Choosing Blindly
How can we tolerate ignorance on something that is as critical to student learning as instructional materials?
The Fate of the Common Core: The View from 2022
The Core is still with us, of course, but it remains a shadow of what its more optimistic proponents envisioned a decade ago.
The Common Core Math Standards
Are they a step forward or backward?
Are they a step forward or backward?
Putting the Schools in Charge
An entrepreneur’s vision for a more responsive education system
An entrepreneur’s vision for a more responsive education system
Reading is NOT Fundamental: Knowledge Is
It is encouraging news that New York City’s three-year-old pilot project testing the content-rich Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum has proved so far “a brilliant experiment in reading.”
High Schoolers in College
Dual enrollment programs offer something for everyone
Dual enrollment programs offer something for everyone
Are We Lifting All Boats or Only Some?
Equity versus excellence and the talented tenth
Equity versus excellence and the talented tenth
The Arts and the Cities Need Arts Education
A new report from the National Endowment for the Arts confirms what politicians need to hear: If you do not bolster arts education classes in K-12 schools, your arts organizations will continue to lose audience.
Challenging the Gifted
Nuclear chemistry and Sartre draw the best and brightest to Reno
Nuclear chemistry and Sartre draw the best and brightest to Reno
What Did Klein Learn? Not Much, Apparently
I love Joel Klein. He made New York City a magnet for reform-minded entrepreneurs, sent forth more than a few excellent leaders to other big city school systems, and is never afraid to speak his truth. But his Wall Street Journal op-ed today is really lame.
All Together Now?
Educating high and low achievers in the same classroom
Educating high and low achievers in the same classroom
The College Board and Foreign Languages
Italian professors all across the country should salute the College Board and the advocates who pressed for reviving the course, including Dr. Margaret Cuomo, the Italian Language Foundation, and the Italian Government.
Holding Students Accountable for Changing into Their Gym Clothes
Are traditional P.E. classes likely to be an effective tool in fighting obesity? What little research there is finds no association between PE and weight loss and obesity. One reason more P.E. has not led to weight loss might be that traditional PE classes do not always offer students a real workout, particularly in high school. Students don’t like having to change into gym clothes and get sweaty in the middle of the day. So P.E. teachers may end up grading students in part based on whether they change into their P.E. clothes. The 25th Hour PE class at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia is different.
Advocating for Arts in the Classroom
Academic discipline or instrument of personal change?
Academic discipline or instrument of personal change?
A Language Arts Curriculum for Students in Jail
In “School on the Inside: Teaching the incarcerated student,” just posted on the Ed Next website, David Chura writes about teaching language arts for 10 years in a New York county penitentiary. Chura is the author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. While the [...]
When Schools Shun Competition, Middle Class Families Seek It Out After School
June Kronholz writes that the self-esteem movement in the 1990s made many educators squeamish about competition. In fact, American educators have had a love/hate relationship with it over the past century. But what we have seen is that as schools move away from promoting competition, those parents who think schools are not providing enough competitive outlets go outside of the traditional education system.
Edutopia: Inside George Lucas’ Quixotic Plan to Save America’s Schools
It was just about a year ago that I first started paying attention to Edutopia. They’ve been around for years, but they weren’t on my radar screen. Then suddenly, they wouldn’t stay off it. You couldn’t listen to the radio without hearing their ubiquitous underwriting credit on NPR, with its sublimely confident tagline “What Works in Public Education.”
E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy and American Democracy
In a new book, The Making of Americans, E.D. Hirsch explicitly connects the idea of cultural literacy to the subject of civics—“the role of a common system of public schools in educating a citizenry to the level necessary to maintain a democracy.”
High School 2.0
Can Philadelphia’s School of the Future live up to its name?
Can Philadelphia’s School of the Future live up to its name?
Book Excerpt: Richard Whitmire Reads from Why Boys Fail
Ed Next is teaming with authors of newly released books to provide 15-minute audio excerpts from those books for your listening pleasure. First up, Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, reads from the introduction of his book. You can listen to the excerpt from the book through your computer’s speakers or download the excerpt [...]
Return of the Thought Police?
The history of teacher attitude adjustment
The history of teacher attitude adjustment
Book Alert: Intelligence and How to Get It
There is no end to the debate over intelligence. The latest book-length entry into this debate is University of Michigan psychology professor Richard Nisbett’s “Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.”
Florida’s Online Option
Virtual school offers template for reform
Virtual school offers template for reform
