Published Articles & Media
Blog
The New and Old of Digital Learning
What stands out in a rendition of recent digital breakthroughs in learning is that it relies on some of the most routine progressivist assumptions about learning.
Blog
Arts Education Goes Activist
While serving at the National Endowment for the Arts, I spent many months working on arts education policy. While one had to admire the dedication and spirit of people scrambling to deliver the arts to young Americans, I soon concluded that their efforts to persuade funders and politicians to support arts education misplaced the emphasis.
Curriculum
Advocating for Arts in the Classroom
Academic discipline or instrument of personal change?
Blog
An Apple Campus
There is an interesting development at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Parents have been informed that every student must use an Apple MacBook in his and her work.
Blog
The Mimetic Classroom
In the current issue of Education Next appears a summary by Robert Pondiscio of the philosophy and practice of Edutopia. Edutopia presents its pedagogy as cutting-edge and innovative, and its motto suggests a hard focus on evidence and feedback and outcomes. Within the article, though, appears a statement by the former executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Milton Chen, that sounds more like an a priori principle than an idea derived from experience: School life should resemble real life.
Blog
Social Justice Teaching from the Students’ Side
A few years ago I interviewed a professor of education about the training of arts teachers. She was enthusiastic about what her school was accomplishing, citing in particular its focus on social issues in the classroom. I asked her about what she does in the classroom, and she volunteered an interesting trend. The students resist her instruction, she admitted, but over the course of the semester they come around and recognize how important these lessons in social justice really are. For her, the pattern was a sign of how much the students learned, how much their awareness had broadened from Day One to the end of the semester.
Blog
Core Standards and College-Readiness
The latest version of the "Core Standards Initiative for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science" bears the phrase, “Through wide and deep reading of literature and literary nonfiction of steadily increasing sophistication, students gain a reservoir of literary and cultural knowledge, references, and images.” This is precisely the kind of acknowledgment of cultural literacy that education conservatives and curricular traditionalists of various kinds have been advocating for more than two decades. Still, I think, another step needs to take place in the next round of revisions.
Blog
Career Readiness: Don’t Expect Too Much from Colleges
Employers shouldn’t expect colleges to instill the writing skills employees need. The duty falls on high schools whether they like it or not and whether it is fair or not.
Blog
Atlanta Grades
A story last week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that fully 191 schools in the state of Georgia, 10 percent of the total number of elementary and middle schools, are up for investigation for altering test answer sheets. The next day's story put the count at one in five Georgia public schools.