Two and a half centuries later, we should ask ourselves: What grade would our Founders give American education today? My latest in @dcexaminer: washingtonexaminer.com/resto…

If a district adopts the CKF Language Arts curriculum to comply with science of reading legislation, they are also implementing a curriculum that covers history, geography, math, science, visual arts, and music. Are they transparent about this? coreknowledge.org/core-knowl…

Shouldn't there be more discussion about school districts being mandated by their states to adopt curriculum from a list of approved providers that includes several highly structured options that must be followed strictly? This seems like a big deal.

Another example of why we need to get government out of education. It doesn't matter what parents want or what kids need. The agenda is always someone else's.

Advocates for knowledge-rich curriculum often speak as though the evidence is finally on their side, and it is. But evidence was never the obstacle. The obstacles are ideological, professional, structural, and political. Many are deeply embedded in the culture of education and in American society itself. thenext30years.substack.com/…

You want to fix education? Fix #20: Let teachers teach. Let me break down Fix #20. This is the fix that contains all the others. Every fix in this series points at the same underlying problem, which is that the people best positioned to educate children are increasingly prevented from doing so by the weight of everything that has been piled on top of the actual job. The paperwork. The compliance. The initiatives. The meetings. The data entry. The documentation. The interventions that require documentation of the interventions. The professional development on topics that the experienced teacher mastered fifteen years ago. The walk-throughs that interrupt the lesson that they are there to observe. All of it lands on the teacher, and none of it is teaching. What does it mean in practice? It means a teacher who should be planning tomorrow's lesson is filling out a form. It means a teacher who should be calling a parent is sitting in a meeting that could have been an email. It means a teacher who has thirty years of expertise in reaching a particular kind of student is being told to implement a scripted curriculum designed by someone who has never met her students. It means the professional who knows best what her classroom needs is the one with the least authority to make decisions about it. The further from the classroom a person sits, the more power they have over what happens inside it. That is the inversion at the heart of everything that is not working. How does this help kids? A teacher who is trusted to teach teaches better. A teacher who has the time to plan, to think, to prepare, and to know her students produces better outcomes than a teacher who is managed, monitored, scripted, and buried in compliance tasks. The research on teacher autonomy and student outcomes is consistent. Teachers who feel trusted and supported stay in the profession longer and perform better while they are in it. The kids who benefit most from an experienced, autonomous teacher are the ones who can least afford to lose her to burnout or a better offer. How do we make this happen? We need to audit every demand we place on teachers' time and ask honestly whether it serves the students or serves the system. We need to eliminate the meetings that do not require decisions, the forms that do not produce action, and the professional development that does not develop professionals. We need administrators who protect their teachers' time instead of consuming it. We need district offices that measure their own value by how much they enable the work in classrooms rather than how many initiatives they can launch. We need to trust the professionals we hired to do the job they were trained for and give them the conditions to do it well. The goal is not a teacher who is left alone with no support. The goal is a teacher who is given everything she needs and then trusted to use it. That teacher, in that room, with that child, is the whole point of every dollar we spend on education. Get out of their way. #YouWantToFixEducation

Just got off with the New York Times wanting my thoughts about the new mandatory reading list in Texas. I kept repeating that I think it’s awesome. Then she asked me if it concerns me that Muslim students will now have to read the Bible in school. I said that’s awesome too.