“We’ve tried: standardized tests, charter schools, smaller classes, longer school days, stricter discipline, looser discipline, tracking, differentiation. We’ve decided the problem is teachers. The problem is parents. What is true about almost all these reforms is that when we look for what’s broken we look at who they’re failing: poor kids, black kids, brown kids. […]
In Part 1, we talked about the impact SCOTUS is having on education; in Part 2, we saw how the private school setting didn’t produce higher achievement for students. In Part 3, we looked at how the effects of School Choice compounded with each other to produce schools segregated by race, income, and social status. […]
In Part 1, we talked about the impact SCOTUS is having on education; in Part 2, we saw how the private school setting didn’t produce higher achievement for students. In Part 3, we looked at how the effects of School Choice compounded with each other to produce schools segregated by race, income, and social status. […]
In Part 1, we discussed the recent SCOTUS decision in Maine. In Part 2, we looked at school choice’s inability to deliver on its most vaunted promise: higher achievement for students. Because the private school setting doesn’t confer higher achievement (that comes from parental income level and educational attainment), it begs the question of what […]
School choice is a term that’s been applied to a variety of programs in education. In one very large district in North Carolina, school choice allowed parents to tell the district which elementary, middle, or high school they wanted their children to attend among all the public school options in the district. In public school […]
Using taxpayer money to pay for faith-based private school used to be considered a direct violation of the separation of church and state. Many still believe it is because such a practice would force taxpayers of whatever faith (or no faith) to support faith-based instruction that they may not agree with. Some legislatures have lauded […]
A few months ago, I wrote about the dangerous levels of depression and anxiety teachers reported during the 2021/22 school year and the disturbingly high percentage of teachers who said they would likely leave the profession earlier than they originally intended. Now the start of a new school year is upon us and districts across […]
The Kappan recently included an article about how educators could communicate more effectively with parents of color whose experiences with racism might make them wary of teacher intervention. The article offered some great suggestions, but what really resonated for me was how they framed the core issue of trust between teachers and parents. The authors […]
Here’s a neat piece from Reading Partners about how teachers can use poetry with emerging readers to support and further develop their reading skills. And by poetry here I mean the rollicking, rhyming kind, not the staring out the window at the rain kind. Using poetry in this way has a number of benefits for […]
What if you sank a lot of money into a Pre-K program to try to close achievement gaps and instead you ended up with the same gaps and increased discipline problems? Does that seem like something out of a dystopian novel? Unfortunately, it’s not. A recent study from Vanderbilt University examined the effect of a […]