In a recent discussion board thread on reading comprehension challenges in autism, a special-education teacher commented that her students can't understand the assigned reading passages. "When I complained, I was told that I could add extra support, but not actually change the passages," she wrote. "It is truly sad to see my students' frustration." Why must this teacher's students contend with passages that are too complex for them to understand? She attributes this inflexibility to the Common Core, new standards — created in 2009 by a group of education professionals, none of them K-12 classroom teachers or special-education experts — that have been adopted by 45 states.

Nashville Director of Schools Jesse Register cleared the first hurdle in a push to offer all 4-year-olds preschool by 2018 when the nine-member school board voted unanimously Feb. 11 to turn two elementary schools into pre-K hubs. The centers will offer 260 additional seats, part of a larger plan to ultimately expand the district's pre-K offering from about 2,500 students to upwards of 4,500, Register said.

Twenty-eight years ago, John Corcoran learned to read at the age of 48. Today — with the help of a granddaughter who was born the same year he read his first book — he runs a nonprofit foundation that teaches reading skills to grade-school children as well as adults like himself, a former schoolteacher who hid his secret for nearly five decades. With as little as $500 and 20 hours of instruction, the John Corcoran Foundation can bring most pupils' reading skills up to grade level or beyond. The results can be life-changing, said Corcoran’s granddaughter Kayla Mertes, the foundation's executive director. Two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare, according to a study by the One World Literacy Foundation. In San Diego County there are 500,000 adults who read below elementary school level. Nationwide, that figure is 44 million.

An iconic children's book heroine who observes friends, classmates, and neighbors — and holds nothing back in her notebook commentary — first came on the scene in 1964, when Harper & Row published Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy. The author followed up that debut novel with two others featuring Harriet's friends: The Long Secret, released in 1965, and Sport, published posthumously in 1979. The commemorative edition includes a new map of Harriet's Manhattan neighborhood and "spy route"; tributes by 14 children's book professionals; a letter that Fitzhugh’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, wrote to her when the book was published; and early praise for the novel from poet Phyllis McGinley and author Elizabeth Janeway.

Last school year, about 100,000 Oregon students missed at least 3-and-a-half weeks of school, an investigation by The Oregonian has found. Missing that much school — 10 percent of school days, enough to be tagged "chronically absent" — puts children on track to fall behind their peers for years. Some will never earn a diploma. And while no state has worse attendance statistics, few Oregon schools have raised alarms. The Oregonian gained unprecedented access to student-level data on every public school in the state for a five-part series on absenteeism and its disastrous effects.

A new early literacy initiative will include programs that will help more children meet Ohio's third grade reading requirements, especially children from low- to moderate-income families. Under the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, students can be held back if they don't meet reading targets. Today, the United Way of Trumbull County will announce "Reading Great by 8," which is set to begin this summer. Along with the initiative, United Way announced literacy kits and free books will be distributed to children at McGuffy PK-8 in Warren. The books will be available through a partnership with GFWC Ohio Warren Junior Women's League and the Mahoning Valley Scrappers. Members of the GFWC and United Way also may read to the children.

Linda Liukas was at a meeting with officials at the Finnish Ministry of Education when her phone started buzzing. As she stepped out the room, she discovered that her phone had clogged up with push messages from Kickstarter, the crowd funding exchange site, where her project, a children's fantasy book aimed at teaching concepts of computer coding, had reached its $10,000 minimum funding goal target in just a few hours, a good measure in terms of time to achieve funding goals. A Kickstarter project doesn’t end when the funding target is reached, and with two days left to funding deadline, her project has raised more than 340,000 pledged dollars. The book is called Hello Ruby, and its plot follows a small girl with a huge imagination called Ruby (which is also an open-source programming language), as she stumbles around in a magical world and meets robots and a lonely snow leopard, and solves problems with the help from wise penguins.

