Some preschoolers are encouraged to bring in their favorite toy or stuffed animal, while others risk having it confiscated. Layland Masuda/Moment Collection via Getty Images The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea Poor preschoolers get fewer chances than wealthier children to bring their prized personal possessions to school.… Continue reading Rich kids and poor kids face different rules when it comes to bringing personal items to school
Climate change means more schools will need to install or upgrade cooling systems. Bill Uhrich/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images Rising temperatures due to climate change are causing more than just uncomfortably hot days across the United States. These high temperatures are placing serious stress on critical infrastructure such as water supplies, airports, roads and… Continue reading As heat waves intensify, tens of thousands of US classrooms will be too hot for students to learn in
The core of education is to enable young learners to be kind, giving members of society. David Brewster/Star Tribune via Getty Images Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. Why do us kids have to go to… Continue reading Why do kids have to go to school?
Black teachers comprise just 7% of U.S. public school teachers even though 16% of their students are Black. Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images The intent of school desegregation is clear: Black and white children should attend the same schools, and Black children should not be relegated to inferior buildings, learning materials and extracurricular… Continue reading Lessons from segregated schools can help make today’s classrooms more inclusive
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
Poor preschoolers get fewer chances than wealthier children to bring their prized personal possessions to school. That’s what I found in my two-year comparative ethnographic study of two preschools in Madison, Wisconsin. One of the preschools primarily serves middle-class white children and the other primarily serves poor children of color.
In the preschool that served mostly poor kids, the teachers made a rule that kids could not bring toys, games, stuffed animals or other personal items to school. The stakes felt too high to these teachers. Some students’ families were recently evicted and had few toys. Other students’ families did buy them toys but at great financial cost, and families didn’t want these items broken. Teachers also worried about toys being stolen. The items that I observed children try to bring in ranged from expensive action figures to random board game pieces to sparkly ponytail holders.
I then observed an affluent school and found that teachers actually encouraged children to bring their personal items to school. The teachers hosted a weekly show and tell. Kids could bring toys, objects from nature or anything else to show and tell. Teachers also encouraged kids to bring books to read with their peers and stuffed animals to cuddle at nap time any day of the week. Because these teachers knew their students’ families were financially well-off, they made classroom rules that allowed children to celebrate their personal property.
Why it matters
This gulf in how kids experience classroom rules about property matters for three reasons.
First, I observed that when children brought personal stuff to school, they used the items to connect with friends or just to hold and enjoy by themselves throughout the day. This was true whether they were encouraged to bring the items in or they successfully sneaked them in.
Bringing special personal objects to school provided the kids with a form of what sociologists call substantive dignity – the sense that one belongs in a wider community but is still respected as a unique individual. My research suggests that preschool segregation creates pressures for teachers of poor children to forbid personal property at school, closing off a pathway to substantive dignity for these children.
Second, the disparity in children’s degree of control over property connects to other researchers’ findings that affluent children have more control over their experience within schools. From school uniform rules to how much of their teacher’s help they get when working on assignments, affluent children grow up expecting more special attention from authority figures. They are more comfortable asking for accommodations, and this matters in college and as they transition to adulthood. In contrast, poor and working-class children experience more encouragement to defer to the rules of an institution. My research suggests that affluent children’s comfortable access to personal property in preschool is an additional mechanism by which they come to feel entitled to individualized attention in workplaces and other institutions.
Third, one consequence of the no-personal-items rule at the poor preschool was that a handful of students – all boys of color – sneaked toys in anyway. Sometimes these children were caught and were disciplined by having their items taken and being sent to the quiet area. As a result, property rules contributed to differences in discipline on race and gender lines. This aligns with other scholars’ findings that boys of color experience more punishment as early as preschool, and this pattern continues through K-12 schooling.
What still isn’t known
My research observed broad, social experiences that children had over time. However, social scientists will need to do more research to determine how teachers’ rules about controlling children’s personal property use differ across a wider range of preschools. Another question is how teachers manage kids’ access to personal items in mixed-income preschools.
Casey Stocksill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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string(14144) "Climate change means more schools will need to install or upgrade cooling systems. Bill Uhrich/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images
Rising temperatures due to climate change are causing more than just uncomfortably hot days across the United States. These high temperatures are placing serious stress on critical infrastructure such as water supplies, airports, roads and bridges.
One category of critical infrastructure being severely affected is the nation’s K-12 schools.
Ideally, the nation’s more than 90,000 public K-12 schools, which serve over 50 million students, should protect children from the sometimes dangerous elements of the outdoors such as severe storms or extreme temperatures.
But since so many of America’s schools are old and dilapidated, it’s the school buildings themselves that need protection – or at least to be updated for the 21st century.
Twenty-eight percent of the nation’s public schools were built from 1950 through 1969, federal data shows, while just 10% were built in 1985 or later.
As a researcher who studies the impact of climate change, I have measured its effects on infrastructure and health for over a decade. During that time, I’ve seen little attention focused on the effects of climate change on public schools.
Since 2019, climate scientist Sverre LeRoy, at the Center for Climate Integrity, and I have worked to determine if the nation’s schools are prepared for the heat waves on the approaching horizon.
Comparing the climate conditions under which U.S. schools were built with the projected conditions over the next two decades, we looked at the vulnerability of all K-12 schools to increasing temperatures. We determined whether current schools have air conditioning or not and whether they would be required to add air conditioning in the future.
Research has shown that high classroom temperatures can make it harder to learn. Hot school days cause difficulty in concentrating, sleepiness, a decrease in energy and even reduced memory capacity.
Over the past several years, schools across the U.S. are increasingly forced to take “heat days,” cutting school days short because of classrooms that are too hot for students to effectively learn.
