Weekend To-Do List
2/3 - 2/4
1. The Stunning Transformation of Ryan Walters
READ: Adolfo Flores and Matt Barnum spoke with former students of Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s secretary of education who went from being a beloved high school teacher to a public figure who calls teachers unions terrorist organizations and says schools are “Epstein islands” of sexual predators. Walters’s students, who remember debating topics like abortion in the classroom, are shocked by their former teacher’s public rhetoric:
“He was compassionate, reasonable, levelheaded,” said Starla Edge, one of his former students. “The things he says now are just so backward from anything he ever said to us in class.”
Read more in the Wall Street Journal here.
2. From Controversy to Conviction
READ: Hannah Natanson penned a profile of high school English teacher Mary Wood, a South Carolina-based educator who faced backlash after teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me to her predominately white, conservative students. Wood returned to the classroom this year and decided that, instead of appeasing the critics, she would teach the book again:
“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”
Read more in the Washington Post here.
3. New Study Shows Mixed Progress in Pandemic Recovery
READ: Students have regained about a third of what they lost during the pandemic in math and a quarter in reading. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University found that the U.S. Has made some progress in addressing learning loss, but noted that the results also showed wider gaps between students from rich and poor students:
“We seemed to have lost the urgency in this crisis,” said Karyn Lewis, who has studied pandemic learning declines for NWEA, a research and student assessment group. “It is problematic for the average kid. It is catastrophic for the kids who were hardest hit.”
Read more from Claire Cain Miller, Sarah Mervosh, and Francesca Paris in the New York Times here.
4. How To Save Academic Freedom
READ: Lost Debate guest and Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen took to the pages of The New Yorker to reflect on the resignation of Claudine Gay, the rise of self-censorship around students, and the impact of government and public opinion on academic freedom, free speech, and inclusion on college campuses. Gersen urged her colleagues to think carefully about what it would take to embrace a culture of true freedom on college campuses:
The post-Gay crisis has created a crossroads, where universities will be tempted to discipline objectionable speech in order to demonstrate that they are dedicated to rooting out antisemitism and Islamophobia, too. Unless we conscientiously and mindfully pull away from that path, academic freedom—which is essential to fulfilling a university’s purpose—will meet its destruction.
Read more here.
5. Small Town, Big Loss
READ: Jon Marcus at The Washington Post traveled to St. Martin, Ohio, to better understand the impact a college closure can have on a rural community. St. Martin’s Chatfield College closed in 2022 after 177 years in existence and only 129 enrolled students in its last semester, citing declining enrollment trends and unsustainable fiscal losses. Closing rural colleges increases the barrier to higher education for local students, who are already 6% less likely to go directly to college than their suburban counterparts:
A big reason for this is a lack of confidence, [Chatfield College Associate Dean David] Hesson said. “They don’t think they can do it. It’s unknown.” And without a college close by, “you lose accessibility.”
Read more here.
6. The Classroom to Career Pipeline
LISTEN: Diane Tavenner and Michael B. Horn sat down with Ryan Craig, author of Apprentice Nation, for an episode of The 74’s Class Disrupted podcast, where they talked about Ryan’s latest book and why the earn-and-learn alternative to traditional higher education might be the education of the future. I also spoke with Ryan last month on our Sweat the Technique podcast to discuss where the U.S. has gone wrong in preparing our young people to enter the workforce and how we can do better.
Listen to the episode here, and listen to my own episode with Ryan on Sweat the Technique here.
7. Look Mom, I’m A Podcaster
READ/LISTEN: My Sweat the Technique co-host Doug Lemov penned a reflection on his first year as a podcaster and how some of his recent episodes best reflect his current thinking about schools and their place in the world. Check it out here, and make sure to subscribe to Sweat the Technique here.