The other day I received this email from the Illinois Network of Charter Schools: The other day, I received this email from the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. Charter advocates,The charter school community needs you to act now! The U.S. Department of Education recently proposed new regulations that would create roadblocks to make the federally-funded Charter Schools Program almost...
Collaboration: When It Doesn’t Work Out
I love reading the interviews the Paris Review has been publishing with noted writers for years, not the products of their labors but about how they go about their work. (It was a particular thrill to see an interview with my wonderful son-in-law, poet and translator Peter Cole appear last year in this pantheon of noted writers.) These valuable and entertaining documents have been collected in at...
The Virtues of Collaboration
My teaching career started as a collaborative effort. Dick and I had worked together at Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York and when we were invited to recreate a version of that program in a small school district in Vermont, our partnership continued. At first, the work involved overseeing a pullout and after school program, but when we accepted the challenge of assuming full...
Joining the Personal and the Political
I recently finished a novel by Damon Galgut called The Promise, the winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2021. A friend who is one of the most discerning and prolific readers I know recommended it lavishly, not his usual style, which communicated a sense of urgency, so may the God of Books forgive me, I ordered it from Amazon for next day delivery. The book begins in a South Africa...
A Double Header – Our Pals at Pearson and Our Hero Horace Mann
If the name Pearson is familiar to you, it’s likely to be through the corporation’s stranglehold on the college textbook business with its notoriously inflated prices. Or it might be because of its inside track on the academic testing market. Almost every state has contracted with Pearson to create, publish and score the reading and math tests mandated by Federal and State agencies. In addition...