Compounding the increase in temperatures is the national trend that seasonal temperatures are rising in both the spring and the fall. For example, both Rhode Island and New Jersey have seen average spring and fall temperatures rise over 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 Celsius). Rather than high temperatures only occurring when students are on summer break, these heat events now occur regularly during the school year too. Students today in a greater number of cities are beginning and ending the school year in classrooms that often exceed 80 F (27 C).
Expensive upgrades
The problem of more hot days is due to average temperatures increasing over the past 40 years. The number of days with high temperatures has risen across the country, with notable increases in large northern cities. For example, Chicago has seen the number of days over 80 degrees during the school year increase from 27 in 1970 to 32 in 2020 and a projected 38 by 2025. These increases affect schools in two distinct ways.
Schools in the traditionally cooler north – especially older schools – will need to be retrofitted with new air conditioning systems at an accumulated cost of US billion by 2025. For schools in the traditionally warmer South and West, many existing systems will need to be upgraded at a projected cost exceeding 0 million.
Temperature increases are especially costly in large cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles, where existing efforts and continued needs will result in outlays exceeding 0 million,
.5 billion and 0 million, respectively. These large districts have a greater number of older buildings that require upgrades in electrical and structural systems to support new air conditioning systems.
For all schools – even ones that don’t require system upgrades – the additional costs of operating air conditioning systems to meet the new demands will exceed
.4 billion per year.
An equity issue
Since school districts are dependent on local taxes or bond measures to finance the school system, districts in affluent areas have a greater opportunity to obtain funds through tax increases or voter-approved bond measures.
In contrast, districts located in less affluent counties – including Bell County, Kentucky; Scott County, Tennessee; and DeKalb County, Alabama – face the challenge of creating safe learning environments without a financial safety net. With household incomes for the entire district in the bottom 20% of national averages, or less than ,000 per year, these districts are unable to absorb significant tax increases.
In this regard, classroom environments become an equity issue. While the increase in temperature may affect all children, the relative impact of the increase and the ability to adapt is not equal.
Protesters in 2019 demand equity for Denver students who go to school in old buildings without air conditioning.
Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post
Unsustainable solutions
Increasingly, school districts are turning to individual window units to address classroom overheating. However, window units do not cool interior offices, cannot circulate and exchange air within the classrooms, and will not meet expected lifespans due to extensive use. Furthermore, they create uneven cooling patterns and classroom disturbance due to noise. While these solutions are popular from an initial budget perspective, they ultimately fail to solve the hot classroom crisis.
Where mechanical systems are not an option due to budgetary constraints, school districts are looking at altering the school year to start later or end earlier. However, there are limits to this approach because there are minimum requirements for the number of days that are in the school year. Some schools are even experimenting with remote learning as a response when extreme temperatures are an issue.
The bottom line for schools and their surrounding communities is that rising temperatures from climate change are a growing threat to school infrastructure. Schools will need additional funding to install or upgrade air conditioning systems, pay for increased energy usage or redesign school buildings to enhance natural cooling. Various cities and states argue that fossil fuel companies have a duty to pay these infrastructure costs associated with climate change.
The only other choice is for America’s students to continue to endure classrooms where it’s simply too hot to learn.
Paul Chinowsky receives funding from the Center for Climate Integrity.
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string(15957) "Miami and Miami Beach were built right up to the waterfront, with little room for nature. Shobeir Ansari via Getty Images
Miami is all about the water and living life outdoors. Walking paths and parks line large stretches of downtown waterfront with a stunning bay view.
This downtown core is where the Army Corps of Engineers plans to build a US billion sea wall, 20 feet high in places, through downtown neighborhoods and right between the Brickell district’s high-rises and the bay.
There’s no question that the city is at increasing risk of flooding as sea level rises and storms intensify with climate change. A hurricane as powerful as 1992’s Andrew or 2017’s Irma making a direct hit on Miami would devastate the city.
But the sea wall the Army Corps is proposing – protecting only 6 miles of downtown and the financial district from a storm surge – can’t save Miami and Dade County. Most of the city will be outside the wall, unprotected; the wall will still trap water inside; and the Corps hasn’t closely studied what the construction of a high sea wall would do to water quality. At the same time, it would block the water views that the city’s economy thrives on.
Much of Miami is built right up to the water’s edge. On average, it’s 6 feet above sea level.
Ryan Parker/Unsplash, CC BY-ND
Living with water today doesn’t look the same as it did 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago. Parts of Miami now regularly see “sunny day” flooding during high tides. Salt water infiltrates basements and high-rise parking garages, and tidal flooding is forecast to occur more frequently as sea level rises. When storms come through, the storm surge adds to that already high water.
Hurricanes are less common than tidal flooding, but their destructive potential is greater, and that is what the Army Corps is focused on with its sea wall plan.
If Miami Beach were an undeveloped barrier island, and if thick mangrove forests were still common along the South Florida shoreline, the Miami area would have more natural protection against storm surge and wave action. But most of those living buffers are long gone.
There are still ways nature can help preserve the beauty of Miami’s marine playground, though.
Coral reefs like these in Biscayne National Park provide habitat and storm protection.
National Park Service
Each area of coastline is unique and requires different protective measures based on the dynamics of how the water flows in and out. Given Miami’s limited space, living shorelines alone won’t be enough against a major hurricane, but there are powerful ways to pair them with solid “gray” infrastructure that are more successful than either alone.
Hybrid solutions mix green and gray
Nobody wants to look at a cement breakwater offshore. But if you’re looking at a breakwater covered with corals and hospitable to marine life, and you can go out and swim on it, that’s different.
Corals help the structure dissipate wave energy better, and at the same time they improve water quality, habitat, recreation, tourism and quality of life. For a lot of people, those are some of Miami’s main selling points.
By pairing corals and mangroves with a more sustainable and eco-friendly hard infrastructure, hybrid solutions can be far less obtrusive than a tall sea wall.
