Education and the Elderly: Looking at Trends in the U.S.

America is an aging nation. A recent Education Week article entitled, “In Districts Where Seniors Outnumber Children, Schools Adjust,” points out that “[s]eniors now outnumber students in more than 900 counties across the U.S., and that “seniors outnumber schoolchildren by more than 2-to-1 in 33 counties,” according to recent numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. This can have a significant effect on education funding, as senior citizens are statistically more likely to favor lower taxes and cuts in education spending. The same article points out, however, that some of these counties have found ways to minimize this effect by involving the local senior population in the school experience. In a book published several years ago entitled, Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform American — And the World, Peter G. Peterson explored not only these implications in the U.S. but also aging trends worldwide.

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The Solution to Closing the Achievement Gap

It’s a fact. If students don’t exercise their brains over the summer months, they can lose up to three months of reading and math skills gained over the last school year. Low-income students are at the highest risk for summer learning losses, as they have less learning opportunities afforded to them over their summer vacation.

Summer learning programs can be as simple as giving a child books to read over the summer. Or they can be formally offered through a community center, school, church, or neighborhood to serve many kids in the community. In Baltimore County, the number of homeless students has doubled in the last five years. Homeless students are likely to suffer summer learning loses at twice the rate of their nonhomeless peers. That’s why Camp St. Vincent is offering a summer learning program for homeless students in the area. Their summer students are beating the odds and walking away from camp retaining more than 80 percent of their reading and math skills. 1
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Increasing Number of College Grads by Aligning K12, Business, and Higher Ed

Alignment is key to getting more students through school and into a fulfilling career. We need to align middle school to high school, high school to college, and college to career. We also need alignent between K-12 systems, colleges, and businesses. And most importantly between students, schools, and parents.
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Opportunities for Low-Income Students: Summer Learning and Work Which Turns to Gold

For low-income kids, the oncoming summer vacation can bring forth different feelings than it does for privileged students. Due to a lack of accessibility, availability, and financial resources, low-income students often don’t have equal summer learning opportunities as privileged students, which contributes to increased summer learning losses and puts them at a disadvantage at the start of each new school year. Some of these students care for younger siblings all summer. Others play the role of parent to parents who may struggle with addiction or other issues. Others are in foster families or are raised by a grandparent because their parents are in prison or not fit to raise them.

This year, teen unemployment rates are soaring between 23.2 – 23.8 percent 1, which may prove to be even more problematic for low-income teens looking to work more hours to contribute to the family, make money for the upcoming school year, or to simply keep busy and off the street.

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Promoting Nonfiction Literacy Standards Is a Collaborative Effort

Most states are adopting the new Common Core Standards, requiring that students’ reading curriculum include more rigorous and nonfiction materials. In fact, the goal is to have 70 percent of a student’s reading come from informational texts by graduation, according to the article “New Literacy Standards Could Challenge Even Passionate Readers.” This shift in reading content is aimed at helping build reading skills students will need in college, career and throughout their lives.

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Activity: Creating Community in the Classroom

Lessons on the events of 9/11 are not included in social studies standards for more than half of American classrooms. As we approach the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11, students will be hearing many stories about the tragedy on the Internet, radio or television, around the dinner table, or possibly in conversations with friends. These students have spent most or all of their lives in an America where terrorism is a real threat, but how much do they know about it and have they ever been taught how to cope with it?

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