It’s an understatement to say that the most recent NAEP results from 2024 were less than encouraging. Most students are still performing below pre-pandemic levels, which means we haven’t been able to recoup the learning loss that occurred over the two years when classes were disrupted by Covid-19. In 2024, the average reading score for […]
So far we’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century […]
In Part I, we discussed at length the limitations AI has when used to generate texts or even just supposedly factual information about a wide array of topics. Those limitations, which include frequent factual inaccuracy and amplified racial, gender, and other biases, are disturbing, and as such, have important implications for how AI can and […]
I’m pausing our series on the history of American education to discuss something that we’ve begun to encounter in our work with client districts: the use of AI to grade student essays and other work. AI — artificial intelligence — is cropping up everywhere, even as the ethics of its use have yet to be […]
So far we’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century. […]
So far we’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. Today, we’re going to jump ahead again to the first decades of the 19th century and […]
In the last two posts, we talked about the first public school in the U.S. and what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635. Today, we’re going to jump ahead 125 years and talk about a truly unique school in the American colonies: The Bray School. On September 29, 1760, a school […]
Last time, I talked about the Boston Latin School, the U.S.’s oldest public school. That sent me down a very enjoyable rabbit hole of how education has changed in the last 390 years. There was no such thing as standardized education, so what follows is a description of education in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Other […]
The United States has a long history of public education, stretching back to within just a few years of the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1620). In 1635 — just 15 years after the Mayflower’s arrival — the Boston Latin School was opened with a novel premise: that anyone, regardless of social class, could […]
Quizzes are an established fact of the school experience. The pop quiz is a trope that occurs again and again in movies, always — literally always — accompanied by a groan from students. It would be easy to dismiss quizzes as either a form of teacher retribution for bad behavior or low-level recall that kids […]