Closer to shore, we’re experimenting with a novel modular marine and estuarine system we call “SEAHIVE.” Below the water line, water flows through hollow hexagonal channels of concrete, losing energy. The top can be filled with soil to grow coastal vegetation such as mangroves, providing even more protection as well as an ecosystem that benefits the bay.
The SEAHIVE design combines hollow channels of concrete with mangroves above and corals below for natural protection.
Gallo Herbert Architects
We’re currently working on testing SEAHIVE as a green engineering alternative for riprap in North Bay Village, an inhabited island in the bay, and as infrastructure in a newly developed marine park in Pompano Beach called Wahoo Bay, developed in collaboration with local governments and Shipwreck Park, a not-for-profit organization.
What about the rest of Miami?
The Army Corps of Engineers’ draft plan – a final version is expected in the fall – would give nature-based solutions little role beyond a fairly small mangrove and sea grass restoration project to the south. The Corps determined that natural solutions alone would require too much space and wouldn’t be as effective as hard infrastructure in a worst-case scenario.
Instead, the Army Corps’ plan focuses on the 6-mile sea wall, flood gates and elevating or strengthening buildings. It basically protects the downtown infrastructure but leaves everyone else on their own.
Sea walls and flood gates can also affect water flow and harm water quality. The Corps’ own documents warn that the sea walls and gates will affect wildlife and ecosystems, including permanent loss of protective corals, mangroves and sea grass beds.
We would like to see a plan for all of Miami-Dade County that considers the value that green and hybrid solutions bring for marine life, tourism, fishing and general quality of life, in addition to their protective services for the shoreline.
Both types – green and gray – would take time to build out, particularly if the sea wall plan were challenged in court. And both run a risk of failure. Corals can die in a heat wave, and a storm can damage mangroves; but storms can also undermine engineered solutions, like the New Orleans levee system during Hurricane Katrina. To help build resilience, our colleagues at the University of Miami have been breeding corals to be more resistant to climate change, investigating novel cementitious materials and noncorrosive reinforcements and developing new designs for coastal structures.
Miami in the future
Miami will be different in the coming decades, and the changes are already starting.
High ground is at a premium, and that’s showing up in real estate decisions that are pushing lower-income residents out and into less safe areas. Anybody looking back at Miami will probably think the region should have done a better job of managing growth and maybe even managing some form of retreat from threatened areas.
We don’t want to see Miami become Venice or a city walled off from the water. We think Miami can thrive by making use of the local ecosystem with novel green engineering solutions and an architecture that adapts.
Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos receives funding from the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) for the research and development of the SEAHIVE - Sustainable Estuarine and Marine Revetment.
Brian Haus receives funding from the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) for the research and development of the SEAHIVE - Sustainable Estuarine and Marine Revetment.
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string(11296) "The core of education is to enable young learners to be kind, giving members of society. David Brewster/Star Tribune via Getty Images
Why do us kids have to go to school? – Vanessa C., age 10, Gilbert, Arizona
Kids go to school for many reasons. Where and when depends on their age, location, parental preference and local policies. Parents send their kids to school to expose them to experiences that are different from their own at home and in their communities. Schools are designed to provide spaces for exploration, self-awareness and connection with other kids. Teachers encourage kids to strengthen the skills they have and help them gain new ones as they advance from grade to grade.
I have spent the last 20 years studying and working with children from birth to 21 years of age in a variety of settings. I often think about how to create the best learning environment for children, beginning with preschool. To me, that means ensuring that all children have the opportunity to be in a school that can fulfill their learning needs as well as their physical, social and emotional well-being at all stages of their lives.
During this important developmental stage, children also form a sense of self. For example, they might start to think of themselves as a big brother or sister if there’s another child at home. They also begin to connect more deeply with others, learn to communicate their feelings, practice sharing and more. When schools include children’s identity, cultural norms and traditions in the classroom, students feel a sense of belonging and inclusion. This helps children form associations that are important for learning.
Elementary school
Children entering kindergarten at age 5 or 6 can have many different feelings, including nervousness and excitement for this new experience. Perhaps kids have heard adults say that starting kindergarten is the start of “real learning.” But this isn’t the case; kids learn from the day they are born.
With the transition to kindergarten, kids begin to work on personal and social skills, like managing their behaviors and reactions, problem-solving and logical thinking. Kids’ early experiences expand their ideas of how the world works. And as they mature they become better able to understand more complex thought processes, like reversibility, or water turning to ice and then back to water. Another concept they may start to explore is how matter takes the shape of the space it occupies, like sand filling a star-shaped container, and why that happens.
As students advance through elementary school, their reading and comprehension skills improve and they are able to use different resources – from reading books and watching documentaries to taking trips to the museum – to help them understand ideas they encounter inside and outside of the classroom. The education students receive in school further builds on these experiences.
Middle school students begin to apply their skills and take on more schoolwork and school-related responsibilities, both inside and outside the classroom.
Maskot/Maskot via GettyImages
Middle school
During the middle school years, when students are typically between 10 and 13 years old, kids and parents are both starting to interact with school in different ways. Teachers increasingly give more responsibilities to students, and they try their best to personalize what happens in the classroom to students’ talents and strengths.
As students become increasingly independent, parents often pass on more school-related responsibilities to them. Students feel capable and competent when their environment supports who they are and encourages them to apply their existing skills at all levels, but especially in middle school.
Understanding all of the challenges kids are going through – like fitting in, maintaining friendships, puberty and others – can be overwhelming. But middle school also offers opportunities for students to sharpen their skills and talents. Some schools may offer band, theater or robotics and other new opportunities to learn, play and grow alongside their daily studies.
High school helps students understand more about their own interests and passions while they continue learning how to critically think and communicate with others.
