I have long admired and appreciated Peter Greene for his deep and thoughtful engagement with my work, and his willingness—rare from the “other side” — to focus on areas of agreement, not just difference. Please give this a read.

Know what’s worse than being bored? Being illiterate.

The idea that one might need to make the case for reading books might surprise those who haven’t spent much time in classrooms lately, but it is an argument that goes against entrenched beliefs that have come to predominate in schools.

educationnext.org/why-are-books-…

The case for curriculum is, in part, the case for making the classroom teacher’s job doable by the teachers we have, writes Robert Pondiscio—not, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, the teachers we wish we had or hope to have someday. fordhaminstitute.org/national/comme…

Nobody needs to hear this bc it's 100% false.

Project Follow Through proved the opposite decades ago.

The fact anyone, esp teachers, believe (or were trained to believe) this nonsense only destroys many Ss' chances of learning to read proficiently.

education-consumers.org/follow/

“The bottom line is that it’s time to take a clear-eyed look at the ever-spiraling demand we place upon teachers and talk seriously about taking things off their plate and making the job doable by the workforce we have.” Robert Pondiscio via Fordham Institute fordhaminstitute.org/national/comme…

Robert Pondiscio's complementary piece on curriculum at Fordham Institute: The case for set curriculum reducing teacher workload.

Teachers should be given clear parameters and expected resources, and then the freedom to work within these.

The gems in this piece from Robert Pondiscio cannot be overstated. If you're at all interested in fixing American education, this is an absolute must-read.

It all rests on *Curriculum and Instruction*, the very reasons schools exist.

I plan on highlighting key selections on X.

His ex-wife could not be reached for comment.

I'll never forget struggling for days doing 'partial quotients' division with 5th graders, then finally giving up and teaching them the steps of long division. One student looked at me incredulously as if to say, 'Wait. You knew this all along? Why didn't you TELL us?!?'

“Our teacher doesn’t offer much explanation; she assigns problems for us to solve in groups & every 3rd lesson she checks in to see if we have any questions” Evidence aside, common sense should tell you this is a bad (and lazy) way to teach math.

'In no field of human endeavor do we look at the most gifted practitioners as proof points. Yet this is the mindset we apply to teachers. What the most talented and driven can accomplish with children is what we expect from all teachers.'

fordhaminstitute.org/national/comme…

The Reading Recovery organization is spending a lot of money to defend itself. It hired a consulting firm to design a campaign to rebut Sold a Story, and it filed a lawsuit against its home state of Ohio.
New from Christopher Peak and Kate Martin.

apmreports.org/story/2024/04/…

'If curriculum was central to school improvement plans, implementing it well would be a primary focus of teacher training and professional development, not an afterthought.'

fordhaminstitute.org/national/comme…

'It’s worth noting that students could also damage their eyes if they stab them repeatedly with pencils. Presumably, schools have sufficient behavioral control to avoid closing over concerns about pencil-induced blindness.' Jay P. Greene

dailysignal.com/2024/04/10/edu…

New from yours truly for Fordham Institute: The case for curriculum is in equal measure the case for making the classroom job doable by the teachers we have--81 percent of whom say they 'just have too much work.'

fordhaminstitute.org/national/comme…

Things i'd rather do than make my own curriculum:

Home visits and and calls
Detailed feedback on student work
Grading/Scoring
Encouraging students
Bringing in items of interest
Internalizing lesson
Checking safety nets
Checking extensions
Reviewing 'next and/or previous' lessons

For comparison, this would make The Free Press the 5th largest newspaper in the country--print and online circulation combined--behind the NYTs, WSJ, Wash Post, and USA Today, and just ahead of the LA Times. Extraordinary, meteoric growth.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_n…

Today there are 630,591 Free Pressers.

Next stop: one million.

If you believe in independent, honest journalism help us get there:

thefp.com/p/were-number-…

High school sports participation: before and after Covid. aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/upl…

DC got a lot of things wrong in that era, including not keeping young people engaged in much of anything.