face and catalyst of a protest movement – across sports and society – and before he was the San Francisco 49ers’ starting quarterback in the Super Bowl XLVII, he was just a teenager trying to figure out who he was and where he was going. In a new graphic novel, Colin Kaepernick details how he wrestled with his identity within his blended adoptive family.

“I think as a kid, to be able to read a book where you feel seen and you feel like who you are as a human being, where you come from is being honored and recognized as something good, then that makes you feel good. It makes you feel like who you are as a person is an ok person to be and you can do good things in the world as that person whether you are still in your rural community or somewhere else.”

These are hidden nonfiction gems, each of them brilliant in its own way, and you’re going to want to get your hands on them.

During Black History Month in the library, I’m always looking for titles to recommend to the teenagers at the high school where I work. Of course, I spend time highlighting books by Black YA authors — all Black authors, YA or not, to be perfectly honest — yet I wasn’t doing much to educate about the history itself.

Dr. Ken Ginsburg is tired of swimming against the tide when it comes to public perceptions about teens. After decades of work strengthening families and raising teens of his own, the founding director of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia says it’s time to change the narrative altogether.

NPR’s Rachel Martin speaks with phycologist Lisa Damour about her book: The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable and Compassionate Adolescents.

Middle school teacher Chris Bily’s media literacy course is designed to give students the skills to become more news-literate, but it actually does much more. It bridges millennia and enhances his seventh-grade ancient history classes.

Why is no one talking about his delightful novels for kids? Unknown to many folks, Segel became a writer of fiction for children, co-authoring the bestselling Nightmares! series for middle-grade readers in collaboration with the established YA author Kirsten Miller. 

The number of teen suicide attempts in the U.S., meanwhile, increased dramatically between 2019 and 2021. Unfortunately, there is no expert consensus about the causes of this mental-health crisis.

Social-emotional skills provide adolescents with valuable tools to navigate the tricky world of tweens and teens. But schools tend to focus much more on social-emotional learning in the preschool and elementary years than the latter grades.

Facing History & Ourselves’s Dimitry Anselme on how teachers can address Nichols’s death in the classroom while affirming students’ grief & anger

From spooky read-alouds for Halloween to a spring Battle of the Books, middle schools can use these strategies to get all students excited about literacy.

Advocates say new government funding is a down payment on long-awaited research and development arm of DOE.