Willie B. Thomas/DigitalVision via Getty Images
High school
High school is an exciting time for most students because it’s the final gateway to adulthood. Students may take on a heavier academic and extracurricular load as a way to prepare for higher education. In high school, students are able to choose from a range of courses that may include journalism, biology, an advanced foreign language class or world history. At the same time, students may begin taking part in specialized activities like volunteering or trips abroad that could expose them to fields they’d like to study if they choose to continue to college.
The core principle of education is to enable students to become kind, giving and contributing members of their community and the world. While not all students have the opportunity to attend great schools because of unequal circumstances, it is critical all children are afforded education, at home or at school, public or private. Schools are a tried-and-true place where kids gain new skills and knowledge that they continue to use and build on for the rest of their lives.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
But scientists are still trying to unravel how and why swimming, in particular, produces these brain-enhancing effects.
As a neurobiologist trained in brain physiology, a fitness enthusiast and a mom, I spend hours at the local pool during the summer. It’s not unusual to see children gleefully splashing and swimming while their parents sunbathe at a distance – and I’ve been one of those parents observing from the poolside plenty of times. But if more adults recognized the cognitive and mental health benefits of swimming, they might be more inclined to jump in the pool alongside their kids.
New and improved brain cells and connections
Until the 1960s, scientists believed that the number of neurons and synaptic connections in the human brain were finite and that, once damaged, these brain cells could not be replaced. But that idea was debunked as researchers began to see ample evidence for the birth of neurons, or neurogenesis, in adult brains of humans and other animals.
Research shows that one of the key ways these changes occur in response to exercise is through increased levels of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor. The neural plasticity, or ability of the brain to change, that this protein stimulates has been shown to boost cognitive function, including learning and memory.
It’s tempting for adults to watch kids splash from the poolside, but research shows it’s worth jumping in alongside them.
Povozniuk/iStock via Getty Images Plus
In studies in fish, scientists have observed changes in genes responsible for increasing brain-derived neurotrophic factor levels as well as enhanced development of the dendritic spines – protrusions on the dendrites, or elongated portions of nerve cells – after eight weeks of exercise compared with controls. This complements studies in mammals where brain-derived neurotrophic factor is known to increase neuronal spine density. These changes have been shown to contribute to improved memory, mood and enhanced cognition in mammals. The greater spine density helps neurons build new connections and send more signals to other nerve cells. With the repetition of signals, connections can become stronger.
But what’s special about swimming?
Researchers don’t yet know what swimming’s secret sauce might be. But they’re getting closer to understanding it.
Most of the research to understand how swimming affects the brain has been done in rats. Rats are a good lab model because of their genetic and anatomic similarity to humans.
Rats serve as a useful laboratory model for understanding the effects of swimming on memory formation and brain health.
irin717/iStock via Getty Images Plus
In one study in rats, swimming was shown to stimulate brain pathways that suppress inflammation in the hippocampus and inhibit apoptosis, or cell death. The study also showed that swimming can help support neuron survival and reduce the cognitive impacts of aging. Although researchers do not yet have a way to visualize apoptosis and neuronal survival in people, they do observe similar cognitive outcomes.
One of the more enticing questions is how, specifically, swimming enhances short- and long-term memory. To pinpoint how long the beneficial effects may last, researchers trained rats to swim for 60 minutes daily for five days per week. The team then tested the rats’ memory by having them swim through a radial arm water maze containing six arms, including one with a hidden platform.
Rats got six attempts to swim freely and find the hidden platform. After just seven days of swim training, researchers saw improvements in both short- and long-term memories, based on a reduction in the errors rats made each day. The researchers suggested that this boost in cognitive function could provide a basis for using swimming as a way to repair learning and memory damage caused by neuropsychiatric diseases in humans.
Although the leap from studies in rats to humans is substantial, research in people is producing similar results that suggest a clear cognitive benefit from swimming across all ages. For instance, in one study looking at the impact of swimming on mental acuity in the elderly, researchers concluded that swimmers had improved mental speed and attention compared with nonswimmers. However, this study is limited in its research design, since participants were not randomized and thus those who were swimmers prior to the study may have had an unfair edge.
Another study compared cognition between land-based athletes and swimmers in the young adult age range. While water immersion itself did not make a difference, the researchers found that 20 minutes of moderate-intensity breaststroke swimming improved cognitive function in both groups.
Kids get a boost from swimming too
The brain-enhancing benefits from swimming appear to also boost learning in children.
Another research group recently looked at the link between physical activity and how children learn new vocabulary words. Researchers taught children age 6-12 the names of unfamiliar objects. Then they tested their accuracy at recognizing those words after doing three activities: coloring (resting activity), swimming (aerobic activity) and a CrossFit-like exercise (anaerobic activity) for three minutes.
[The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories.Weekly on Wednesdays.]
They found that children’s accuracy was much higher for words learned following swimming compared with coloring and CrossFit, which resulted in the same level of recall. This shows a clear cognitive benefit from swimming versus anaerobic exercise, though the study does not compare swimming with other aerobic exercises. These findings imply that swimming for even short periods of time is highly beneficial to young, developing brains.
The details of the time or laps required, the style of swim and what cognitive adaptations and pathways are activated by swimming are still being worked out. But neuroscientists are getting much closer to putting all the clues together.
For centuries, people have been in search of a fountain of youth. Swimming just might be the closest we can get.
Seena Mathew does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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string(14531) "Black teachers comprise just 7% of U.S. public school teachers even though 16% of their students are Black. Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
The intent of school desegregation is clear: Black and white children should attend the same schools, and Black children should not be relegated to inferior buildings, learning materials and extracurricular activities.
While separate-but-equal is no longer legal, the reality is that today many Black children do not experience inclusive public school education. Inclusive education not only responds to the needs, interests and backgrounds of Black children, but it also incorporates diverse learning – such as not teaching predominantly white history.
