Tag: education

In her memoir ‘Educated,’ Tara Westover studies herself to safety, but books can’t rescue her from the memories of sustained violence.

Students are performing worse than ever, but private companies are making millions.

Why the libertarian billionaire keeps tabs on the magazine he founded at Stanford 30 years ago.

Promethea’s education was the most important thing in her mother’s life. Then a mysterious benefactor made it his business as well.

At Buzzfeed, Kiese Laymon tells the story of his early years teaching at an elite liberal arts college in New York.

A teacher at an elite boarding school confronts her own confused leap up the ladder of class privilege.

For talented black spellers in the 1960s, the segregated local spelling bee was the beginning and the end of the long road to Washington, D.C.

The Education Secretary makes the case before Congress that “less money” becomes “more latitude.”

“When my state passed one of the most rigid abstinence-only sex education laws in the nation, I went back to school.”

Journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire traveled to the heart of DeVos-land — the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan — to learn more about Betsy DeVos and her family’s life-long attempt to dismantle the “nanny state.”

Congress was inundated with thousands of phone calls from people urging their representatives to vote against Trump’s education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. Given her poor performance during confirmation hearings, her lack of experience, and her history of supporting attempts to dismantle traditional public education, Americans had visceral, negative reaction to DeVos. But this defense of […]

Eight stories about modern-day child care, from 24/7 facilities to Montessori wonderlands.

Video: An incredibly moving piece by The New York Times Magazine writer.

An essay from Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis in The Offing, on his years working in private education at Straight A Learning Center, a “model minority factory” at which he taught SAT prep classes and helped build a college advising service.

Every year America’s schools shut down for nearly three months—leaving families like single mother Olympia and her 6-year-old daughter Raina struggling to keep up.

Writer Katherine Reynolds Lewis, in Mother Jones, examines the latest approaches to addressing children and discipline—most notably, that timeouts, negative consequences, and other traditional punishments might not be as effective in many cases as helping kids manage their own emotions. It’s based on “Collaborative and Proactive Solutions,” a program that was developed by psychologist Ross […]

In 1931, the historian James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream as “a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.” His book, The Epic of America, may have popularized the term, but the dream dates back at least to […]

I was brought up in Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents were very nice. The first time I wrote a poem, my mother gave me a big kiss and said, “I love you.” The whole idea of writing poetry had a lot to do with escaping, escaping from the bourgeois society of Cincinnati, Ohio, escaping from any […]

It is worth noting that American students have never received high scores on international tests. On the first such test, a test of mathematics in 1964, senior year students in the US scored last of twelve nations, and eighth-grade students scored next to last. But in the following fifty years, the US outperformed the other […]

In our latest Longreads Exclusive, Kiera Feldman and Tulsa-based magazine This Land Press went deep into the downfall of the Oral Roberts family dynasty—how Richard Roberts went from heir to the televangelist’s empire, to stripped from his role at Oral Roberts University. Feldman, a Brooklyn-based journalist, and This Land Press have worked together before—her story […]

When a problem exists in Philadelphia schools, it generally exists in other large urban schools across the nation. One of those problems—shared by districts in New York, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities—is that many schools don’t have enough money to buy books. The School District of Philadelphia recently tweeted a photo of […]

After more than two thousand interviews, the investigators concluded that forty-four schools had cheated and that a “culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation has infested the district, allowing cheating—at all levels—to go unchecked for years.” They wrote that data had been “used as an abusive and cruel weapon to embarrass and punish.” Several teachers had […]

In the latest Mother Jones, Tasneem Raja argues that “code literacy” is becoming just as critical as reading and writing in education. To understand how we as a society might begin to take it seriously, it also helps to understand the history of literacy itself: Reading and writing have become what researchers have called “interiorized” […]

University Heights High School is located in one of the poorest congressional district in America, and six miles away, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School charges $43,000-a-year for tuition and is attended by the children of celebrities.

During the next two years, more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, teacher evaluation. Many of the consultants had worked for Joel Klein, Teach for America, and other programs in the tight-knit reform movement, and a number […]

In the latest New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind explores how his autistic son Owen found a voice through the lessons and sidekicks in Disney films. The story is an excerpt from the journalist’s new book, Life, Animated: Owen’s chosen affinity clearly opened a window to myth, fable and legend that Disney lifted and retooled, […]

“‘There was this transformation of the whole culture—and curriculum,’ Andrea says. ‘I could see it mostly through the homework. It really looked like test prep. There were even ­bubble sheets.’ Oscar had more than a year before the third-grade test, when students start taking the New York State ­English ­Language Arts (ELA) and math tests—but […]

“Mel and Norma Gabler founded Educational Research Analysts in 1961. Funded through donations, they hired serious-minded believers like Neal Frey, a professor at a small Christian liberal arts college in New York, to help them page through mountains of material. In a 12-by–15-foot bedroom next to the garage in the Gablers’ house, Frey and a […]

“The dream that new technologies might radically disrupt education is much older than Udacity, or even the Internet itself. As rail networks made the speedy delivery of letters a reality for many Americans in the late 19th century, correspondence classes started popping up in the United States. The widespread proliferation of home radio sets in […]

Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. I read a brilliant piece, “Zen and the Art of Cover Letter Writing,” that reminded me that I had not yet featured the stories of those suffering under the yoke of this abusive economy. These are stories about […]