Daniel Koretz Book Reception
American education today has one goal. And it’s not teaching students. It’s raising test scores. High-stakes testing, launched as a way to evaluate Teaching and determine whether students were learning, has become an end in itself. And it’s ruining education.
Charter School Expansion & the Viability of Public Education
There is vital economic dimension to the American promise of a free, quality public education for all of its youth. In its simplest aspect, government needs to provide adequate funding to public schools.
Academic Freedom in an Age of Political Polarization
From a variety of different perspectives, our panel addressed the issues raised by the need to defend academic freedom in an age of political polarization.
Is the Promise of ESSA Being Actualized?
Now that the states have completed and submitted their first ESSA plans, it is an appropriate time to ask if the promise of ESSA is being realized.
Teaching Democratic Citizenship When Democracy is at Risk
Today, the U.S. finds itself in a crisis of democracy, in which the future of our liberties and our republican form of government hang in the balance.
Austerity Politics and American Education
A decade after the start of the Great Recession and eight years into the U.S. economic recovery, almost half of the states have failed to restore K-12 education spending to pre-recession levels; almost all states have yet to restore higher education spending to pre-recession levels.
2013-2020 Conversations
Co-Sponsored by the Shanker Institute and the AFT, they are held the second Wednesday of the month during the school year from noon to 2:00 pm at 555 New Jersey Ave, NW.
Vouchers and Education: What Do History and the Research Tell Us?
As Congress considers the Trump-DeVos proposals for a national voucher program, what can we learn from the history of vouchers and from the research on the performance of voucher systems?
The Role of School Organization, Social Capital and Collaboration in the Improvement of Teachers and Teaching. From Research Findings to Policy Proposals
Current education policies haven’t sufficiently leveraged the organizational and interpersonal aspects of schools which can benefit educators and students collectively.
School Integration By Race & Class: A Movement Reborn?
From a variety of perspectives, our panelists examined the state of segregation by race and class in America’s schools, and the promising initiatives and practices that are emerging in the renewed movement to integrate America’s schools.
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Collective Bargaining and Digitalization: A Global Survey of Union Use of Collective Bargaining to Increase Worker Control over Digitalization
A special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Vol. 34, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2022) featured essays on the topic of the Future of Work which were solicited by the American Federation of Teachers for a conference on the subject it jointly hosted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Shanker Institute. In the eighth of these essays, guest authors Eckhard Voss and Daniel Bertossa discuss the future of collective bargaining in the face of increasing digitalization.
In “Collective Bargaining and Digitalization: A Global Survey of Union Use of Collective Bargaining to Increase Worker Control over Digitalization,” WMP consultant Eckhard Voss and PSI expert Daniel Bertossa discuss what the future of collective bargaining looks like in the face of increasing levels of digitalization. Through an in-depth evaluation of seven key areas affected by digitalization, the authors discuss the deficits in collective bargaining, before approaching the herculean task of confronting them.
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From Circletime to Civics: Involve our Youngest Learners in Civic Engagement
Early childhood classrooms are a surprising yet ideal site for introducing meaningful civic engagement. Schools, particularly preschools, are often the first institutions where children must work alongside others, beyond the members of their families and their immediate circles. With the somewhat shocking change that entering a school environment brings, there is also the opportunity to introduce and practice good civic skills. Think about it, at the blocks center, children begin to develop their negotiating and compromising skills for a limited set of resources. At dramatic play, children navigate competing interests, advocate for themselves and their ideas, and navigate big emotions as they are experienced when they don't get their way. Do these skills sound like they should be applicable outside the classroom? I hope they do, because they are the foundational skills for engaging in civil discourse and participating in the democratic process. This is more than just voting on what to name the classroom pet fish—democracy, in its purest and most beautiful form, is woven deep within the seemingly mundane play interactions children engage in and teacher-supported instruction. Too often, we observe children developing these skills without giving the experience the acknowledgment it deserves: lived experiences that cultivate civic capabilities and a developmentally appropriate understanding of equity. These skills, and the acknowledgment of these skills, are more critical now than ever.
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Reshaping the Digitization in Public Services
A special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Vol. 34, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2022) featured essays on the topic of the Future of Work which were solicited by the American Federation of Teachers for a conference on the subject it jointly hosted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Shanker Institute on July 13, 2022. This is the seventh of these essays.
Digitalization is already a sweeping force throughout private and public spaces, and public services are on the forefront of this new frontier. Unfortunately, this has not been an easy process, with rights being violated and harm being caused. In “Reshaping the Digitization in Public Services,” Christina Colclough, founder of the Why Not Lab, discusses the measures needed to protect human rights and put in place safeguards to ensure digitization proceeds in a manner that benefits everyone.