Before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Black children attended segregated schools that were full of Black teachers and other leaders who shared their Black experience.
These adults passed along spoken and unspoken rules about living while Black in the United States. A contemporary example might be teaching and role modeling confidence in the face of negative stereotypes and statistics. For example, having just one Black teacher by third grade reduces the risk of Black boys dropping out of high school by 39%.
Vanessa Siddle Walker, a professor of African American educational studies, summarizes three goals of inclusive education: access, aspiration and advocacy. Access is using the same buildings and educational resources as other neighborhood children. Advocacy is having leaders who inform and support Black children. And aspiration is offering Black children models of what success can look like as adults.
Black children in segregated schools did not have access to the same buildings and educational resources as white children. Desegregation was an attempt to solve the access barriers and a step forward from the worst educationalinequitiesunder Jim Crow.
But inequities and segregation persist. Many of today’s K-12 public school students have teachers who are unprepared and unable to inform and support Black students’ realities of being Black. Nor can they offer examples of what success looks like for Black adults. Black teachers comprise just 7% of U.S. public school teachers even though 16% of their students are Black.
Furthermore, the messages within schools since integration have not supported Black children in general. We believe desegregated schools today are systemically racist. For example, most history lessons don’t teach a true picture of what enslaved people experienced in the founding of this country. And generally, school curriculum paints racism as a thing of the past – ignoring the racism that Black people experience now. Most teachers lack specific training in anti-racist and inclusive teaching and learning.
Anti-Black bias is also visible when school dress codes don’t allow Black hairstyles like dreadlocks or braids. Unfair disciplinary approaches mean Black students are more likely to be suspended than white students. This punitive focus feeds the school-to-prison pipeline in which Black students are overrepresented in the criminal justice system starting with school disciplinary actions.
Other examples include lower teacher expectations of Black students compared to white students. Researchers have shown that communities and school zones with higher levels of anti-Black bias also have lower Black student test scores.
Law professor and author Patricia Williams coined the phrase “spirit murdering” to recognize the devastating impact this education system has on Black people. Bettina Love, a professor of educational reform and abolitionist teaching, expands on this by saying, “Racism is more than physical pain; racism robs dark people of their humanity and dignity.”
Students, parents and teachers rally in Brooklyn in 2015 to demand racial justice in New York City schools after a report showed Black and Hispanic students are increasingly confined to some of the worst-performing city schools.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Indigenous, bilingual and deaf students
These losses in the move toward school integration also apply to other underrepresented students throughout the U.S.
Indian Residential Schools were established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to forcibly assimilate Native American children into Euro-American culture.
For today’s students who aren’t native English speakers, bilingual language policies in the U.S. have usually focused on English fluency rather than supporting continued fluency in the native language as well.
Meanwhile, schools for deaf and hard of hearing children are closing. That’s partly because small, specialized schools are expensive, and partly because placement decisions by special education teams increasingly send these kids to local schools first. Special education law requires that – to the maximum extent possible – students with disabilities are educated with children without disabilities.
In all of these cases, students on the margins have much less direct access to adults with similar life experiences.
More inclusive classrooms
There are many ways to make today’s classrooms more inclusive.
School leaders – from teachers and principals to district superintendents – can partner with local communities to determine how to improve their children’s schools. One solution is for every school to have role models that represent a school’s diversity - such as Black, deaf and Indigenous.
Training programs can better prepare all teachers to teach about race and diversity, and to support marginalized students.
In short, we believe current practices are spirit-killing: They bulldoze over children, families and communities, leaving them academically traumatized and fighting to be seen and heard. The above recommendations come from a perspective of spirit-uplifting instead.
Most importantly, we believe society needs to admit that the experiment of desegregation has not solved the problem. It has not led to true abolition, inclusion and deep learning in U.S. public education for children who are Black, Indigenous, bilingual, deaf or have disabilities.
Sara Schley receives funding from the National Science Foundation's IUSE program (award # 162581), titled Collaborative Research: Accessible STEM Instruction with Deaf Students -- Supporting Faculty in Pedagogical Exploration and Innovation.
Lissa Ramirez-Stapleton received funding from the Ford Foundation (2018-2019 Postdoc Fellow) and The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (2019 Fellow). This funding did not directly impact the writing of this piece.
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string(8846) "At least 9 inches of rain became floodwater that swept through valleys in eastern Kentucky in July 2022. Leandro Lozada/AFP via Getty Images
The impact of climate change on extreme water-related events like this is becoming increasingly evident. The storms in the U.S. followed extreme flooding this summer in India and Australia and last year in Western Europe.
Studies by scientists around the world show that the water cycle has been intensifying and will continue to intensify as the planet warms. An international climate assessment I coauthored in 2021 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lays out the details.
It documented an increase in both wet extremes, including more intense rainfall over most regions, and dry extremes, including drying in the Mediterranean, southwestern Australia, southwestern South America, South Africa and western North America. It also shows that both wet and dry extremes will continue to increase with future warming.
Why is the water cycle intensifying?
Water cycles through the environment, moving between the atmosphere, ocean, land and reservoirs of frozen water. It might fall as rain or snow, seep into the ground, run into a waterway, join the ocean, freeze or evaporate back into the atmosphere. Plants also take up water from the ground and release it through transpiration from their leaves. In recent decades, there has been an overall increase in the rates of precipitation and evaporation.
A number of factors are intensifying the water cycle, but one of the most important is that warming temperatures raise the upper limit on the amount of moisture in the air. That increases the potential for more rain.
This aspect of climate change is confirmed across all of our lines of evidence discussed in the IPCC report. It is expected from basic physics, projected by computer models, and it already shows up in the observational data as a general increase of rainfall intensity with warming temperatures.
