To improve student engagement during the school day, don’t ignore what happens after the final bell rings.

Today’s digest explores how to apply lessons from afterschool programs to build deeper learning opportunities during the school day, how to generate authentic engagement through questions, the importance of signature learning experiences in schools, and a webinar on lessons from brain science.

The House education committee holds a hearing on trauma-informed practices in education, the White House diverts money away from schools for the border wall, and a new coalition is announced to make education a priority in the 2020 election.

This post was originally published in the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper.

In the last month, two reports have renewed questions about the current direction of states’ high school assessments. The first, End-of-Course Exams and Student Outcomes, from Fordham’s Adam Tyner and Lafayette College’s Matthew Larsen, finds that end-of-course assessments (EOCs)—tests designed around specific high school courses, like algebra II or biology—are correlated with higher high school graduation rates and college admissions test scores. Despite these positive effects, however, Tyner and Larsen also find that EOCs may be slipping in popularity among states. The second report, The New Testing Landscape: How State Assessments are Changing under the Federal Every Student Succeeds Act, by Lynn Olson of FutureEd, reveals one of the reasons why: the rise of the ACT or SAT as states’ primary high school assessments.

If a school is making a difference for students through new and innovative practices and word gets lost in the education echo chamber, how can other schools and students benefit?

Today’s digest highlights a new project by the Christensen Institute to uncover under-the-radar schools that are transforming the learning process and driving better outcomes for students, a California district that is transforming schools with lessons from brain science, strategies to refresh school culture, and an upcoming conference on the future of K-12 education.

Research from neuroscience highlights that adolescence represents a critical period for brain development—second in importance only to early childhood. This research shows that adolescence is a period when the human brain develops the capacity to engage in key elements of learning, such as critical thinking and problem solving. In fact, the degree to which adults can engage in analytic thinking depends largely upon the degree to which this capacity develops during adolescence. While it is well known that adolescence is a period of heightened risk for behaviors such as truancy and substance use, the “risk” of adolescence is not solely about problem behaviors. It also is about potentially limiting the ability to thrive as an adult.