Father’s Day 2022

Peter Greene, former teacher and one of the best public thinkers about education today, found this Tweet “familiar” as a veteran of education reform debates: Greene and I share long careers in education and the mind-numbing experience of rebuking education reform claims and policies over the last few decades…

A core aspect of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation in 2001 was the report from the National Reading Panel (NRP) [1]. The NRP report represents a key feature of NCLB that isn’t being interrogated fully during the current “science of reading” (SOR) movement: NCLB mandated that…

A mass shooting in Buffalo. Another racist massacre reminding us of the AME mass shooting in Charleston, SC. Then another mass school shooting of elementary children in Texas. Reminding us of Sandy Hook. Minutes after President Joe Biden addressed the nation about the cancer of mass and gun shootings in…

Just 10 days after the New York Times ran a factually misleading piece on a dyslexia program championed by Mayor Eric Adams, Dana Goldstein amplified the “science of reading” attack on Lucy Calkins and the Units of Study reading program. Margaret Thornton (Princeton) offered on Twitter the essential problem with…

Recently, I accepted a scholarly writing assignment, a policy brief for a university-based think tank. As I approach submitting the initial draft for peer-review and then revision before publishing, the experience has helped me continue to think about ways in which teaching students to write present challenges for both teachers…

NYC Mayor Eric Adams is proving to be an unreliable source on just about anything he mentions. Adams seems more interested in crying false “crisis” for political gain than doing the hard work of political leadership. First, crime: With context and data, Adams’s claim is more than “a very…

Dear 20-Somethings: First, speaking as a person in his 60s, I am sorry for this country being dismantled in front of you, the country you are entering as the newest wave of adults. I spent my 20s in the 1980s, the Reagan era, the lingering era of AIDS. That was…

“Third grade reading proficiency matters — enormously,” declares Mike Schmoker in How to Make Reading Instruction Much, Much More Efficient for Education Week. When I saw this piece from 2019 pop up on my social media feed this week, I immediately noticed the subheading: “Scaling back small-group instruction would have…