How a Dozen Immigrant Parents Organized to Transform Literacy in Their District

Parents’ love for their children is the single greatest—and most underutilized—natural resource in education. I learned this firsthand as a son. My parents escaped political…

Have We Been Paying Too Much Attention to Girls in School at the Expense of Boys?

Legendary actress Meryl Streep recently garnered a considerable amount of media attention during a Vanity Fair panel about the second season of HBO’s series “Big…

How Teachers and Families Can Help Students Build Reading Fluency Over the Summer

Summer is a time for trying new things. Summer can also be a time for falling backward on academic skills like reading fluency. Research shows…

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…

It’s Going to Take More Than a Black History Month Report to See Racial Equity in Our Schools

Black History Month provides a calendar-driven chance for students and teachers to talk about Black History. But it can easily become a way of tokenizing…

The Best Part of Teaching Is When You Succeed in Engaging Your Students’ Mind, Body and Spirit

My favorite book in the world is “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and it is special for me to share that book with my students. They…

I Always Write About How Hard Teaching Is But I Really Do Love It

Once, forever ago, I wrote a tweet bemoaning how many stories out there were about how much teaching sucks, and all the reasons people left…

You Know You Love Teaching When You’re on Maternity Leave and Stop to Talk to a Former Student

#LoveTeaching Week is a grassroots campaign started by teachers in 2015 as an opportunity to celebrate teaching, leading, and learning in a way that unites…

I Took a Year Off Work to Learn About Dyslexia Because My Son’s Teachers Couldn’t Teach Him How to Read

Why, for so many, is access to an education that recognizes the science of reading limited to private programs? My son experienced this as a…

Holding Teachers Accountable Without Adequate Teacher Prep Programs Is a Set-Up

One of my resolutions for this new year is to think outside of silos and to start connecting the dots between the wide, disparate, and…