34justice

  • A Conversation with John Stuart Mill

    If you haven’t read J.S. Mill’s classic work, I highly recommend it for 1 main reason: it is a keen and succulent defense of individual rights. The book changed my life, in a very painful and liberating way, because it forced me to be extra critical of the rules and…

  • Working Together for Educational Equity: What’s Missing from the TFA Debate

    Teach For America (TFA) articles are all the rage right now.  Over the past month and a half, the four articles linked below have received particular attention: “I Quit Teach for[sic] America” by Olivia Blanchard (The Atlantic, September 23) “Remember the ‘I Quit Teach for[sic] America’ essay?  Here’s the counterpoint.…

  • On Time, Pt. 1

    This is a first of a series on time, apparently. Time is great. Time is. If you ask most people what their time is worth, they’ll think it’s an absurd question. Obviously, you can’t put a value on their time. Who do you think you are? Just like most progressive…

  • A bit on Ignorance

    I’m fascinated by ignorance for several reasons: 1. Few people completely understand it because few spend actual time acknowledging their ignorance, understanding why it’s there, and what it actually means. Can I identify something if I don’t understand it? Is ignorance a bad thing? If so, why? Everyone takes it…

  • The Shutdown: Blame Republicans but Watch the Democrats

    I wrote an email to my political mailing list on August 21, 2011 entitled “Does the White House have Power?”  At that time, many mainstream Democrats insisted that Barack Obama was an innocent victim of an intransigent Congress, that he ardently supported progressive priorities like a public health care option…

  • Voting with Our Dollars for Chipotle

    Vote with your dollars.  That’s the message Mike Levy, my tenth grade history and ethics teacher, delivered to Moorestown Friends School’s graduating class in 2004 (the same year 34justice author Jon Zaid delivered a convincing anti-war speech to that same class).  That idea – that I send a loud message…

  • The Mural Capital

    I consider Philadelphia my city. I have never lived in it or attended school there, but I have worked there and have family that reside all throughout its various far-reaching sections. Some of these family members will even order a “wooter” when they go to a restaurant from time to…

  • On Intellectual Honesty

    Below is an incomplete list of what intellectual honesty means to me. Let me know what I missed, or if I’m wrong. Please comment if you have any thoughts at all; I want to hear from you. Yeah, you. 1. Admit you could be wrong. “The surest way to corrupt…

  • TFA Effectiveness

    Several people have sent me articles discussing Mathematica’s recent research study that examined Teach For America (TFA) math teacher effectiveness.  This study is significant because, to my knowledge, it is the first large-scale study on TFA to randomly assign students to classrooms.  Its experimental design provides fairly convincing support for…

  • The Teach Like a Champion Paradigm

    At the middle school where I currently serve as Math Instructional Coach, part of our professional development consists of reading Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion.  This book provides a list of “49 techniques that [ostensibly] put students on the path to college” and is a Teach For America (TFA)…