Low-Hanging Fruit: Small Ways Schools Can Make Big Differences as the School Year Begins
After I sent my kids back to school last week and watched the steady stream of adorable “first day” Facebook posts, I began thinking about all of the little things that schools do, or don’t do, that make a huge difference for students and parents during the first weeks of school. I started compiling a list of […]
Technology’s Unmet Progressive Promise
This is the second in our series of “Notes From the Field” on personalized learning. Twenty-five years ago, I was a young history teacher soaking up progressive teaching methods that aimed to foster deep, personalized learning for my students. My classroom was decidedly low-tech, but I can see how today’s technological advances might have made […]
Beware the Iconography Trap of Personalized Learning: Rigor Matters
This is the first in our series of “Notes From The Field” on personalized learning. My colleague and I recently visited a middle school science classroom. Students, outfitted with safety glasses, were organized into groups of three to four. The room was lively but not disorderly as each group worked on its own experiment. As we walked […]
Notes From the Field: Personalized Learning
In 2015, CRPE kicked off a multi-year, multi-method study of district and regional systemic efforts to support schools implementing personalized learning. Personalized learning (PL) is designed to tailor instruction to individual students’ strengths, needs, and personal interests—often integrating technology—in order to boost student outcomes. Over the next two years, we’ll look across a diverse range […]
Why Collaboration Can Be Harder Than Herding Cats
Researchers at CRPE use “Herding Cats” as a metaphor to describe the complications of district-charter school collaboration. I think they describe the challenges well, but they are also being polite. Really bad charter schools and the chance of changes in district attitudes toward them can make collaborating even harder than cat herding. As CRPE explains, collaboration […]
Taking a Lesson from The Boys in the Boat and Aiming for “Swing”
To be of championship caliber, a crew must have total confidence in each other, able to drive with abandon, confident that no man will get the full weight of the pull…. When you get the full rhythm in an eight, it’s pure pleasure to be in it. It’s not hard work when the rhythm comes—that […]
New Research Confirms…Everything We Already Believe
As many predicted, the worlds of research and journalism have changed with the advent of the internet and the explosion of social media. Gone are the days when research studies were mainly published via journals and extensive peer review processes. The pace of news has accelerated, as has the pace of consumption. This new reality […]
Can High Standards and Accountability Co-Exist? Lessons From the Common Core Assessment Consortia
The Common Core State Standards Initiative was designed to solve a problem that has plagued past standard-setting efforts. Many states responded to earlier efforts by watering down their standards for learning and lowering expectations for students in an attempt to artificially boost the number of students that reached proficiency. By creating a set of common […]
Suspending Belief
This piece was originally published as part of Fordham’s forum on discipline practices in America’s charter schools. Magicians rely almost exclusively on the technique of misdirection. In order for us to believe that the dove emerged from the handkerchief, the magician must “misdirect” our attention away from what would otherwise be the obvious sleight of […]
Tradeoffs, not absolutes, on suspension and expulsion
This piece was originally published as part of Fordham’s forum on discipline practices in America’s charter schools. The ongoing exchange about suspensions and expulsions in charter schools needs to be seen from the school’s perspective. As a school of choice, a charter has two obligations: to maintain a climate conducive to learning, as it promises the […]