Understanding this and other changes in the water cycle is important for more than preparing for disasters. Water is an essential resource for all ecosystems and human societies, and particularly agriculture.
What does this mean for the future?
An intensifying water cycle means that both wet and dry extremes and the general variability of the water cycle will increase, although not uniformly around the globe.
Rainfall intensity is expected to increase for most land areas, but the largest increases in dryness are expected in the Mediterranean, southwestern South America and western North America.
Annual average precipitation is projected to increase in many areas as the planet warms, particularly in the higher latitudes.
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report
Globally, daily extreme precipitation events will likely intensify by about 7% for every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) that global temperatures rise.
Many other important aspects of the water cycle will also change in addition to extremes as global temperatures increase, the report shows, including reductions in mountain glaciers, decreasing duration of seasonal snow cover, earlier snowmelt and contrasting changes in monsoon rains across different regions, which will impact the water resources of billions of people.
The IPCC does not make policy recommendations. Instead, it provides the scientific information needed to carefully evaluate policy choices. The results show what the implications of different choices are likely to be.
One thing the scientific evidence in the report clearly tells world leaders is that limiting global warming to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 C (2.7 F) will require immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Regardless of any specific target, it is clear that the severity of climate change impacts are closely linked to greenhouse gas emissions: Reducing emissions will reduce impacts. Every fraction of a degree matters.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Mathew Barlow, UMass Lowell.
Mathew Barlow received travel funding from the US government to attend three IPCC lead author meetings.
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string(14518) "All adult citizens who have not been convicted of a crime have the right to vote in federal and state elections. Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
In a case to be heard in the coming months, the U.S. Supreme Court could decide that state legislatures have control over congressional
elections, including the ability to draw voting districts for partisan political advantage, unconstrained by state law or state constitutions.
At issue is a legal theory called the “independent state legislature doctrine,” which is posed through the court’s consideration of a dispute over gerrymandered North Carolina congressional districts. In early 2022, North Carolina state courts found the legislature violated the state constitution when it drew gerrymandered congressional districts favoring Republicans. The legislature has claimed that the U.S. Constitution gives it authority, unfettered by state courts’ interpretation of the state constitution or laws, to regulate congressional elections, and is asking the Supreme Court to agree.
Some election and constitutional law analysts have already suggested that state legislatures may have similar power over presidential elections. The U.S. Constitution allows state legislatures to determine how a state chooses its presidential electors, arguably leaving the legislature free to choose presidential electors on their own without a popular election.
Power of the people in early America
The people wielded little power in congressional elections at America’s founding.
Before the doctrine was recognized, one congressional district in a state could have several times the population as another district in the same state. A vote in the larger district would have a fraction of the power of a vote in the smaller district.
In the wake of the one-person, one-vote doctrine, each vote carries approximately the same weight.
Undoing accountability
Providing voting power to the people makes representatives more accountable and answerable to their constituents. Adopting the independent state legislature doctrine may reverse the accountability.
That section reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” It gives state legislatures the primary authority to run congressional elections, subject to congressional regulation through federal law.
For example, for much of the nation’s history, states could choose U.S. representatives through districts or through an at-large system. However, federal law now requires the representatives to be chosen solely through districts.
A strong version of the doctrine might give a state legislature the power to draw congressional districts without any oversight from state courts or the governor. Given that state courts apply a state’s constitution and state statutory law, a strong independent state legislature doctrine could leave the state legislature unfettered by state law in this area.
However, in a well-functioning democracy, state constitutional and statutory law should reflect the preferences of a state’s people. The Supreme Court reminded the Arizona legislature of this point in a 2015 ruling that allowed a citizen initiative in that state to bypass the legislature in redistricting, instead requiring congressional districts to be drawn by an independent commission. If the independent state legislature doctrine were to be adopted by the current Supreme Court, that power could not be exercised by citizens.
Limited federal protection
If the court adopts the independent state legislature doctrine, legislatures would still be subject to regulation by the U.S. Constitution and by federal law, such as the Voting Rights Act.
However, the court has limited the protections embedded in the Voting Rights Act. In the 2019 ruling, Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court deemed partisan gerrymandering a political question, not subject to regulation by the Constitution. In that ruling, the court noted that state constitutional and statutory law could be used to stop partisan gerrymandering.
Three years later, the court is set to hear a case that could remove state courts from oversight of partisan gerrymandering by state legislatures. Adoption of a strong independent state legislature doctrine would leave partisan gerrymandering unregulated at both the state and federal levels.
State legislatures, unconstrained by state law, could then create aggressively gerrymandered congressional districts, possibly leading to an ever more partisan Congress with accompanying gridlock and policy failures.
Disempowering the people
When the Constitution was ratified, the state legislature was the locus of state power. That power was exercised by a few men who were not answerable to the broad populace. The state legislature was responsible for acting in the citizenry’s best interests. However, the citizenry had no effective way to force legislators to act in the people’s interests.
Over time, citizens have gained more control over state legislatures through an expanded vote and by becoming a larger part of the lawmaking apparatus of many states.
In a 21st-century democracy, the constitutional grant of regulatory authority to a state legislature regarding congressional elections might be thought to be a grant of primary authority to a state legislature – but an authority subject to a variety of other limits imposed via state constitutional law, state statutory law, the courts and the citizenry.
At America’s founding, the Constitution made the power of the people a matter of grace provided by state legislatures. As America’s democracy matured, the power of the people became a matter of right under the Constitution.
The independent state legislature doctrine threatens to make the power of the people a matter of grace again, reinstating an anachronistic vision of democracy long thought to have passed.
