Student-conduct administrators around the country are hailing restorative justice as the next big thing. A blend of mediation and restitution, it seeks to resolve a conflict by identifying the harms caused and devising, with suggestions from both victims and offenders, an agreement to repair them. Restorative justice not only offers an alternative…

People who deal with at-risk teens say dropping out is not an event; it's a process. Youngsters miss school and get "backed up" in class, so they miss more school because they're bewildered or embarrassed, and fall further behind. In the three years the 75-seat Hampton Performance Learning Center (PLC) has been open, it claims to have…

The latest release of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides no evidence for the effectiveness of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. In long-term trends, the achievement gap between white and minority students has hardly budged over the past decade. Congress should get rid of No Child Left Behind…

It is hard to imagine how the majority of people made it through the day without cell phones just 5 to 10 years ago. These days, cell phones are everywhere, and everyone seems to own one--including many middle school students and even some students who are in elementary school. Both parents and students feel these phones are essential in order to…

The Internet has had a profound effect on education and social interaction patterns. Educators struggle to stay abreast of technological advances and navigate the maze of positive and negative aspects of students using the Internet. A new use for the Internet is the relatively recent phenomenon called blogging. Blogging is a widely used means of…