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National Civics Day: Civics in the Classroom
Today is National Civics Day. For the last year the Albert Shanker Institute has been working with a team of accomplished educators to create high quality civics and democracy lessons, written with state standards in mind, to share with educators via our partnership with ShareMyLesson. While an unproductive debate about what to teach our students simmers across the country, these lessons serve as an example of how seriously teachers take their responsibility to create healthy teaching and learning environments and lessons where students are introduced to founding documents, like the US Constitution, and the honest history of our country in ways that foster critical thinking. Today we wrap up our 2022 Constitution Day blog series with one example of how these lessons are framed to give readers a glimpse of the work our educators do in their classrooms to meet the academic expectations of students. For more lessons and examples, please visit our Educating for Democratic Citizenship Community on ShareMyLesson.
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The Long Shadow of Racial Housing Discrimination
Earlier this year, we published a report on the relationship between housing discrimination/segregation and school funding disparities. I would encourage you to check it out. But I’d like to discuss the substance of the report from a somewhat broader perspective.
Our analysis, while it includes a lot of national results, consists largely of “case studies” of seven metro areas. In order to interpret and understand our results, we relied heavily on the work of scholars who had focused on those areas.1 And that included a great deal of specific history that one might not see in (otherwise excellent and very important) large scale segregation analyses. These histories illustrate how, in every metro area, the effort to keep white and non-white families living in different neighborhoods was a deliberate plan.
Multiple institutions, public and private, all played a part. That means city governments, the federal government, courts, the real estate industry, the finance industry, and homeowner associations. And the plan adapted to changing circumstances. When segregative tools became obsolete or illegal, new tools were developed to keep building on past efforts. A few of these tools are still in use today.
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The Future of Work in Education: Teachers’ Professional Commitment in a Changing World
A special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Vol. 34, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2022) featured essays on the topic of the Future of Work which were solicited by the American Federation of Teachers for a conference on the subject it jointly hosted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Shanker Institute on July 13, 2022. This is the sixth of these essays.
Teacher shortages are an issue not just in the United States; across the planet, the issue is getting to the forefront of debate as the profession itself is under threat. In “Teachers’ Professional Commitment in a Changing World,” by Ee Ling Low et al. of the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, this issue is confronted head on. The authors take great efforts to both identify the factors that drive teacher commitment, and to identify how these factors can be implemented to drive positive outcomes for teachers for the duration of their careers.
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Jasmine’s Day: An AI Education Story
A special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Vol. 34, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2022) featured essays on the topic of the Future of Work which were solicited by the American Federation of Teachers for a conference on the subject it jointly hosted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Shanker Institute on July 13, 2022. This is the fifth of these essays.
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Student Free Speech Rights: A Lesson on the Constitution
In the fourth blog of our Constitution Day 2022 series, guest author Stephen Lazar, a national board certified teacher and a Shanker Institute Civics Fellow, uses his students' natural interest in their free speech rights in school as an opportunity to teach them about the Supreme Court's role in helping to redefine and enhance the rights enshrined in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
I always tell my students that (other than the Dred Scot case of those of a similarly evil tilt) Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier is my least favorite Supreme Court Case, as it’s the only one that’s ever been used against me. I was editor-in-chief of my high school paper and was set to publish two op-eds that were critical of the school. The Hazelwood case enshrined a limitation on students’ freedom of speech in school-sponsored publications, deeming them school projects that therefore are subject to complete editorial censorship by the school administration. Our advisor took the critical pieces to our principal, who told me I could not run one of them and had to make edits to the other, that I had written.[1] I was livid, but swallowed my pride.
Over two decades later, when I teach students about their free speech rights in school, my primary aim is to help them embrace and understand the rights they do have in school—particularly for political speech—as well as the fact that their free speech rights are not absolute.
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Banning of our "Beloved" Books: A Call for Continued Conversation and Action
It’s that bittersweet time of the year when my much-beloved copy of Beloved by Toni Morrison returns to its spot on my bookshelf. Beloved and I have had this routine since the 2011 National Book Festival. I am inspired to pick it up and read it, as an act of thanks for the opportunity to explore humanity beyond my own experiences, only to promptly return it to its rightful spot on the bookshelf upon completion. While the topics explored in this text were initially uncomfortable when I was first introduced to them in high school, I have come to find great comfort in this routine. This year, however, felt different and unsettling in ways that provided no comfort in completing my annual tradition. I knew that pulling my copy of Beloved from my shelf wasn’t going to be enough to make up for the fact that it, along with hundreds of other books, have been pulled from library shelves all over the United States, uncertain of when, or if, they will ever return.
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At the Intersection of the Future of Work and Education
A special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Vol. 34, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2022) featured essays on the topic of the Future of Work which were solicited by the American Federation of Teachers for a conference on the subject it jointly hosted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Shanker Institute on July 13, 2022. This is the fourth of these essays.
In his article “At the Intersection of the Future of Work and Education,” David Edwards argues that what is truly needed is strong public education. The operation of school systems during the pandemic deepened long-standing problems of financing, segregation, inequality, and discrimination inside and between countries. Distance learning was a quantum leap in the use of artificial intelligence and other technology, depriving learners of social relationships. By consulting teachers and teachers unions on educational policy, the well-known problems of the education system can be combated, and triumphed against.