It’s no secret that arts subjects are increasingly being deprioritised in many schools, and that there’s a fall in the number of pupils taking arts subjects at GCSE. Yet the arts matter, not only to individual learning but to the UK as a whole: the creative industries currently contribute £84.1bn a year to the economy. Enthusiasm for art…
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As members of the University and College Union, including myself, gear up for the upcoming wave of strikes, I find myself wondering how we should communicate to students and the wider public what we’re doing and why. I find this a very difficult subject to broach. I love teaching and care deeply about my students. We’ve…
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Politics is not just anyone’s game. Typically, if you want to play, you have to be a certain type of person. You only have to glance at parliament to see that straight, white, able-bodied men are disproportionately overrepresented. That’s why, as the leaders of the Labour party’s youth movement, running our annual Equalities Academy has been one…
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When it comes to the history of slavery in the U.S., the central role it played in shaping the country and its continued impact on race relations, students don’t know much. In fact, only 8 percent of high school seniors can identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, according to a report…
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A year ago, a group of prominent economists led by Raj Chetty of Stanford Universitycame out with a splashy piece of research measuring exactly how much each college in the nation helps working-class kids rise up the economic ladder. (Splashy for nerdy education circles, at least. See here and here.) It was a giant data project, tracking how much…
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In a new map of the U.S. that details student academic growth, Tennessee is a bright green beacon in a sea of purple. “If you are looking for Tennessee on a student growth map, just look for the bright green rectangle in the mid South,” Kevin Huffman, former state education chief of Tennessee, said on Twitter. “That’s us.”…
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Montessori schools have many loyal devotees and they’re certainly rising in popularity among American parents. But are they any better than traditional schools, or other progressive teaching philosophies? You’d think we’d know the answer to that question by now. Montessori schools have been around for more than a hundred years, dating back to Maria Montessori’s…
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Public schools in Baltimore were closed Thursday after the Baltimore Teachers Union demanded they be shuttered until officials can properly assess and fix heating problems that came to a head this week amid consecutive days of freezing weather. “Kids can’t learn and teachers can’t teach in freezing classrooms and in schools with no heat, frozen…
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Teacher Loraine Wilson, top right, helps bundle up pre-kindergarten students as they wait to be picked up at the end of a school day at Lakewood Elementary School in Baltimore on Jan. 9, 2018. The recent spell of cold weather exposed the poor state of school buildings in many big-city East Coast districts, including Baltimore. (Patrick…
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At the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, about 8,000 students have earned their ordinary course grades in an unusual way. They start out the semester with a zero, but each has the opportunity to earn an A by racking up points. The professor determines how many points each assignment or test is worth, and there’s…
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