Robert Parker, a veteran educator, calls out college exam proctors for attempting to marginalize some of his students. In this open letter, Robert confronts the proctors and challenges them to improve their mindsets about Black...
Category - Higher Standards
I’ve written about teacher accountability before, but I recently read a few things that got me thinking. The first was a report out of Los Angeles that showed that nearly half the teachers in Los Angeles’...
Education Week likes to frustrate me in the morning. Reading their article today about the retreat of the anti-testing suburban opt-out movement, I should have been happy, but a few word-bytes in it are restating flimsy...
It would be so easy to stop caring about race. Yes, I can only say this because I’m White. Yes, I can only say this because I’ve been so tempted so many times. It would be so easy, and I wouldn’t even have to make a big...
By last December, the fall of my ninth year of teaching high school, I had been observed by teacher coaches, visitors from educational non-profit organizations, principals and assistant principals, no fewer than 15 times. Each...
“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class-it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.” A multitude of hidden figures silently loom in our shadows, yet those...
“After 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching…is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented. The...
“An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.” –Lerone Bennett, Jr. There is a war going on. When war is mentioned, most folks will immediately think about what is happening overseas or...
Two weeks ago, Gov. Wolf vetoed a bill that would have helped school principals ensure that our most effective teachers are in classrooms for the 128,000 students who attend the Philadelphia School District. This is a missed...
Saying the enslaved were happy is akin to saying Black communities are happy sending their children to persistently failing schools. Just as we needed an abolitionist movement then, we need one now-with the right mindset. I...