Two middle school students in San Francisco Unified School District are Grand Prize winners of NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge.

Presidio Middle School students Erika Young and Norah Weiner produced the podcast Middle School Now, which documents the realities of life in grades six through eight: gun violence, social media and mental health.

The 13-year-old best friends and now podcasters took the top prize in the middle school category for the judged contest, which drew more than 3,300 submissions from 48 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

The podcast addresses a recent school lockdown and how the normalcy of school violence is affecting students.

“I can promise you that every child in our sixth- through eighth-grade school has imagined who they’d be in a shooting,” Norah says in the podcast.

The podcasters also describe social media’s grip on the lives of teens. Examples include students doing Tik-Tok dances before class, the “devious licks” viral videos that influenced students to vandalize their school bathrooms, and fashion trends like cropped corset tops and curtain bangs that are “cool one day are considered ugly the next.”

Read about the winners at https://www.npr.org/2023/06/21/1182424027/student-podcast-challenge-2023-middle-school-winner and listen to the podcast at https://soundcloud.com/nwey/middle-schools-now.

Tyrone C. Howard, Pritzker Family Endowed Chair of Education in the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies, has been named president of the American Education Research Association for 2023-2024.

As president, Howard will help to lead the largest national interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning. In doing so, he joins with more than 25,000 AERA members in the U.S. and across the globe working to advance knowledge about education, encourage scholarly inquiry and promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.

“I am beyond honored, humbled, and excited to be taking on the presidency of the world’s largest educational research organization for the next year,” Howard said, in an article announcing his appointment. “The field of education continues to face some of the most complex challenges that we have seen in recent memory. Issues continue to linger from the pandemic, racial justice in schools and colleges remains elusive, mental health matters are pervasive, and we have yet to attain educational equity for minoritized populations. I am looking forward to working with some of the world’s most dedicated and talented scholars, practitioners, and policy makers on making a notable impact on some of the most vexing issues we see across the educational spectrum.”

As professor of education at UCLA, Howard’s research addresses issues tied to race, culture, access and educational opportunity for minoritized student populations in Los Angeles and beyond. His work is keenly focused on equity, and his research has helped to illuminate the challenges and complexities, as well as the strengths and resilience that Black and Brown students bring to their pursuit of education and learning.