Ecology of Education

In the past few weeks, two major reports on teacher turnover and retention have been released. One was rolled out with extensive media coverage, and has been the subject of much discussion among policymakers and education commentators. The other was written by me, along with Teachers College doctoral student Clare Buckley. The first report, “The […]

I was, generally speaking, a fairly well-behaved kid. I’ve no reasonable explanation, then, for burning a hole in the wall of the one-room school I attended in the late 1930s. It wasn’t an original idea. A precedent had been set by somebody who’d come and gone before I arrived at Union School the previous year […]

Yvette Jackson, CEO of National Urban Alliance, opens her session, titled Transforming Urban Classrooms Through Strengths: Making Students Smart Again, with helping the audience to understand the disconnect between students’ lives and what goes on in the classroom.  How do many inner city students think about content? “You guys are talking about 1779, but this is today.” She […]