Category: Education
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Anti-Vaxxers: Why Medical Students Aren’t Being Trained to Weigh-in
With increasing frequency I have been asked by friends and well-wishers about how “anti-vaxxers” are being broached by my medical school professors. Simply put, we aren’t being taught anything on the matter. This is insight on how future physicians are being groomed to handle public misinformation and media outcry. Obviously…
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Everything You Need to Know About Inequality
Jared Bernstein and I just published a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation on inequality in the United States (available for download here). This presentation is first and foremost intended as a resource. Part 1 of the presentation documents the increase in inequality over the past 35 years; the trend is evident from…
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TFA, CTA, and What It Means to Be a Union
A former instructional coach and one of only five people selected nationwide as a 2012 recipient of the Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence, Jen Thomas is now President of the San Jose Teachers Association (SJTA). In this post, also destined for the next issue of the California Educator, Jen…
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The Political Lens: What Global Warming and Wright v. New York Have in Common
During the 2003-2004 school year, my chemistry teacher told my class that global warming wasn’t occurring. I believed her. When I attended New Jersey’s Governor’s School of International Studies in the summer of 2005, a professor told me the opposite – the evidence for global warming, and for the human…
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On Education and Poverty, and How We Talk About Them (Part 3b)
StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I recently began a debate about approaches to teacher evaluation. During Part 2 of that debate, the conversation touched on the relationship between anti-poverty work and education reform. We resume that conversation below. Here were the relevant parts of our original exchange, in case…
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Cooks, Chefs, and Teachers: A Long-Form Debate on Evaluation (Part 3a)
StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I have been debating teacher evaluation approaches since my blog post about why evaluating teachers based on student test scores is misguided and counterproductive. Our conversation began to touch on the relationship between anti-poverty activism and education reform conversations, a topic we plan to…
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Eric Lerum and I Debate Teacher Evaluation and the Role of Anti-Poverty Work (Part 2)
StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I recently began debating the use of standardized test scores in high stakes decision-making. I argued in a recent blog post that we should instead evaluate teachers on what they directly control – their actions. Our conversation, which began to touch on additional interesting…
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What Did I Just Pay For?
One year down and the greater part of a decade to go. As a first year medical student, having finished class for a couple months has allowed for ample time to digest much of what happened to me over the last twelve months, I can’t help but ask the question:…
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StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I Debate Accountability Measures (Part 1)
After my blog post on the problem with outcome-oriented teacher evaluations and school accountability measures, StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I exchanged a few tweets about student outcomes and school inputs and decided to debate teacher and school accountability more thoroughly. We had a lengthy email conversation we agreed…
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