Blog
I write about education, equity, democracy—and how they fit together
Preparing High Schoolers for College Writing Success—Pt 4 (A Sociocultural Model of Writing)
A general disconnect between high school and college instruction is well documented.[1] According to a six-year national study on college...
Preparing High Schoolers for College Writing Success—Pt 3 (Authentic Composition)
First, students need practice with extended, source-based composition. As shown above, an abundance of research indicates that most student...
Preparing High Schoolers for College Writing Success—Pt 2 (What is College-Ready Writing?)
There is no universal standard of college-ready writing, in part because there are such wide differences in the academic demands of postsecondary...
Preparing High Schoolers for College Writing Success—Pt 1 (Introduction)
Too many students find that the kind of writing they were asked to do in high school does not resemble the writing required of them in college....
Online Education Connecting Learners to Enterprising Teachers Worldwide
Universities began putting their courses online in the form of “Massively Open Online Courses” (MOOCs) about a decade ago, with the idea of...
The Future of Testing
Given how much the rest of education has changed since the middle of the 20th century, it’s remarkable that the model of large-scale student...
A Place for the Humanities in the Digital Age
In the 1950s, C. P. Snow famously argued that academia had separated into two cultures—the sciences and the humanities—with no commerce between...
At the Intersection of Creativity and Critical Thinking
Creativity and critical thinking sit atop most lists of skills crucial for success in the 21st century. They represent two of the “Four Cs” in...
Integrating Cognitive, Social, and Personal Competencies
Educators have come increasingly to recognize that student success depends on more than content knowledge and skills alone. After all, learning...
The School Choice Paradox: Competition vs. Monopoly
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently released a list of proposed priorities for her department’s competitive grants program. Number one is...
When Is School Choice a Bad Choice?
With Betsy DeVos as head of the Department of Education, it is a sure bet that school choice initiatives will be at the top of national school...
Why Are Standardized Tests So Boring?: A Sensitive Subject
It is a guiding principle in test development that stimulus materials and test questions should not upset test-takers. Much like dinner...
Is the ACT a Valid Test? (Spoiler Alert: No.)
ACT, Inc. released the results of its 2016 National Curriculum Survey earlier this year. The Survey goes out every three or four years to...
College As Culture Shock
The standards-based education reform movement, kicked off by A Nation At Risk in 1983, has been around long enough now to start showing results,...
Authentic Learning Requires Authentic Assessment
If project-based learning were to form the core of curricula in American schools, our problems with large-scale standardized testing would become...
Function Follows Form
The problems with standardized tests lie less with the content they cover than with their very form—which drives their content and everything...
Welcome to the Sausage Factory
I used to work for ACT, Inc., designing and developing student assessments. In my final years there, I was Director of the Writing and...
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