The “Roadmap” issued by Educating for American Democracy (EAD) is barely a month old, but EAD is already experiencing the good times that await anyone audacious enough (or foolhardy enough) to pursue national initiatives regarding the stuff of history, civics, and standards. The Roadmap has been hammered as a politicized, ideological exercise.
My friend Mark Bauerlein, English professor at Emory and senior editor at First Things, has written, “Organizers present the Roadmap as bipartisan and balanced, but if you scan the details, you’ll find it relentlessly focuses on group identity, access and exclusion, agency and dissent, and diversity.” Joy Pullman…
Dr. Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University, where his research examines how people judge the credibility of digital content. His work has appeared in prominent publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, and Smithsonian Magazine. The digital document-based history curriculum he helped create has been downloaded 10 million times. Of note: Wineburg is the only one out of the top 50 in this year’s RHSU EduScholar rankings with a primary focus on online learning or education technology. …
Recently, in the midst of a short, charming interview, an award-winning 2nd grade dual-language teacher casually offered an offhand comment that gave me pause. She said, “With gentrification, there are many more affluent families in the neighborhood who are attracted to the benefits of bilingual education. It takes a conscious effort on my and the school’s part to make sure that our dual-language classrooms serve our Latinx families and put their language needs first.” The teacher later added, “Latinx children are diverse and have varying needs,” and explained, “I teach for equity, not equality.”
The interview clearly revealed a thoughtful…
City Year partners with public schools in 29 cities across the U.S., where its AmeriCorps members provide full-time support to students and teachers. Especially in light of the pandemic, I was interested in learning how City Year has adapted its approach to meet student needs. Recently, I spoke with CEO Jim Balfanz, who served as a City Year corps member in Boston 25 years ago, about the program and its response to COVID-19.
— Rick
Rick: So, what is City Year, and how did the program get started?
Jim: City Year, which was founded in 1988, partners with 320 systemically…
Waterford Upstart uses adaptive software to provide online early education support to four-year-olds. Since its inception in Utah in 2009, Waterford Upstart has grown to serve over 90,000 children across 28 states. I spoke with Dr. LaTasha Hadley, Waterford Upstart’s vice president of state partnerships, about the program and its work, especially in the face of the challenges posed by COVID-19.
— Rick
Rick: So, what is Waterford Upstart?
LaTasha: Waterford Upstart is an in-home, technology-delivered school-readiness program that children use independently for 15 to 30 minutes each day, five days a week. The software itself presents a wide range…
As millions of students return to school this spring and fall after many months of isolation, angst, and disruption, it’s a good bet there’ll be plenty of issues relating to behavior, discipline, and safety. For me, this raises the question of what, if anything, policymakers should do to ensure that the raft of well-meaning reforms intended to help schools tackle these challenges are indeed keeping students and staff safe. …
FIRST aims to engage students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) by holding robotics and building competitions sponsored by the likes of LEGO, Lucasfilm, and Disney. Launched in 1989, FIRST now partners with more than 200 companies in the Fortune 500 and has 320,000 volunteers working with 650,000 students across 110 countries. I recently had the chance to chat with Erica Newton Fessia, vice president of field operations at FIRST, about their work.
— Rick
Rick: So, what is FIRST?
Erica: FIRST was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the first portable insulin pump and many…
Decisions regarding renamings and cancellations are typically made behind closed doors, making it hard to gauge how much deliberation goes into them (as with the recent, deservedly controversial decision to cease publishing six Dr. Seuss titles). In a bit of a twist, however, another such push has played out more publicly: the San Francisco school board’s move to strip existing names, including Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein, from 44 schools. Because that process (momentarily on hold) unfolded over Zoom, outsiders like my AEI colleague Greg Weiner were able to document the deliberations of the School Names Advisory Committee. …
I’m frequently told that I’m using Twitter “wrong.” You see, I mostly use it to post links to stuff I’ve written. Occasionally, as a certified pundit, I’ll post a statement on some political or policy development. I’ve got it wrong, I’m told, because it’s a lousy way to generate retweets or attention.
This is on my mind because, just this week, I published my new book with USC’s Pedro Noguera, A Search for Common Ground. Pedro and I approach education and school improvement from very different perspectives. …
Today, Pedro Noguera and I release our new book, A Search for Common Ground: Conversations About the Toughest Questions in K-12 Education. We drafted the book as a continuous e-mail correspondence that unfolded between January and June 2020. We delved into the purpose of schooling, testing, school choice, the role of for-profits, philanthropy, civics, social and emotional learning, teacher pay, and much else, all against the backdrop of COVID-19, intense attention to issues of race, and a bitter (if mostly virtual) presidential contest.
In the course of our collaboration, we each argued from conviction while also striving to listen to…
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.