Henry L. Chambers Jr. does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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string(12749) "Gilda Soosay, president of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Parish Council in Maskwacis, Canada, where Pope Francis visited the site of a state school for Indigenous children. Cole Burston/AFP via Getty Images
During a weeklong trip to Canada, Pope Francis visited a former residential school for Indigenous children in Maskwacis, Alberta, on July 25, 2022. The Ermineskin Residential School operated between 1895 and 1975 in Cree Country, the largest First Nations group in Canada.
As at many boarding schools set up to assimilate Indigenous children, students were punished for speaking their language and sometimes experienced abuse. According to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba, 15 children died at this particular school over the years. Several of them succumbed to tuberculosis.
During his visit, the pope said he was “deeply sorry” for “the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples.”
Like many other Indigenous people of the U.S. and Canada – especially those, like me, whose family members attended the schools – I listened with interest as Pope Francis asked his audience for forgiveness “for the evil committed by so many Christians.” He apologized “for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated” in projects of forced assimilation while not acknowledging the role that the Catholic Church as an organization played in residential schools.
Religion was a pillar of the forceful campaigns to assimilate Indigenous peoples on both sides of the border but played out differently in the U.S. and Canada. Christianity’s central role is responsible for lingering resentment today, and many Indigenous people, me included, question whether the pope’s apology fell short in holding the church responsible.
Canada’s residential schools were different from those in the U.S. in two significant ways. First, the Canadian government farmed out First Nations education to the Catholic and Anglican churches and other Protestant denominations.
The U.S. federal government, on the other hand, operated its own Indian school system both on and off the reservations. Twenty-five were off-reservation boarding schools, the first of which was established in 1879: the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, whose most famous student was the Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe. The boarding schools dominated Indian education in the U.S. for a half-century.
Significant political and educational reforms led to new Indian policies under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, backing away from the previous generation’s goal of assimilation. Many boarding schools closed during the 1930s as FDR’s bureaucrats started to integrate American Indians into public schools. Ironically, that same decade saw the highest enrollment at boarding schools – largely at the request of American Indian families who used them as a form of poverty relief during the Great Depression so their families could survive.
U.S. government boarding schools and Canada’s residential schools did share features in common. Family separation, enforcing the English language – or French, in some areas of Canada – manual labor training and the imposition of Christianity were core characteristics.
Though churches did not operate the U.S. schools, most Americans and lawmakers in Washington, D.C., were committed to the idea that Indian people needed to be “uplifted” from an “uncivilized” life through education and assimilation into American culture, and that included Christianity. Native spirituality came under assault at boarding schools, and students were given “Christian” names to replace their “pagan” and “unpronounceable” ones.
Christianity was also imposed on Indigenous people through the reservation system. I sometimes like to give the example of my own grandparents, Fred and Jeanette Auginash, who “married” before an Episcopal minister on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota in October 1928.
According to the Ojibwe community in which they resided, they were already married. As my mother had been told, her father asked my grandfather to marry his daughter, and he brought the family gifts of money, food, blankets, horses and other items. For an Ojibwe family, the ritual exchange of gifts is what made a marriage.
However, when my grandparents went to apply for a housing loan on the reservation, they needed a marriage certificate signed by the local Christian minister. In this way, Christianity and the federal government blended their authority in another form of settler colonialism.
Cultural survival
Not surprisingly, Indigenous children and youths were often resistant to the boarding school regimen of family separation and enforced assimilation and Christianity. Young people frequently expressed themselves through rebellions large and small, most often through running away from school. They stowed away on trains and headed home to visit their families.
Parents and other relatives, meanwhile, demonstrated their commitment to their children by writing letters, staying in touch despite the distance and school terms that could last four years without visits home. Parents of boarding school children also wrote to school administrators, insisting that their children visit the doctor and maintain their good health in an era when there was no cure for diseases like tuberculosis and trachoma, an eye infection that can cause blindness.
Pope Francis pauses in front of the site of the former Ermineskin Residential School, alongside the Maskwacis Chiefs, during his visit on July 25, 2022, in Maskwacis, Alberta.
Cole Burston/Getty Images News via Getty Images
Perhaps it is not surprising that Francis’ visit to Alberta was met with mixed emotions on the part of Indigenous Canadians. He also blessed a Native church known for blending Christian and Native traditions that is being rebuilt in Edmonton after a fire. In Maskwacis, site of the Ermineskin school, one Cree man gave him a headdress.
The act of generosity was widely criticized and mocked on Native social media. Many Indigenous people felt Pope Francis did not deserve the honor, and that his apology did not acknowledge the Catholic Church’s role in family separation and the abuse of children in residential schools.
As many Indigenous people work to rebuild their language and spiritual traditions, Christian traditions no longer have the same influence over their lives and destinies.
Brenda J Child receives funding from The University of Minnesota, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation.
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string(11214) "Repairing storm damage is expensive, and insurance covers less than many people realize. Sean Rayford/Getty Images
If you look at homes on real estate websites today, you’ll likely see risk ratings for flooding, hurricanes and even wildfires.
In theory, summarizing risk information like this should help homebuyers and renters make more informed housing choices. But surveys show it isn’t working that way, at least not yet. Housing developments and home sales are still expanding in flood- and wildfire-prone areas.
The problem isn’t necessarily that consumers are ignoring the numbers. In our view, as experts in hazards geography, it’s that the way risk information is being presented ignores long-established lessons from behavioral science.
These ratings tend to appear as a single number for each hazard and lack an intuitive interpretation. What does it mean to have a heat risk of 84 (“extreme”) with 52 hot days in 2050, or a flood risk of 10 (“extreme”)?
We believe that current and future hazard and climate risks can more effectively be translated as costs, savings and trade-offs.
We belong to a group of more than 20 interdisciplinary researchers at universities in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina who are trying to improve risk rating information. We’re currently testing an online tool for the Gulf Coast that provides residents with actionable resilience information. It is an early model of what residential risk reporting could look like.