Darby Baumberger comes highly recommended by her supervisors. She's spent more than half of her 18 years as an educator helping inner-city third-graders learn to read. "I'm confident in my teaching," she said, hushing her class with ease. And it shows in her students, who make impressive gains on reading tests given twice yearly. With 10 of her 22 students identified as being at-risk of being retained under the state’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee, she seemed the right teacher to get these struggling readers the help they needed. Yet until just a few weeks ago, the state considered her inadequate. Baumberger may be a competent and veteran teacher. But she lacked the state-approved credentials to be considered a "qualified" teacher, which today could mean a teacher with only one year of experience.

As decentralized as the K-12 educational system is in the United States, our hodgepodge of early childhood education programs takes the cake for fragmentation. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the patchwork of early education data that states maintain. In fact, according to a new report from the Early Childhood Data Collaborative (ECDC), only one state in the nation — Pennsylvania — even links its data across early educational programs like state pre-K, Head Start, and early intervention services. ECDC argues for 10 fundamental aspects for any state early childhood coordinated system, an excellent primer on what states should be striving for. And in the realm of good news, it seems many states are beginning to collect screening and assessment data that could be especially useful to teachers and policymakers.

In preparation for the celebration of Women’s History Month in March, we're featuring audiobooks for all grade levels that highlight the accomplishments of women who have made strides in areas from music to politics to science to literature and beyond. The theme for 2014, chosen by the National Women's History Project, is "Celebrating Women of Character, Courage & Commitment." Teachers and librarians seeking great information on women's history need look no further than the NWHP website (nwhp.org), which is an excellent place to find a diverse range of resources, including an extensive "Biography Center" that lists several hundred women who have been honored for National Women's History Week and National Women's History Month with a brief paragraph on each.

A research synthesis based on decades of evidence from the fields of medicine, psychology, education and linguistics highlights common myths about children who grow up speaking more than one language. Drawing upon more than 100 studies, the qualitative review concludes that multilingualism is an advantage to be nurtured and maintained rather than a risk factor to be eradicated early in a child's life. In November, the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed the report, which appears in the current issue of Social Policy Report, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Society for Research in Child Development.

The Common Core has been applauded by education leaders and promoted by the Obama administration as a way to replace a hodgepodge of state standards with one set of rigorous learning goals. Though 45 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to them since 2010, resistance came quickly, mostly from right-leaning states, where some leaders and political action groups have protested what they see as a federal takeover of local classrooms. But the newest chorus of complaints is coming from one of the most liberal states, and one of the earliest champions of the standards: New York. And that is causing supporters of the Common Core to shudder. Carol Burris, an acclaimed high school principal on Long Island, calls the Common Core a "disaster."

Most parents prefer that their children pick up a book rather than a game controller. But for kids with dyslexia, action video games may be just what the doctor ordered. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities, affecting an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the world's population. Many approaches to help struggling readers focus on words and phonetics, but researchers at Oxford University say dyslexia is more of an attention issue. So programs should emphasize training the brain's attention system, they say, something that video games do.

There is overwhelming evidence that those who live in poverty have little access to books at home, in schools, and in public and school libraries, and that the lack of access to books impacts literacy development and also results in less knowledge of the world. Research, in fact, strongly suggests that lack of access to books is the major reason for the literacy "achievement gap," the difference in reading ability between children coming from higher- and lower-income families. Someday, e-books might be available at a reasonable cost for everybody. But until this happens, I would like to suggest one way we can help close the access-to-books gap. It requires no special funding from the government or the Gates Foundation, no paperwork, and no sacrifice. In fact, we can do it in a way that benefits everybody.

Idaho's betting its younger students will choose school this summer — investing $30,000 to keep six school libraries open during June, July, and August. The goal is to entice children to come in during the heat of the summer, crack a book, and read. Idaho's 2014 Summer Slide Pilot Project will launch in June, with three schools receiving $1,500 to cover the cost of staff to keep their doors open for the season. An additional three library programs will receive new paperback books in return for staying open.

