Current events and perspectives from the Eskolta team
School Accountability after 2014
What does the year 2014 matter in the history of public education? For those who are keeping score, this is the year, according to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), when every student in America was supposed to have achieved proficiency. According to the law, which...
A Nation Still at Risk
Thirty years ago, the authors of A Nation at Risk told us: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to...
Recognizing the Importance of Feedback in Education
For years in education, when talking about what matters in classrooms everyone refers to the same power trio: curriculum, instruction, and assessment. But in doing so we often under-emphasize a critical fourth ingredient: feedback. Feedback merits the same level of...
Are Computers in the Classroom Tools or Diversions?
At some point early in the U.S.-Soviet space race, the two nations set out to solve a problem: How would space travelers write in the subzero weightlessness of outer space? Harnessing millions of dollars in resources along with the ingenuity of the same scientists who...
Peer Learning: Worth All Its Inefficiency
At first glance, democracy is not a very efficient system. Put a good dictator in charge and it would seem you can get a lot more accomplished a lot more quickly. But we have learned since grade school to recoil at such ideas in part because we know that the more we...
What Do We Value in Our Students?
Values: They’re the third rail of public education. You can talk about preparing students for college or career or learning basic skills, or you can talk about teaching dancing or drumming or DNA. Just don’t talk about teaching values. I can understand people’s...
How to Deal with Failures
What if you were repeatedly told you were a failure? Eventually, you would turn off, give up, drop out. This is, unfortunately, the experience of many students who struggle in New York schools, just a few of whom get back on track and end up in transfer schools. Five...
Making the Grade
It is virtually impossible to think about schools without thinking about grades and test scores. For many, they are taken for granted as the way to judge results. Test scores have many advantages. They feel reassuringly final: no wishy-washy changing them after the...
Adding Value: Let’s Be Careful About What We Measure
Are students learning? At a time when teachers’ unions are being bashed, budgets are shrinking, and the big funders are demanding that every teacher be measured by their test scores, it seems only fair to ask: What do the numbers tell us about student learning? Many...
What’s in a Name?
What’s in a name? “Eskolta” may be hard to spell, but here at Eskolta, it means a lot to us. Latin happens to have two very similar words for “listen” (ausculto) and “school” (schola); squashing them together, you get: Eskolta. It was important to me in naming this...