Despite laws cracking down on preschool expulsions, thousands of young children a year are put out of school. Read more…
‘It makes us better teachers because we’re not carrying it inside’: How a Detroit preschool helps teachers cope with the stress of the job
A Detroit-area preschool is taking a therapeutic approach to addressing the impact on educators of what’s known as “secondary trauma,” the distress that comes from learning about difficult things that have happened to others. Read more…
The children of 8B: One classroom, 31 journeys, and the reason it’s so hard to fix Detroit’s schools
By the time she’d reached the eighth grade, Shantaya Davis had attended so many schools — at least five — that she couldn’t name them all. “I don’t even know what grade it was,” she said of one school. Read more… This story is part of the series Moving Costs: How students changing schools disrupts Detroit […]
‘Possible, but daunting’: Inside Nikolai Vitti’s early effort to transform Detroit’s battered public schools
Three months after taking on one of the most daunting tasks in American education, Nikolai Vitti was having a fit over pizza — $340,000 worth of pizza. Vitti, Detroit’s new school superintendent, had just discovered that the district had set aside that eye-popping sum of money last year to pay Domino’s Pizza for what he […]
On a superintendent’s first day, just another Tuesday for 37 Detroit first-graders with no music or art or gym
Spend a morning in a Detroit classroom and it quickly becomes clear exactly how much will have to change in this city before it looks anything like the “mecca” that Vitti imagines. Read more…