The Sacramento Kings have announced that they will donate up to $100,000 from new season ticket deposits to four organizations that support reading and literacy initiatives in the Sacramento region. The Sacramento Public Library is pleased to be one of these recipients. The up to $25,000 from the Kings will be used to help fund the 1,600 reading programs the library provides each year, serving 65,000 area children.

Video games might help people with dyslexia improve their ability to read, a new study suggests. One of the researchers said, "We think that people with dyslexia might learn associations between letters and their sounds faster if they first hear the sound and then see the corresponding letter or word. We propose that training people with dyslexia to shift attention quickly from visual to auditory stimuli and back — such as with a video game, where attention is constantly shifting focus — might also improve literacy." The study was published Feb. 13 in the journal Current Biology.

In the 15 years since voters essentially banned bilingual education in state schools, teaching English learners to read, write and do arithmetic first in their native language has nearly disappeared from California classrooms. Since Proposition 227 overwhelmingly passed in June 1998, it's been all about learning English, first and foremost — but not in San Francisco. Nearly 30 percent of the city's 17,000 English learners are in bilingual education programs, compared with 5 percent on average statewide, according to the most recent data available. And it's working, according to a recently published Stanford University study commissioned by the San Francisco Unified School District.

On the shelves of many high school libraries, there’s a collection of books that looks similar to other novels geared toward teen readers. What's inside, though, is starkly different. The font is bigger, the sentences are shorter, and the books' subject matter often is geared toward students in middle school and high school who aren't reading at the levels they should be, sometimes at levels as low as first or second grade. These are the readers publishers like Costa Mesa's Saddleback Educational Publishing is hoping to reach with collections of books geared toward low-level readers struggling in school.

Kindergarten might be the new 1st grade but it is still too easy. A forthcoming study in the peer-refereed American Educational Research Journal finds that students make bigger gains in reading and math when they learn more advanced content such as adding numbers and matching letters to sounds. Yet kindergarten teachers spend nearly twice as much time on basics such as alphabet recognition and counting out loud. Study authors Amy Claessens, Mimi Engel and Chris Curran found that the majority of kindergartners already know how to do these things when they start school.

Michigan is losing ground on a key benchmark in its long-term goal of expanding its educated workforce: Making sure children are reading by fourth grade. The state is one of only six that showed no improvement in reading proficiency among fourth-graders over the decade between 2003 and 2013, according to a new KIDS COUNT report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Almost seven of every 10 Michigan fourth-graders did not demonstrate reading proficiency in 2013 on a national test, worsening slightly over the decade. The national average, meanwhile, improved.

The stakes are high. This spring, most third graders who don't score at least 392 points on the Ohio Achievement Assessment won't be promoted to the 4th grade. That’s slightly higher than the score kids had to hit last year, but still below what’s considered proficient. And that's got some school districts on edge and honing in on reading with a laser focus. In Warren not far from Youngstown, the Tribune Chronicle reports a third of Trumbull County third graders scored below proficient on the fall reading test.

The results of a pilot study of Missouri’s Mid-Continent Public Library (MCPL) suggest that summer reading programs actually raise student reading levels by their return to school in the fall — particularly among at-risk kids."Intuitively, most people understand that if children read in the summer, they don't slide back in the fall," says Steven V. Potter, director and CEO of MCPL, a library system in Independence, MO. "What we discovered is that not only does summer reading guard against summer slide, it actually increases achievement."

E. E. Cummings, Virginia Wolfe and Mark Twain are popular adult literature authors who will never (usually) make a top 10 list for children's books. But each of these authors and more have penned beautiful, funny and interesting children’s stories that adults and kids alike should enjoy. These books offer fun and playful illustrations to help bring the stories to life.

Most Americans think education is the key to upward mobility, that all we need to do to break the cycle is to help the next generation do well in school and rise into the middle class. A growing body of research, however, is showing that poverty and hunger can harm children's cognitive development. The challenges of poverty, and the often-violent neighborhoods poor children live in, are impeding their progress in school. Late last month, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore-based nonprofit that works to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children in the United States, released a report that added evidence to that idea.

