Category Archives: Essays
If It Ain’t Broke: The Workshop Model
by GABRIELLE LENSCH PLASTRIK If It Ain’t Broke. . . don’t fix it, right? But what if “fixing it” might make it better? I have spent the last few weeks trying to make some important decisions about how I will … Continue reading
Filed under Classroom Reflections, Essays
Get on the School Bus: Erin Gruwell and the Freedom Writers
by ALISTAIR BOMPHRAY Any public school teacher will attest to the difficulty of organizing a field trip. There’s paperwork to fill out, signatures to obtain, and money to raise. Not to mention the logistical headache of shepherding an unwieldy troop … Continue reading
Filed under Essays, Interviews
Riding the Bus: a Path to Greater Diversity in Schooling Options
by GABRIELLE LENSCH PLASTRIK Recently, I was in San Francisco for the Learning and the Brain technology conference. While there, there was an accident involving Bart trains at the West Oakland station. Hundreds of people crowded the Powell street Bart … Continue reading
So long and thanks for all the NELP
by ALISTAIR BOMPHRAY This is a shamefully belated post but it’s important to me that I write it anyway. Last summer, a college teacher of mine, Alan Howes, passed away. It wasn’t tragic or sudden; he lived a long, full … Continue reading
Filed under Essays
Obama’s Longer School Days, Shorter Breaks Will Come with a Price
by OLIVIA COLEMAN President Obama, despite major setbacks in recent elections, has pledged to move forward with his education reforms, and many see it as a space in which bipartisanship can actually work. While there are several components to Obama’s … Continue reading
Filed under Essays
An Achievable Model Classroom
by GABRIELLE LENSCH PLASTRIK This piece was written in response to a Slate Magazine contest in which readers were encouraged to enter their ideas a for a model classroom. The success of a classroom has a lot less to do … Continue reading
Filed under Essays
The False Promise of Technology
by ALISTAIR BOMPHRAY This piece was written in response to a Slate Magazine contest in which readers were encouraged to enter their ideas a for a model classroom. Technology is amazing, hey? The fact that you’re reading this blog right … Continue reading
Filed under Essays
Starlit Evening
An uncomfortable connection between standardized testing and prostitution on the the streets of Oakland. Continue reading
Filed under Essays
On School Reform or When Good Words Go Bad
Education writers, policy-makers, administrators, union leaders, and teachers alike drape their ideas in the rhetoric of reform as if it were some magic cloth immune to criticism. It peremptorily turns the critic of said idea into a behind-the-times hairsplitter who is getting in the way of progress.
The way industrial food corporations like Dole scramble to affix the “organic” label to their product, purveyors of educational policy are all too quick to identify themselves as “reform-minded.” But what does “reform” actually mean? Has the word been so overused as to have lost all meaning (much in the same way the meaning of “organic” has been appropriated to the point of meaninglessness)? Or is it kind of a deceptive concept to begin with? Continue reading
