“Active shooter drills” terrify students, but do they make them any safer? Photo: Education Week When schools do fire drills, they don’t set off smoke bombs. The fad for “active shooter drills” with simulated gunfire has produced pushback, writes Evie Blad in Education Week. Some states are limiting lockdown drills to avoid traumatizing children. “You can prepare your kids for a house fire by telling them where to meet and how to climb out of their windows,” Washington state

While social-emotional learning sounds “positive and uncontroversial” in theory, “in practice, SEL serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism,” Chris Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told the New York Times in a March interview. Credit: Twinkl.com SEL’s intention “is to soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of ‘repression,’ ‘whiteness,’ or

Thousands of Bay Area teenagers have attended four-day camps that claim to teach empathy and leadership by screaming insults and enacting bigotry, reports Karen de Sa in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s Camp Diversity, which follows what’s known as the “Anytown” model: In a campground hall deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 55 teenagers have been ordered to separate by race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. By groups, the children of Silicon Valley engineers and attorneys,

At a Columbus, Ohio school in a high-poverty neighborhood, teachers use different strategies to help children learn to calm themselves, writes Katherine Reynolds Lewis in The Atlantic. Many students at Ohio Avenue Elementary come from troubled families and violent neighborhoods. Staff have been taught that “trauma can make kids emotionally volatile and prone to misinterpret accidental bumps or offhand remarks as hostile,” writes Lewis. “They’ve learned how to de-escalate conf

School is a safe haven from the streets, students at Baltimore’s Excel Academy tell Kevin Rector, a Baltimore Sun reporter. Seven students at the alternative school have been shot to death in the neighborhood in the last two years. Many students have lost family members to street violence. Deaundra Fisher said her older brother was killed about five years ago. She later witnessed the shooting of her young nephew. . . . Dajona Bass, an 18-year-old senior, said her father was k

Teachers chart their relationships with students at a high-poverty North Carolina school, reports Lisa Philip on WUNC. Pattillo Middle School teachers post the names of school’s 265 students on index cards, then place dots by those with whom they have meaningful relationships. “Then we were able to step back and see which students didn’t have a dot, or didn’t have as many dots as other kids,” said Byron Bullock, an administrator at the Edgecombe County school, about 75 miles

Pressured by the federal government and beliefs about “rape culture,” colleges have tried to police their students’ sex lives. Emily Yoffe’s excellent three-part Atlantic series explains what went wrong. Part 1: Rules intended to help sexual-assault victims have denied due process to the accused, Yoffe writes. Part 2 deals with the bad science underlying “trauma-informed” investigations and adjudications. . . . some schools have come to rely on the work of a small band of sel

Speech is violence, if it causes chronic stress, argues Lisa Feldman Barrett, a Northeastern psychology professor, in The New York Times. After all, chronic stressors “can make you sick, alter your brain—even kill neurons —and shorten your life.” Violent protests prevented right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on the Berkeley campus. Photo: Ben Margot/AP Advocating distressing ideas isn’t “violence,” counter social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukiano

Unstable parenting, poverty, a violent environment and other “adverse childhood experiences” contribute to “toxic stress” that impairs brain development, writes Olga Khazan in The Atlantic.  “As a result, poor children tend to have less gray matter in areas of the brain critical to learning and memory, which explains as much as 20 percent of the gap in test scores between poor and middle-class kids.” As adults, they may have trouble planning ahead. “In many studies, lower-inc