Whether it’s an assignment they’ll never forget or a teacher who made school a challenge, most people have an opinion on education — some good, some bad.
Now more than ever, our education system is under tremendous pressure. Everyone from parents to educators are examining it with a critical lens.
How do we know students are learning? How can we best understand students’ needs and behaviors in order to meet them where they are? What does it mean to set students up for success?
Education is a complex topic, from questions about technology and curriculum to cultural differences and the prevalence of systemic racism in schools. Its ripples are felt across the country — even by those who aren’t in a classroom, or don’t have children.
The American education system has been around formally since the 17th century. There are thousands of textbooks and memoirs and other resources on learning. This makes it impossible to know where to start when keeping yourself (no pun intended) educated.
That’s where this month’s Words on the Street comes in.
My hope is to cover as many angles as possible from trusted experts in the field, from addressing how our schools continually fail Black students to examining developmental milestones for a variety of ages.
The EdSurge Podcast
This podcast covers education from all directions. Its end goal is to explore its many nuances, including what it looks like presently and what the future may hold. Highlights include the effects of AI and technology on learners, problems with our letter grading system and ways to encourage diverse viewpoints in the classroom. To do this, EdSurge’s team of journalists interviews scholars, educators and other innovators.
What is so intriguing about this weekly podcast is how thorough the team of hosts is while simultaneously making each subject approachable. Interviews conducted with experts deeply cover the subject at hand, but always in a way that feels breezy. Approachable language makes the podcast informative for those outside education while the straightforward format, well-known experts and variety of topics also make it a must-listen for educators or those with direct involvement with the education system.
Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal by Bettina L. Love
Statistics show Black students and other students of color receive disciplinary action more frequently than other students. They are also more likely to drop out of school and less likely to receive early childhood education and access gifted and advanced courses. Bettina Love, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, writes about our education system from the desegregation of schools through COVID and into the modern day. Through this timeline, and especially through tracing the education policies put into place during the Reagan era, she argues that policies that negatively affected the education of Black students then are still an issue today.
To repair these injustices, Love suggests we first understand these policies and their real-life effects. She does that by providing cases of students affected by these policies and data to show their harm. She also provides potential solutions. Those include funding to make up for missed opportunities and negative effects on Black and brown students from those education policies that over-punished and under-resourced students.
The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley
The United States has always claimed its education system is effective, but how does it measure up against other countries? Journalist Amanda Ripley hopes to answer this question, and she does so by enlisting the help of three American teenagers. Each went outside of the U.S., choosing to spend one year living and learning in South Korea, Poland and Finland, countries that, according to data from the Programme for International Student Assessment, all had very high educational standards. Through this study, we see not only how those education systems differ from the U.S., but also how attitudes, parenting and the way schools operate — including how they hire teachers — affect how students learn.
To understand our education system, Ripley believes we must zoom out and look at how other countries behave and what expectations are being set for their students, as well as how effective these methods are.
This book not only shares the experiences of these three students, but provides outside data that offers a comprehensive overview of what schooling looks like in these countries and, overall, what makes them so successful.
Yardsticks: Child and Adolescent Development Ages 4-14 by Chip Wood
In order to meet students where they are, we must understand where that is. Education, after all, is about the students, not the educators.
In this book, Chip Wood, who has more than 45 years of experience teaching, heading school operations and training educators, explores cognitive, social-emotional and physical characteristics that are unique to each age. He shares the ways teachers and parents can apply knowledge of those characteristics to children in that 4-14 span.
To best serve children, we must first understand how they think, how they operate, how they change as they get older. This book is a great resource for educators who interact with elementary and middle school students, as well as adults who wish to better understand kids in this age range. The book also includes charts on typical moods, interests, behaviors, and skills for each age.
