Last September, before school began, I made my way to the Brooklyn Historical Society for the launch of Renée Dinnerstein’s new book, Choice Time. At a time of standardized tests for five-year-olds, canned curriculum, didactic instruction, and the Common Core—in a city of deep inequality and segregation—this event was long …
“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 …
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
“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 …
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 …
Early childhood professionals have long been a beleaguered species. For starters, they’ve had to battle the perception that they’re “just babysitting,” providing “day care.” Never mind the field’s heroic history, chronicled in Exchange magazine a few years ago by Roger Neugebauer and Debra Hartzell. Heading the list was the Sheltering …
There’s nothing like a megadose of civic action to boost my serotonin—especially in these dark times. Several days ago, Parent Voices NY posted to their website an eloquent, diplomatic request
How can you resist a book that links Vygotsky’s theory of social constructivism with the Framers’ vision for American democracy? I couldn’t. When I first looked at Learning Together: The Law, Politics, Economics, Pedagogy, and Neuroscience of Early Childhood Education, I nearly ran in the other direction. I’m married to …
