I think some of the most powerful feminist depictions in art are the ones that show us how bleak life was for women before feminism, or for women who couldn't or didn't embrace feminist ideals. Continue reading

I've been excited about Al Jazeera's expansion in the U.S. market, but this poorly-written, rambling essay by Columbia professor Joseph Massad, calling Zionists anti-Semitic, is as bad as its critics allege. Continue reading

Richwine fails to grasp the difference between testing academic achievement and testing innate cognitive ability, claiming that an exam that includes algebra can be used to draw conclusions about genetic IQ. He explicitly ignores the well-documented, historically persistent reality of educational inequality across the United States, assuming that the only "environmental" factors that affect a child's test score are ones inside the home. Continue reading

Alfred Binet, the French psychologist who invented IQ testing, made quite clear that his exams could not draw conclusions about the difference in innate ability between two individuals from different cultural and socioeconomic populations. Little has changed. Continue reading

Kudos to David Leonhardt for calling attention to the staggeringly high American youth unemployment rate -- 26.6 percent -- compared to rates in Europe and Japan. I just want to add that in addition to overall sluggish job creation, one... Continue reading

Denying middle-class kids smaller classes turns out to be a great way to alienate middle-class parents from education reform, and might even drive rich families out of the public school system entirely. Continue reading

In the hallway at Crenshaw High, spring 2011. On Monday, half the teachers at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles found out they had been dismissed from their jobs as part of a "conversion" process. Among them was Alex Caputo-Pearl,... Continue reading

In a speech in Manhattan this morning, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called for a "moratorium" on high stakes attached to Common Core tests. She complained that in New York state, students sat for new tests this spring,... Continue reading

There is a growing national movement to opt one's children out of public school standardized tests. Continue reading

I'm excited about my new piece in Smithsonian, about the history of corporate and philanthropic influence over American public schools. It summarizes some of the research I've done for my upcoming book: During the twentieth century, private interests drove a... Continue reading

The scandal-prone Michelle Rhee does it. So does Leonie Haimson, the combative leader of the advocacy groups Class Size Matters, Parents Across America, and NYC Kids PAC, which oppose almost all the ideas Rhee supports, like increased standardized testing, teacher... Continue reading

Like a lot of other people, I was riveted by Susan Faludi's New Yorker report on the work, life, and death of Shulamith Firestone, a Second Wave feminist theoretician and organizer whose name I knew, but whose legacy I was... Continue reading

I've written a new explainer for Slate on the indictments of 35 Atlanta educators for inflating students' test scores: What does it tell us about national education reform? For previous coverage of my thoughts on Atlanta and standardized test-based accountability,... Continue reading

For over a century, school reformers have been dissatisfied with how teachers are evaluated, yet overhauling rating systems has not, historically, been an effective way to improve educational outcomes for kids. This is like hoping to lose weight simply by buying a new, high-tech scale, without changing your diet or excersie routines. Continue reading

The following was written by the Princeton sociologist Melvin Tumin, in 1973. Tumin was thinking about the Teacher Corps, a Great Society program that was a sort of lefty precursor to Teach for America, in which intern teachers arrived in... Continue reading

I've worked in offices for small magazines, large media companies, and think tanks. So I know there's a lot about office culture that sucks: useless meetings, crackberries that ruin your precious out-of-the-office hours, and sometimes an assumption that whoever stays... Continue reading

In a Nation podcast, Bryce Covert interviewed me about Obama's new early childhood proposals. Listen here. And on Jane Williams' BloombergEDU show, I participated in a panel discussion of education writers. We each got to discuss two education issues to... Continue reading

If we look at actual data, we'll notice that American suburbs are not becoming hipper and younger, but are, in fact, becoming grayer (as their population ages), browner (as immigrants and African Americans are priced out of central urban neighborhoods), and poorer (as young adults with economic means are increasingly choosing to live in cities). I grew up near the Times' "hipsturbia" in a gorgeous riverfront town that neatly illustrates all these trends: Ossining, New York. Continue reading

Via Twitter, I'm seeing a lot of anxiety about the part of President Obama's new universal preschool proposal that calls for "comprehensive data and assessment systems" to track student progress and program quality. I know what you're thinking: Standardized tests... Continue reading

In his State of the Union address, President Obama promised to create a new federal funding stream to provide high school students with technical education, to help them prepare for the workforce. This is promising. As I've reported, during the... Continue reading

Two years ago, a young writer named Mike Elk lent his Huffington Post press pass to a union organizer, who used it to help 200 protestors crash a meeting of the Mortgage Brokers' Association. Elk was subsequently "fired" from his... Continue reading

This is the text of a loyalty oath New York City public school teachers were expected to take in 1917 and 1918. Over the next three decades, teachers across the country were periodically subjected to these sorts of jingoistic fevers.... Continue reading

I've decided to shut down my Tumblr -- I've found it a pretty inflexible platform -- and bring future content from my ongoing historical research here, to be interspersed with news blogging and links to my journalism. A few readers... Continue reading

If there were endless hours in the day, I'd blog about the news much more regularly. But since my book project is pretty much all-consuming at this point, I'm not posting here as much as I'd like. I do want... Continue reading

Yesterday I got to meet and interview Bill Gates, along with five other writers and reporters. We sat around a conference table at a midtown Manhattan hotel. Gates, wearing a totally unassuming gray suit and sipping Diet Coke out of... Continue reading