It Cost Nearly $250K to Teach My Son to Read. Here’s How to Do Better for Less.

My formerly illiterate fourth-grade son is now an eighth-grader at The Windward School for Children with Dyslexia, where he learned to read. Next year, he…

The Right Is Distracting Us From Needed Gun Safety Laws by Creating a Myth About School Discipline

This is how myths are made. It typically starts with a view grounded in ideology. Then “research” is generated to support the view. Lastly, pundits…

VIDEO: Meet the Bronx Educator Who Uses Hip-Hop to Teach Science

As a science teacher in the same school system where I attended elementary and high school, I have noticed a significant lack of engagement and what many call an aversion for learning science among Black male students.…

VIDEO: I Fight Against the School-to-Prison Pipeline for My Students and for My Husband

Every day during the week I teach Black and Brown kids at a school in the ’hood. Then every Saturday or Sunday I visit my…

Don’t Get Angry, Get Eva

Somehow, while managing a sprawling network of public charter schools serving 15,000 children, engaging in the day-to-day political combat of New York, and raising three…

What If Kids Could Depend on Their School All 12 Months of the Year, Not Just 10

Funding for summer schools in New York City has been in deep decline since 2000. That year, New York City ran the nation’s largest summer school program,…

The Hidden Costs of Our Tutoring Epidemic

There’s a tutoring epidemic. It goes beyond four-year-olds prepping to ace gifted and talented screenings, and teens cramming for the Specialized High School Admissions Test.…

Battling Segregation Is Going to Take a Combination of Parents and Policy

New York schools have a problem, as do many other schools across our nation. Our children are so segregated from others who aren’t of similar…

Coffee Break: D.C. Principal Arthur Mola on Mucho Cafe, Helping Kids Chase Their Dreams and Channeling Frederick Douglass

In any endeavor, great leadership can make all the difference. In public education, that’s been getting some renewed attention lately. The Washington, D.C. Public Schools…

Suspension Is No Longer the Only Tool Educators Have to Address Discipline Problems

A student yells at a teacher, engages in an altercation with a peer or is continually late to class. For decades, under a zero-tolerance framework,…