Two schools have gone public with their use of an online reading program that personalizes the content for each student. KIPP Delta Elementary Literacy Academy in Arkansas and E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. have both integrated the use of Lexia Learning's Lexia Reading Core5 into their reading curriculum. The program covers grades pre-K through 5 with six skill areas: phonological awareness, phonics, structural analysis, vocabulary, automaticity and comprehension. Students work independently in 18 levels of self-paced activities that take them on adventures around the world. When they struggle at a given task, the program continually adapts by limiting what's displayed on the screen and providing additional instruction until they're able to show understanding and be returned to "standard-level activities."

Sixteen of 2013's best books for young people are being paired off to engage in a series of one-on-one contests, March-Madness-style. This online elimination competition will pit the year’s most acclaimed titles for children and young adults against one another in matches to be decided by some of the biggest authors working in the field. Now in its sixth year, School Library Journal's Battle of the Kids' Books — BOB for short — brings together kid-lit fans from classrooms, libraries, and publishing houses across the country to debate each book's literary merits, design, and overall appeal.

Children’s book artist Erik Blegvad, known for his whimsical illustrations of more than 100 books, has died in London. He was 90. The wide-ranging artist was a native of Denmark who studied at the Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts before developing his reputation in the New York and Paris publishing worlds. He worked as a commercial illustrator and developed a sophisticated pen-and-ink style that seemed perfectly suited for children's books. Among his best known works are the illustrations for ‘"Bed-Knob and Broomstick," "The Tenth Good Thing About Barney" and his own translation of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘"Stories and Fairy Tales."

Many Ohio school districts are working harder than ever to help tens of thousands of youngsters improve at reading so they won't have to repeat the third grade. Lancaster schools have added after-school and summer reading programs for students not reading at grade level. In Mechanicsburg, teachers have received literacy-intervention training, with more classroom time devoted to reading. The Cleveland Heights-University Heights school district hired 20 more elementary-school teachers to allow smaller classes for students needing help with reading and is keeping school libraries open in the evening for students and their parents. Starting next school year, Ohio third-graders must be reading at grade level to move on to the fourth grade, although the new state law allows exemptions for students with special needs or those learning English as a second language.

For Tarhe Elementary School reading program volunteer Holly Plescher, Lancaster's after-school reading program has been a unqualified success. "I work with eight students, and since we began working together, seven of the eight (have) shown great progress," she said. "It gives them confidence to keep learning, and they enjoy it and hardly know they are learning at the same time." The after-school reading program is part of a four-pronged approach to get as many third-graders to pass the state's reading test. Ohio's Third Grade Reading Guarantee requires students to meet certain proficiency levels on reading tests to advance to the fourth grade.

Hopefully last week's digital learning day brought more awareness to how technology can transform teaching and learning. In our network, we had dozens of new and veteran teachers realizing how they could harness the power of tech to create new opportunities for their students. However, no matter your level of buy-in or awareness, if you don't have devices it doesn't matter since you can't "go digital," right? Not necessarily! Here are seven ideas for how you can go digital — even without devices. All of the examples below can be done with a single computer and a projector, either as a whole-class activity or in small groups!

A year after Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan won the Newbery Award, this heartbreaking tale about a gorilla living in a tiny cage in a shopping mall still resonates with students and librarians. Kelly Spector, a librarian at the NEW Academy in Canoga Park, CA, recently used Ivan to launch a school-wide program, resulting in thematic art projects, social activism, and even a staged interpretive dance.

Researchers examined data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) to track its effects on the achievement gap at three, five, and eight years old. The program was intended to serve low-birth-weight infants. It provided families with weekly home visits for a year and biweekly visits for the next two years, high-quality child care for two- and three-year-old children, as well as ongoing parent support groups. They found that "the IHDP program boosted the cognitive ability of low-income children much more than the cognitive ability of higher-income children." In fact, they projected that the program could — if made widely available to low-income families in the United States — "eliminate income-based gaps in IQ at age three."

