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American Educator: Fall 2007
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Notebook
Want to See the World? Go on Summer SabbaticalTeachers often tell their students that the world is their classroom. Thanks to one man's generosity, teachers can more fully experience that world for themselves—and inspire their students with a sense of adventure.
A decade ago, businessman Raymond Plank, chairman of the board of the...
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The Agenda That Saved Public Education
Albert Shanker was president of the AFT from 1974 until his death in 1997. His ideas about teacher unionism, improving schools, and the importance of public education have substantially shaped the perspective of the modern AFT. In a new biography of Shanker, excerpted below, the author,...
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Peer Assistance and Review
Peer assistance and review was the brainchild of Dal Lawrence, the union president in Toledo, Ohio, an AFT affiliate. Like Albert Shanker, Lawrence had strong union credentials that gave him credibility with members to try innovative things. He was also a maverick. For a number of years,...
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"Where We Stand"
"Where We Stand," a weekly paid column, began running in December 1970, in the Sunday New York Times' Week in Review section. Its impact was monumental.
In the late 1960s, Shanker had grown frustrated that his attempts to be published in various magazines and newspapers had been...
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Teaching Plutarch in the Age of Hollywood
In the summer of 2006, at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., I had the pleasure of working with a dozen Los Angeles high school teachers, test-driving the classics in the curriculum. Part of a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities project, the two-week workshop explored...
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Plutarch for the Sound-Bite Generation
Let me be the first to admit that teaching with Plutarch is a challenge. For high school students, the language is difficult and the references obscure. But it is still possible—and worthwhile—to introduce students to Plutarch though excerpts from the Lives. The excerpts below could be...
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Can Plutarch Regain Popularity?
Like all ancient authors today, Plutarch is at best a name to most people, even—especially?—to most college-educated people. You, dear reader, are of a select group, because you know that Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120) was a Greek biographer and moral philosopher who wrote, among other things, a famous...
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Focusing on Academic Intensity and the Road to College Success
Eight years ago, Clifford Adelman, then a senior researcher with the U.S. Department of Education, published a striking finding—high school students' "academic resources" (a combination of high school curriculum, score on an SAT-like test, and class rank) have a greater impact on completing a...
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Focusing on the Forgotten
How to Put More Kids on the Track to College SuccessNot long ago, Cesar Moran was more concerned with hanging out with his friends than making good grades. His parents, Mexican immigrants, did not go to college. His father works in construction, his mother, in an office that sells wallpaper. Although they always reminded Cesar to do his homework...
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When Challenged, Average Kids Succeed
In both Answers in the Toolbox and The Toolbox Revisited (see "Focusing on Academic Intensity and the Road to College Success"), Adelman urged policymakers to use his findings to help more students...
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Be the First in Your Family to Go to College
You Can Do It—and This Advice from Other First-Generation College Students Can HelpHazel Janssen thinks of herself as an artist. "I love to act," she says, "but I also knit, I sew, I shoot and edit movies." When she found herself crammed into the over-crowded classrooms of a huge Denver high school, she fell behind in her work and lost interest in school. "I need a lot of...
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Two-Year's the Ticket
With all the talk about four-year colleges, it may seem to students like they face a stark choice: Either get a bachelor's degree or end up at a fast-food joint, flipping burgers for the rest of their lives. Many students fear that without a four-year degree they will be destined to work in dead...
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The Journey Begins Now
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Teaching the Legacy of Little Rock