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What We Talk About When We Talk About School Reform
With all due respect to Flannery O’Connor, my vote for greatest American short-story writer goes to Ray Carver. And with all due respect to America’s current crop of leaders, my hope is that they...
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What Plato Would Think of School Choice
“But how, exactly, will they be reared and educated by us? And does our considering this contribute anything to our goal of discerning that for the sake of which we are considering all these things –...
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New Rules for School Reform
You know there’s a dearth of creative thinking in education when an article trumpeting cutting-edge teaching quotes somebody, without irony, saying the following: “Get a computer, please! Log on . . ....
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What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?
OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st...
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Are Parent Trigger Laws a Good Idea?
It’s hard not to feel excited for the group of parents who successfully took over their California community’s school, and who now are dreaming of bigger things. “Our children will now get the...
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The Empathy Formula
For over a year now, I’ve been working with a remarkable group of people at Ashoka who believe empathy is the foundational skill we need in order to become effective changemakers in modern society —...
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If Murder Can Be Tracked Like An Infectious Disease, Should Failing Schools...
There’s a fascinating new story out there, courtesy of NPR, in which a team of researchers pored over 25 years of murder data in Newark, New Jersey and reached a surprising conclusion: murdering...
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Positively Deviant School Reform?
If you had six months, little to no resources, and a clear mandate to solve a chronic country-wide problem – knowing that, if you failed, you would be asked to leave that country altogether – what...
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Summer, once the time for reflection, now the time for radical redesign
Tanesha Dixon vividly remembers the first summer she spent as a teacher – as part of a service program in Uganda, just before her senior year at Notre Dame. “I had my heart set on being a forensic...
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A School is Not a Pet. And Yet . . .
This weekend’s story in the New York Times about former NFL star Deion Sanders’ struggling charter school lays bare much of what’s wrong with the way Americans think about public education in general,...
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What does it mean to be prepared?
I just spent three days at a wonderful independent school in Columbia, South Carolina. The students there are the types of young people you want to meet and hand over the keys of the world to — smart,...
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New PBS documentary tells a story about education we don’t ever hear
In the small town of Hartsville, South Carolina, which sits just about two hours from anywhere you’ve ever heard of, Monay Parran and her two young sons – eight-year-old Ja’quez, and eleven-year-old...
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Big Bird Can Close the Achievement Gap? Not So Fast . . .
Don’t get me wrong: I love Big Bird as much as the next guy. But when people start talking about how Sesame Street is just as effective at closing the achievement gap as preschool, I start to worry...
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