Becky Poplin, director of elementary education for Henderson County Public Schools, is concerned that more than 50 percent of local kindergartners start school with inadequate reading skills. The lack of preparedness puts them at risk of falling short in assessments administered early in the school year. Some children entering kindergarten don't understand that "printed words have meaning," she said. "Children will recognize that a McDonald's sign means McDonald's restaurant, but they need to go from that to understanding that all words have meaning — that you can label everything. Where that comes from is parents and caregivers reading with children."

Is your child struggling with reading? Does your child have difficulty decoding (sounding out) words? Does your child read haltingly, mispronounce words, drop the endings of words, or change words? Your child may have a specific reading disorder called dyslexia. How can you identify if you or your child has dyslexia? There is not one single test to determine if someone has dyslexia.Trained professionals use formal evaluations that look at a person's ability to understand and use spoken and written language.These evaluations also look at areas of strength and weakness in the skills that are needed for reading, plus other factors including family history.

February is here, and as we all know, it is Black History Month. With Auburn being the home of one of the most important African-Americans to shape American history, it is a great month to grab a Harriet Tubman book for your child. I have complained in the past that there just aren't enough Harriet Tubman books written for adults, and even though that is true, there are many great books for the children. Each of these books would teach them about one of Auburn's greatest citizens and help them learn about an important time in our nation's past.

Three bills introduced into the state Legislature offer affordable evidenced–based solutions through school-community partnerships to improve academic performance of struggling students. Incorporating the 2013 Rand Report recommendations, these bills ensure quality summer learning opportunities that provide for hands-on and experiential learning, combining academics with fun. There is a much cheaper and much more effective way to deal with summer learning loss than by adding 20 days of school to the school year. Provide more access to interesting reading material.

Books promoted during Black History Month tend to dwell on two topics: Martin Luther King Jr. and slavery. For a look at different characters and events, consider these picture books and young adult novels about less publicized black history. In addition to the ALA Coretta Scott King award winners, we've included several other children’s books with African-American characters worth investigating.

The Olympics can be mined for rich learning possibilities in dozens of ways and across all academic content areas. This applies to all grade levels. Whether speaking of history, geography, art, culture, science or mathematics, there are myriad ways to hook the attention of children and deliver to them rich, exciting and valuable lessons, by making the Olympics a high-profile area of focus for a few short weeks.

Skyping. Scanning QR codes. Creating technology wishlists. Recording videos. Those are just a few of the things that took place across Onslow County Schools Wednesday as part of Digital Learning Day. Digital Learning Day is a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and common-sense, effective applications of digital learning in schools, according to information from Alliance for Excellence Education, which organized the event. Jerri Sydes, the technology facilitator at Trexler Middle School, said she and the technology facilitators at Richlands High School, Richlands Elementary School and Richlands Primary School worked together to plan Digital Learning Day events.

Ideas for digital learning are expanding daily in Mobile and Baldwin County schools, where teachers are integrating digital devices to the very youngest children. Children in grades K-3 received iPads; grades 4-12 received MacBook Airs. The classroom iPads are used for lessons in science, speech and reading, and the devices also enable the students to interact with the Epsom projectors at the front of each room, the next iteration of Smartboards. In Sarah Gross's kindergarten class, a recent lesson on the popular children's book "Brown Bear" culminated in a video, starring each student. "Technology is not replacing basic learning," Gross said. "It's only enhancing our classroom. I like to integrate my lessons with technology. They're still using manipulatives, so we try and use both." The technology keeps the kids attentive and on good behavior, she said. "They want to be engaged and challenged. It's a great behavior management tool … they're so excited to use the technology." Digital learning can also help highlight students' strengths and weaknesses, said Kelli Etheredge, the school's teaching and learning resources director.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mayor Bill de Blasio joined forces Tuesday for a cause dear to both, initiating a public service campaign encouraging Hispanic families to read, sing and talk more to their young children so they're better prepared for school. The effort is part of the Too Small to Fail campaign started last year by the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and Next Generation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit. A partner in the effort is Univision Communications Inc., a New York-based Spanish language media company, which will run public service announcements and news programs with segments focused on the topic.

