Peter Gow, Trying to Further Education and Educators

Archive for the NotYourFathersSchool Category

The Higher Calling: Mission-Driven Schools, Duty, and (Public) Service

This is about words that can sometimes sound out of tune to the contemporary educational ear, but words that we have heard often lately in important contexts: duty, obedience, service. When I hear these words, I tend to envision uniformed men, rigid countenances, shiny weapons. At  first […]

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11 Things That I Wish “21st-Century Education” Evangelists Weren’t Doing So Much Of

One thing I have noticed about those lists of “My Top Ten Blog Posts of 2014” summaries favored by many bloggers is that many of the most widely read blog posts are comprised of listicles, urgent-sounding enumerated lists of must-dos or must-haves or pet peeves. Because Not […]

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THE MINI-TERM PROMISE

When I was in college I envied friends at colleges with “Jan Terms.” From my vantage point at a ponderous, grad school-ridden university, these four-week terms looked pretty appealing, great examples of nimble, student-interested-based programs that could happen in smaller liberal arts colleges to make education fresh […]

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Sitting Down to Turkey in Discomfort With My Privilege

Our epitaph will no doubt be that we were good people, nice people, who tried to do the right thing. Once a year we were even thankful, unless of course we were on an early morning shopping spree or being forced to work selling gadgets and gewgaws […]

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CODING IS JUST THE NEW SURVEYING

A tip from a wise friend, Thomas Steele-Maley, brought me back to some old school reading the other day: Theodore Sizer’s The Age of the Academies, from 1964. A look at the roots and fruits of the pre-Civil War “academy movement” in the United States, the little […]

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THE DATA PARADOX: MORE DATA, MORE QUESTIONS

I’m on the train home from a very interesting conference, “Using Data to Make Thoughtful Decisions About Schools” at the ridiculously gorgeous (especially on a sunny late fall day) St. Andrew’s School in Delaware. (In a synchronicitous link to a previous post here, St. Andrew’s was a […]

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INNOVATION: AND WHO’S THE CULPRIT, NOW?

In today’s NAIS Bulletin blog post, National Association of Independent Schools president John Chubb asks, “Are Colleges the Culprit?” For generations, he notes, schools—independent schools chief among them, often enough—have laid the blame for congenital curricular conservatism at the door of colleges. The fact is, “what colleges […]

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SLOW-GRADING TEACHERS: CANARIES IN OUR COAL MINES

This is what students call “Early Decision week,” and college counseling offices are quietly freaking out as they collate the last bits of paperwork to send off to colleges in support of students’ applications. When I directed such an office, the bane of my existence at this […]

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Disruptive Innovation: The Mirror and the Crystal Ball

The other night on the #PubPriBridge Twitter chat we took on the topic of change in schools, and the conversation surfaced some pretty strong feelings on the point and purposes of change. Consensus, I feel comfortable saying, lay on the side of change, Heck, yes! but change […]

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Will Your Smart Watch Save the World?

At some point in 1968 my high school Spanish teacher—a rather gloomy fellow, he was—recommended that we read Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. First published that year, The Population Bomb was a kind of pop science (if you can say this about the work of a Stanford […]

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF TRADITIONAL LANDS

I here affirm that the offices from which I work are situated on lands that have a very long and continuing history as a locus of residence, livelihood, traditional expression, and exchange by the Massachusett, Wampanoag, Abenaki, Mohawk, Wabanaki, Hohokam, O’odam, Salt River Pima, and Maricopa people. The servers for this website are situated on Ute and Goshute land. We make this acknowledgment to remind ourselves, our educational partners, and our friends of our shared obligation to acknowledge and work toward righting the inequities and injustices that have alienated indigenous peoples from the full occupation and utilization of these spaces.