Education Next – Robert Pondiscio
“My biggest takeaway from five years of teaching fifth grade in a South Bronx public school was this: much of what I had been taught about why my students struggled with reading comprehension and literacy was simply incorrect, and almost certainly doomed to fail. There was no conspiracy at work. No impersonal forces lined up to keep the majority of my students—all of them black or brown; all of them low-income—achieving below grade level. And forget what you think you know about teacher incompetence, institutional indifference, or the malign effects of teachers unions. My school was, in the main, filled with earnest people trying hard and failing. Not despite their training, but because of it. Our efforts were praiseworthy, but insufficient because we were overlooking something essential.”(more)