“Keep anxiety at bay,” was the subject line of last week’s email from the Family Institute at Northwestern University. The magnitude of the task can’t be overstated. One of the monsters has come out of the closet, and he will soon live in a big white house built by slaves. …
In 2014, Kalyb Wiley Primm, a seven-year-old Black boy with a hearing impediment in Kansas City, broke down in tears after he was bullied by a fellow student. Upon hearing the little boy’s cries, his school’s resource officer, Brandon Craddock, embarked on an intervention. Frustrated by Kalyb’s persistent yells of …
“Millions of workers have gotten a raise!” the Economic Policy Institute exulted in an email on Sunday. Income growth in 2015 merited the adjective “superb,” with the fastest gains among black and Hispanic workers. Yet the early childhood workforce was nowhere to be found. The stewards of our human capital …
I recently learned that Harriet Cuffaro had left us. Suddenly, I was back on the classroom floor at Bank Street College of Education, where she taught for three decades. Well past childhood, we were deep into block building, one of the most rigorous assignments I encountered in graduate school. Cuffaro, …
As the season of high-stakes testing got underway, winter’s chill unabated, a petition began to circulate, a flower of democracy. “Save Central Park East 1 Elementary School!” it read
It was a moment that called for John Coltrane. The California Alliance of Researchers for Equity in Education—love that acronym, CARE-ED— had revealed the truth about the Common Core State Standards and high-stakes assessment: Overall, there is not a compelling body of research supporting the notion that a nationwide set …
“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the opening canto of The Waste Land. The month in which America celebrates child abuse prevention. Each spring, the English Language Arts, math, and science tests arrive, New York City’s third- to eighth-grade public school students busily filling in bubbles. As …
This morning, succumbing to my raging digital addiction, I opened yet another email from Education Week. The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines this malady as a “process” condition—distinct from an obsession with activities such as shopping, eating, and doing drugs. A primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory …
The subject line was irresistible: “Early Childhood Pushes Up.” The Teachers College Record, a hotbed of radical critique, had delivered another gem to my inbox. Here was a scathing commentary on Obama’s “Cradle-to-Career” education policy. “Wish you hadn’t moved to Australia,” I emailed Jeanne Marie Iorio, a senior lecturer at …
Support for the arts has been steadily dwindling in the United States. Lots of competition out there for a slice of the multi-trillion-dollar American budget. And, besides, we’re too busy with more important stuff, aren’t we? But other, more enlightened views have held sway. Fifty years ago last September, Lyndon …
