As schools race to spend the billions of dollars in COVID-19 aid that Washington has provided, I’m troubled by the number of emails I receive, from district staff or board members, that say things like, “Please don’t tell anybody I shared this, but you won’t believe how we’re spending X million dollars . . .” I think part of the problem is that, even where school and system leaders are intent on making good, “evidence-based” decisions, there’s a lot of uncertainty about just what that means in practice.
After all, districts know they’re supposed to make a particular show right…
Nearly every student knows the frustration of getting stuck on a homework question, and nearly every parent has experienced the time where they just can’t figure out how to help. Michal Borkowski, a Polish entrepreneur, decided to try to solve this issue by co-founding Brainly, an online platform that crowdsources homework questions to its larger community. Founded in 2009, the site is now used by over 350 million students each month across nearly 35 countries. Recently, I spoke with Michal about Brainly and its mission to help students better understand their schoolwork.
— Rick
Rick: Tell me about Brainly.
Michal…
As best I can tell, plans for post-pandemic schooling are mostly proving to be a stew of ambitious promises and jacked-up business-as-usual outlays. From new counselors and class-size reduction to facilities and curriculum projects, systems are busy adding staff, enhancing facilities, and improving curricula. While these are all good things, largely missing is what has long seemed to me the biggest opportunity to improve teaching and learning: fundamentally rethinking how schools make use of instructional talent.
When it comes to instructional talent, efforts have focused more on adding, allocating, professionally developing, or evaluating staff than on rethinking how we can…
Barry Garelick, a veteran math teacher in California and respected observer of math instruction, recently reached out after seeing my Q&A with ST Math’s Andrew Coulson on using visualization to teach math. Garelick is a cogent thinker, clear writer, and author of books including Out on Good Behavior: Teaching math while looking over your shoulder and Math Education in the U.S.: Still Crazy After All These Years. Given all that, I thought his reflections well worth sharing — see what you think.
— Rick
Rick, I thought your recent interview with Andrew Coulson of ST Math was a fascinating look…
It’s been thirty years since the first law enabling charter schools was enacted in Minnesota back in 1991. Today, there are over 7,500 charter schools and campuses across the country, with 200,000 teachers serving 3.3 million students. I thought it worth pausing a moment to take stock of the current state of charter schools. So, I checked in for some reflections from Nina Rees, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools since 2014. Here’s what she had to say.
— Rick
Rick: Nina, what’s the state of charter schooling today?
Recently, I discussed some of my concerns with what’s being done under the banner of “anti-racist” education. While I shared that I have significant apprehensions about many of the policies, practices, and programs enacted in its name, I also observed that the “underlying anti-racist impulse obviously contains much of value.”
Yet, as I noted, the doctrine of anti-racist education has morphed, in too many instances, into something far more problematic. …
Deciding whether and where to attend college is a giant decision for students and families, as well as the educators and guidance counselors who seek to advise them. It can also have an outsized influence on their financial health for the rest of their lives. In her new book, Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education, Beth Akers offers data and analysis that can help navigate these tricky waters. Beth, formerly of the Manhattan Institute, Brookings Institution, and the Council of Economic Advisers, and now a resident scholar at AEI, provides practical…
Early last month, the New York City Department of Education announced that it plans to do away with snow days next year. The move met with predictable angst from students and a series of practical questions from the United Federation of Teachers, but education cognoscenti seem fairly enthusiastic. Indeed, this past year, when most public schools were either remote or hybrid, 39 percent of districts did away with snow days. There seem to be plenty of school systems interested in following New York City’s lead next year.
I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. While a “no snow days”…
Most of us are all too aware of just how polarized things can be today and how easy it can be to fall into the trap of believing the worst of those with whom we disagree. Anyone who needs a reminder can check out this piece by Ben Smith, in which The New York Times reporter describes how a small online cluster of former Jeopardy! contestants descended into a collective freak-out. …
ST Math, an online program from MIND Research Institute used by more than 1.3 million P-8 students, employs a visual, gamified approach to teach math. I recently spoke with MIND’s chief data science officer Andrew Coulson, who heads evaluation of student and teacher usage and outcomes for ST Math, about the program’s approach to math learning and evaluating education technology more broadly.
— Rick
Rick: What is ST Math — how does it work, and how is it different from all the other math programs and curricula out there?
Andrew: ST Math is a supplemental visual instructional program for students…
Frederick M. Hess
Direct Ed Policy Studies at AEI. Teach a bit at Rice, UPenn, Harvard. Author of books like Cage-Busting Leadership and Spinning Wheels. Pen Ed Week's RHSU blog.
