Renaissance® Blog
Shareable tips and insightful thoughts on K–12 education. Subscribe to the Renaissance Newsletter and get the latest posts delivered straight to your inbox.
Subscribe to the Renaissance Newsletter
Thank you for subscribing!
April 16, 2021
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer With the recent passing of Beverly Cleary, we lost a giant in children’s literature. She is among a small, select group of authors whom massive numbers of children just seem […]
April 9, 2021
Life has changed significantly since 1986. Back then, Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee ruled at the box office; Tom Clancy and Judith Krantz had best-selling novels; the Commodore 64 and Apple McIntosh were popular computers; and a talk show called […]
March 26, 2021
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer In my role at Renaissance, I regularly present to teachers and administrators on student literacy. Recently, I’ve received many questions about the Science of Reading: what this term truly means, […]
March 19, 2021
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer March 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 school closures. Do you remember our naivete as this all began? We were thinking in terms of weeks rather than months, […]
March 12, 2021
March is National Reading Month. At Renaissance, we’re celebrating student literacy with the release of the new 2021 edition of our What Kids Are Reading report. We’re also marking the 35th anniversary of Accelerated Reader. In this blog, you’ll learn […]
March 5, 2021
In the mid-1980s, educator Judi Paul created a program to help motivate her four children to read over the summer months. Word of her program’s success soon spread—and Accelerated Reader was born. To celebrate thirty-five years of AR, we’re taking […]
February 19, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on education, from widespread building closures to concerns over the scale of learning loss caused by the disruptions. As of February 19, 2021, the federal government has passed two pieces of legislation—CRRSA […]
February 12, 2021
Each year, Renaissance’s What Kids Are Reading report lists the most popular books at every grade level, and also provides new insights into K–12 students’ reading habits. With the 2021 report arriving on March 2, we wanted to look back […]
January 29, 2021
Last November, we released our How Kids Are Performing report, which uses data from five million student assessments to quantify the impact of COVID-related disruptions. While most students experienced modest declines in reading performance, math performance was impacted more significantly, […]
January 22, 2021
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer Over the last nine months, conversations about the scale of COVID-related learning loss have dominated K–12 education. These began last spring, when various predictions and projections about the “COVID-19 Slide” […]
January 15, 2021
COVID-19 has impacted every aspect of K–12 education, from familiar classroom routines to when and how we assess our students. With thousands of buildings closed and millions of students learning remotely, educational data is playing a more important role than […]
January 8, 2021
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer Like nearly all children in the 1970s and 80s, I fully embraced the early video games of that era. For many, the only access to these was at video arcades. […]