Solving the Education Crisis in America

EDUCATION REFORM

• NAACP Dinner Focuses on School Reform (BY Allan Appel, New Haven Independent) Yale psychiatrist and school reform pioneer James Comer received a lifetime-achievement award.  His “Comer method” addresses social development as intrinsic to academic development; it is in place at the high-performing Davis Street Magnet School and nine others in the New Haven system.
• Leveling the Playing Field in our Classrooms (Gabrielle Kurlander, President and CEO, All Stars Project, Inc.) The All Stars Project recently released a new white paper, entitled  Solving the Education Crisis in America: Let’s Pretend, by our co-founders, Fred Newman, Ph.D. and Lenora Fulani, Ph.D. which discusses how poverty and the life circumstances of poor youth impacts on their capacity to become good learners and how that “difficult truth” (as Nocera calls it) can not only be faced – but positively and effectively addressed.
• The Limits of School Reform (By JOE NOCERA, NY Times) What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.