If you care about school leadership or culture and don’t know Michael Sonbert, you really should. He’s been a teacher and a novelist, cut his teeth as a coach working in the nation’s largest turnaround school network, and then founded Skyrocket Education in 2016 and Rebel Culture in 2022. Today…

In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine some of the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. In a field full of buzzwords and jargon, our goal is simple: Tell the truth, in plain English, about what’s being proposed and what it might mean…

Hard to believe that it was just last fall that ChatGPT was unveiled. In the months since, AI has leapt from the realm of science fiction into our daily lives. Educators have struggled to make sense of these new tools and the attendant opportunities and risks — all while being…

Education savings accounts. Universal voucher programs. Charter schools. These are words guaranteed to inspire heated debates among policymakers, parents, and educators. Teachers’ union leaders denounce school choice as part of a malicious “war on public education.” School choice advocates rail against “failing government schools.” These debates manifest themselves as morality…

In The Great School Rethink, I talked about the need to rethink how schools work — top to bottom. Well, the San Francisco-based Red Bridge school offers one evocative approach to doing just that, and I thought readers might be interested in a closer look. Launched in 2020 as a…

In schools, it can feel like there’s never enough time. Even though American students spend as much or more time in school as their peers around the globe (a fact that’s not widely known), valuable units, lessons, conversations, and projects are always running into time constraints. Teachers, for instance, articulate…

When you’ve been around as long as I have, one gets all manner of intriguing questions. While I usually respond to such queries in private, some seem likely to be of broader interest. So, in “Ask Rick,” I occasionally take up reader queries. If you’d like to send one along…

In the spring, Harvard’s Jal Mehta and I discussed the frustrating reality of social-emotional learning, noting the disconnect between the promise of SEL (in theory) and the uneven quality of so many SEL programs (in practice). As we head into a new school year, with parents and educators concerned about…

I wrote recently about the opportunity (and need) to rethink the parent-educator partnership. Inevitably, a bunch of practical questions arise about how to do that. …