A new report makes the case that a school day that is both longer and "redesigned" is a powerful recipe for helping districts across the nation as they seek to implement the common-core standards. The point was underscored at a Jan. 31 event to discuss the report and its implications. "The time is now insufficient [in the school day] to do the job that we're asking kids to do," said Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (and a former Massachusetts secretary of education), during the event.

Our very favorite children's books left an irreversible impression on our childhoods and on our lives. Some of our most cherished storybook characters are so real and palpable in our memory that it feels as if we were introduced to them yesterday. Beyond being gloriously entertaining though, the very best children's books also helped us understand the world around us. Over the years, they shaped our imaginations, our aspirations and our sense of right and wrong. Here are some of the most important lessons we learned from our favorite children.s books.

Dyslexia is a frustrating disorder that gives otherwise smart people trouble with reading. Nobody knows exactly what causes it, but one popular hypothesis is that the root of the problem is a deficit in the brain’s ability to process sounds, especially during childhood. Kids who have a hard time parsing all those talky sounds that grownups make also struggle to learn the connections between speech sounds and words on a page. And that’s what causes the reading difficulties, or so the thinking goes. But if parsing sounds is really the whole problem, how do you explain dyslexic musicians? After all, musicians are supposed to excel at making sense of sound. But a small number of them, it turns out, have dyslexia. Now, a team of researchers at Hebrew University in Israel has tried to sort this problem out — by rounding up, for the first time, a cohort of dyslexic musicians and testing their language abilities.

Preschool's benefits extend beyond the young students to their parents and families. Many programs, like Head Start, have a focus on family outreach, both with the goal of helping parents to help their children, and with the intent of helping the parents to establish more stable and secure lives for themselves and their families. Parents who are part of a strong public preschool program may find support there for applying for housing assistance or returning to school. When public education starts earlier, parents at all income levels benefit.

As schools days grow longer, so do the academic burdens being imposed on students. But, at the same time, school systems are cutting back on the arts, physical education and even recess. Some researchers say that is counterproductive, depriving students of exercise that can help them learn. The NewsHour reports on how nonprofit Playworks helps schools reincorporate play into their day.

When President Obama called for universal PreK programs in his State of the Union address last week, he created a chance for librarians to be part of this picture. Now that there's a federal initiative for PreK, we need to prove our vital role in educating young children. So where does this focus on early learning leave libraries? In a pretty powerful place. Public and school libraries should strike while the iron is hot and fully embrace their role in early education situations. Library staff have an opportunity to both mentor and provide a model for caregivers. We can share best practices for creating the foundation of early learning platforms: reading, playing, singing, talking, and writing. Information about library cards and programs such as summer reading initiatives can be shared with Pre–K and Kindergarten early learning programs to ensure access to library services throughout the year. And Public and school librarians can work together to provide resources on the Common Core standards to their communities.

Preschool is having its moment, as a favored cause for politicians and interest groups who ordinarily have trouble agreeing on the time of day. President Obama devoted part of his State of the Union address to it, while the deeply red states of Oklahoma and Georgia are being hailed as national models of preschool access and quality, with other states and cities also forging ahead on their own. With a growing body of research pointing to the importance of early child development and its effect on later academic and social progress, enrollment in state-funded preschool has more than doubled since 2002, to about 30 percent of all 4-year-olds nationwide.

This blog is not meant to be a monologue, but hopefully help create (or continue) the dialogue around what should happen before children enter school. As easy as the subject should be, it's not because the information can come off condescending when it is supposed to be helpful. Recently, I found a video that I think is very helpful for the dialogue about preparing children for life and school. The video is called How to Build a Better Brain, and it was created by the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative. Overall, the point is to be proactive and less reactive. Playing games, having "baby-talk" with a newborn, and asking a young child questions, and listening to their answers to promote dialogue, is setting the foundation. That foundation is vitally important to their growth. The bottom line is that the more positive interactions that take place between a child and their caregiver the better for the child's healthy development.