Join the Club

My daughter is a newly minted high school freshman, which means we are entering that season of welcome emails, syllabi, expectations, routines, and introductions to the people who will help shape the next four years. This week, I received a welcome email from her Global History teacher that made me stop for a moment. It was honest. It was refreshing. It sounded like a real educator talking to families about what students were actually going to experience in the classroom, not

Helping Families Understand the Portrait of a Graduate and Outcomes-Based Education For generations, families have understood school through a familiar set of structures. Students attend school for a certain number of days, complete a prescribed collection of courses, earn credits, take required examinations, and, if they meet those requirements, receive a diploma. That system is familiar. Familiar does not always mean sufficient. A diploma indicates that a student has comple

Agricultural education is sometimes treated as a specialized opportunity reserved for rural schools, career and technical education programs, or communities surrounded by farmland. In reality, every community is connected to agriculture through its food systems, land use, environmental conditions, local businesses, cultural traditions, workforce needs, and patterns of access. For school and district leaders, fostering agricultural education does not necessarily require buildi

When we hear “agricultural education,” we may picture high school electives, large school gardens, barns, or students preparing for careers in farming. But agriculture is already woven into nearly every part of the traditional Pre-K–12 curriculum, from the food students eat and the clothes they wear to science, economics, technology, history, environmental responsibility, and community life. Including agricultural education does not require classroom teachers to abandon exist