Rather than just presenting a score, the tool offers information on the costs annually and over time that one can expect from each hazard, such as flooding or wind damage, and how the home’s census block compares with the local area, county and state. To capture the effects of sea-level rise, for example, we model the number of years it will take for a home to go from outside a high flood risk area to being inside.
A hazard cost summary for a home in Louisiana shows what risk looks like in dollars.
HazardAware, CC BY-ND
Homebuyers’ psychological hurdles
The development of real estate-focused climate and hazard risk metrics, such as those offered by First Street Foundation and ClimateCheck, is a step in the right direction, going beyond government risk maps that provide risk data by county. The next step is to ground those numbers in behavioral science research.
The motivation hurdle is lower for people with past experience, those who are aware of the risks and receptive to this kind of information, and those who have the financial resources to choose safer communities.
For others, the hurdle can be much higher. They might struggle with common decision biases, such as oversimplifying the severity of the risk, which leads to either an overestimation or underestimation of the threat depending on the type of hazard, focusing on today rather than the future, or simply assuming nothing bad is going to happen. They might just follow what others do – which research finds is what most of us do when deciding on a home.
The combination of these decision biases causes residents to underestimate the risk and impacts from disasters and climate change. Most people then underprepare and don’t consider these risks in their housing choices.
Risk ratings could help overcome those biases by expressing risk information in relatable terms such as the number of assistance requests made to the Federal Emergency Management Agency after disasters, the rejection rate and the average FEMA funds received per applicant in the area.
Next step: Pull it all together in one location
Ideally, homebuyers and renters would have a one-stop shop for all of this risk information about a property. To be prepared for climate change, risk must become a factor in housing choices similar to square footage and number of bedrooms.
Currently, risk data is scattered. For example, people can learn about insurance costs by checking flood insurance rate maps, which outline the areas with a 1% or greater annual chance of flooding. Or they can ask an insurance agent to generate a Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange report, which lists all flood insurance claims made on a property in the past five to seven years. A handful of states such as California require sellers to disclose the risk of natural hazards to the property.
In our view, the continuing influx of residents into high-risk areas, along with skyrocketing disaster losses, presents an urgent need to give prospective renters and buyers better information about the risks properties face.
Melanie Gall receives funding from the National Academies' Gulf Research Program, USAID, U.S. Housing and Urban Development, and Feeding America. She is affiliated with the National Hazard Mitigation Association (NHMA), the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the North American Alliance of Hazards and Disaster Research Insitutes (NAAHDRI), and the Arizona Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters.
Christopher Emrich works for the University of Central Florida, the creator of www.vulnerabilitymap.org. He received funding from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine's Gulf Research Program to build www.hazardaware.org
Marie Aquilino receives funding from the National Academies' Gulf Research Program, USAID, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
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string(7639) "Some preschoolers are encouraged to bring in their favorite toy or stuffed animal, while others risk having it confiscated. Layland Masuda/Moment Collection via Getty Images
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
Poor preschoolers get fewer chances than wealthier children to bring their prized personal possessions to school. That’s what I found in my two-year comparative ethnographic study of two preschools in Madison, Wisconsin. One of the preschools primarily serves middle-class white children and the other primarily serves poor children of color.
In the preschool that served mostly poor kids, the teachers made a rule that kids could not bring toys, games, stuffed animals or other personal items to school. The stakes felt too high to these teachers. Some students’ families were recently evicted and had few toys. Other students’ families did buy them toys but at great financial cost, and families didn’t want these items broken. Teachers also worried about toys being stolen. The items that I observed children try to bring in ranged from expensive action figures to random board game pieces to sparkly ponytail holders.
I then observed an affluent school and found that teachers actually encouraged children to bring their personal items to school. The teachers hosted a weekly show and tell. Kids could bring toys, objects from nature or anything else to show and tell. Teachers also encouraged kids to bring books to read with their peers and stuffed animals to cuddle at nap time any day of the week. Because these teachers knew their students’ families were financially well-off, they made classroom rules that allowed children to celebrate their personal property.
Why it matters
This gulf in how kids experience classroom rules about property matters for three reasons.
First, I observed that when children brought personal stuff to school, they used the items to connect with friends or just to hold and enjoy by themselves throughout the day. This was true whether they were encouraged to bring the items in or they successfully sneaked them in.
Bringing special personal objects to school provided the kids with a form of what sociologists call substantive dignity – the sense that one belongs in a wider community but is still respected as a unique individual. My research suggests that preschool segregation creates pressures for teachers of poor children to forbid personal property at school, closing off a pathway to substantive dignity for these children.
Second, the disparity in children’s degree of control over property connects to other researchers’ findings that affluent children have more control over their experience within schools. From school uniform rules to how much of their teacher’s help they get when working on assignments, affluent children grow up expecting more special attention from authority figures. They are more comfortable asking for accommodations, and this matters in college and as they transition to adulthood. In contrast, poor and working-class children experience more encouragement to defer to the rules of an institution. My research suggests that affluent children’s comfortable access to personal property in preschool is an additional mechanism by which they come to feel entitled to individualized attention in workplaces and other institutions.
Third, one consequence of the no-personal-items rule at the poor preschool was that a handful of students – all boys of color – sneaked toys in anyway. Sometimes these children were caught and were disciplined by having their items taken and being sent to the quiet area. As a result, property rules contributed to differences in discipline on race and gender lines. This aligns with other scholars’ findings that boys of color experience more punishment as early as preschool, and this pattern continues through K-12 schooling.
What still isn’t known
My research observed broad, social experiences that children had over time. However, social scientists will need to do more research to determine how teachers’ rules about controlling children’s personal property use differ across a wider range of preschools. Another question is how teachers manage kids’ access to personal items in mixed-income preschools.
Casey Stocksill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
