Search

Days after a bicycle crash that would erase her memory for two months, Ingrid Rojas Contreras answered her phone and heard the voice of a woman she presumably didn't know, [...]

Edwidge Danticat writes about death, even the most brutal, with a lyricism that reminds us of a primal paradox--within the deepest violence and loss, the life-force reasserts itself. A mother [...]

Through a series of interviews, Erik Gleibermann explores how eight prominent bilingual US writers approach their dual-language craft as they navigate identity between a childhood lived in one tongue and [...]

THE WOMEN SLIDE through stalled traffic, balancing on their colorful head scarves baskets of plantains for sale, or groundnuts or shampoo flasks. If they don't firmly assert themselves into the [...]

The goal of No Child Left Behind appears admirable: by 2014 every child in the nation will test to proficiency in core math and literacy skills. However, as we investigate what schools need to reach these goals, we expose what teachers have long experienced one arduous day at a time: our school system is based on a 19th-century factory model that cycles 150 students a day through the teacher's classroom, a process never intended to ensure that all students achieve high-level skills. We have yet to promote alternative models that might point us toward universal success or to provide resources for public education that would appreciably reduce teacher workload. By itemizing the amount of time it would take to address all of his students' needs, the author demonstrates that it would be impossible for him to do so under the current system.

In this article, the author shares that despite all the efforts he puts in his teaching, 30 percent of his 150 students still fail. However, when he calculate the needed hours to appropriately cover all the needs of his students, he realized that even 100 hours of teaching each week is not enough to have all his students succeed. The author observes that the current school system is based on a 19th-century factory model that cycles 150 students a day through a teacher's classroom, a process that was never intended to ensure that all students achieve high-level skills. The author believes that the U.S. has the means to fully mandate to educate all children well and what is just needed to solve this problem is a radical reprioritization of budgets.

Suppose a teacher in an urban high school wanted to do more than survive. Suppose he wanted to do the job right. Sharpening his pencil and firing up his calculator, [...]