Blog pieces
Education writing is clotted with jargon, fads, and euphemisms. Let’s get real.
Courtesy Ascend Learning
Lessons from the pandemic on elevating teachers’ craft, at scale
July 21, 2021
One of the most stubborn challenges in American education is raising the expectations teachers hold for their students’ learning, especially in underserved communities. We have not yet discovered the ceiling on what students can know and do at each grade. There may be none. Yet exhorting teachers to raise these expectations doesn’t work, no matter how charismatic the preacher. But when teachers watch a mentor teacher—one they have come to know and admire—pitch his or her lessons sky-high and, by lesson’s end, reliably succeed with every child—well, that’s a transformative experience.
Brave New World At Success Academy
March 17, 2020
One blog piece circulating widely now counsels educators to “release yourself from high expectations right now, because that’s the best way to help your students learn.”
Eva Moskowitz has a different view. Children sitting at home not learning would be “an abdication of our responsibility.”
Courtesy Ascend Learning
Beyond No Excuses, the promise of student agency
May 16, 2016
A true liberal education—which fosters and prizes critical thinking and independence of thought—cannot be joined to a culture of rigid rule-following and silent meals. It is a flagrant contradiction. Students cannot learn that their voice has power when for much of the day the school stipulates their silence.
Courtesy Ascend Learning
The potential for real renewal
March 12, 2019
Reading about the suppressed RAND report on New York City’s ill-fated “Renewal” program for fixing the city’s worst schools, I couldn’t help but think of another suppressed RAND report leaked to the Times: the Pentagon papers. They revealed that the federal government knew the Vietnam War, as prosecuted, could likely not be won, yet continued to send thousands of Americans to their death.
No, I stopped myself. The comparison was lurid, ridiculous. No students lost their lives in Renewal. No one was physically harmed. Bad schools simply failed to improve.
And yet I wondered: Have we become inured to the human toll, year after year, of failed big city school systems?