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A teacher assesses the past decade in K-12 education — and makes 9 predictions for the 2020s is the headline of my latest piece for The Washington Post.
By the way, you can see over two-hundred articles I’ve written over the years here, as well as checking out The Seventeen Best Articles I’ve Written About Education.
Larry, I want to say you do an amazing job at driving and maintaining the education conversation the last 10+ years. With that said, I’m somewhat stunned that in your top 10 lists of the 2010’s or 2020’s good/bad there is not one mention of the literacy/numeracy crisis that 25-50% of our student population has. Its just like a large scale epidemic that traps 10’s millions of students reading/math on 2-6 grades behind their US classmates much less the Top tier PISA countries. While all the programs to address the 100’s of other issues that a large diverse population we have is important, it should not come before our basic learning/education requirements of a strong literacy/numeracy foundation.
Having spent over 20 years working in greater NYC area on these issues I find almost no support from the traditional education leadership.It would be great to see far more coverage. You have written awesome books as tools but your public policy positions seem limited. Doing a search analysis of your posts I find the annual literacy day every year, 1-2 posts on ELL’s learning / literacy, 1-2 articles on an approach used in literacy development and almost zero posts by you on the topic as a critical aspect of the development of students in America. On numeracy skills next to nothing. PISA scores which seem to not be important as a benchmark or any benchmarks are not covered deeply.