The Senate passed its education spending bill this week, but the biggest debate wasn’t over whether low-income students should receive more funding. It was whether Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will allow school districts to buy guns with school safety money.

Highline Public Schools is a large urban-suburban school district located just outside of Seattle, Washington. Of the district’s approximately 20,000 students, 77 percent are students of color and 67 percent come from low-income families. More than one-quarter of the students are learning to speak English. 

At the start of my sophomore year of high school, a friend introduced me to a statewide Pennsylvania Youth and Government (YAG) program. “You get to write laws,” I remember her saying excitedly, while showing me the more than 500 pages of student bills. “You’re like a legislator.” Every student bill that was signed by the program’s youth governor landed on the desk of Pennsylvania’s real governor to consider as legitimate legislation. To me, the concept of having the chance to advise state policy as an adolescent was revolutionary. During the next three years, YAG gave me the confidence to voice the opinions that I previously thought were unworthy of consideration and I became aware of policy issues I did not know existed. The program changed my life, and the skills I gained from it will be long lasting.  

Sometimes, diving into emotions requires going back to the basics. For one teacher, this means stepping away from the world of online social media and creating a “Twitter board” full of hand written “tweets.”

This week’s digest also explores how a garden in the Bronx changed students’ minds, connecting state assessments to classroom practice, and some great deeper learning action from social media! And if you’re exploring whether to launch a deeper learning initiative or want to strengthen or expand existing deeper learning practices, we have resources for you.

Most people know that adolescents face dramatic changes in their appearance, but they do not know those changes are accompanied by biological changes in their brains too. These years of adolescence are a time of great opportunity and a time of increased vulnerability for students.