You have to be Effing crazy. I should know. I have helped folks start schools for 20 years. I run a school incubator, and that line about being crazy is the opening and closing line of my introductory training. And I am serious. We don’t have any hedge fund donors, aren’t drinking any free…
education reform
Education Reform’s “Other People’s Children” Problem
We have a serious “Other People’s Children” problem in education reform. Many if not most of the spokespeople and decision makers, really don’t represent or often understand the communities they are “reforming.” This has a distorting effect on the reforms and also gives folks the often real impression that reforms are being done to them rather than…
Return to New Orleans
10 years ago, I drove into a darkened New Orleans. Literally. The streetlights were off, traffic lights non- functional, and there were still large swaths of the city with no power. It’s hard to explain what it was like. Driving down the I-10, and seeing the increasing devastation in the countryside, as you approach, and…
Witness to New Orleans- republishing a photo essay I did in NOLA post Katrina
WITNESS TO NEW ORLEANS by Dirk Tillotson Not even the birds have returned to the Ninth Ward. Warm summer winds lap through the scores of neighborhoods that lay in rubble in what was once New Orleans. Driving through block after block, hardly a sign of life. Homes ripped from their moorings, perching…
The Upcoming Pain from the Common Core, and Why it’s Worth it
“I feel like a failure”, one of our top teachers muttered with downcast eyes. They had just gotten a glimpse of the data trickling out from the latest tests in California, the first that reflected the new, more rigorous, Common Core curriculum standards. This from a teacher who is on top of their game, has…