- When the Los Angeles Board of Education voted to fire fifth-grade teacher Rafe Esquith last week over allegations of sexual misconduct, its members were doubtless aware of the potential for blowback. Esquith, whose myriad awards and world-renowned classroom productions of Shakespeare have made him the district’s most recognizable employee, can count influential friends both inside and outside the school system. And the circumstances of his termination—decided by a closed-door tribunal following an extensive investigation into his private life—do not argue in its favor. Now Esquith’s attorneys have filed a $1 billion class-action lawsuit against the district on behalf of thousands of teachers, claiming that they were targeted for dismissal because of their age and pending retirement windfalls. The accusations lodged against Esquith are ill defined, but serious. If accurate, they are surely serious enough to merit public examination of his record and methods. But if, as some prominent supporters claim, the investigation was a panicked overcorrection in response to earlier scandals, this story could become more bizarre and tragic than it has already. Either way, this is a disciplinary process in dire need of greater transparency.
- The saddest and most illuminating thing you’ll read all week is this long-form Washington Post profile of the plight of impoverished high school graduates in the Deep South. Reporter Chico Harlan spent months with ninteteen-year-old Jadareous Davis, a recent graduate trapped by the social and institutional pathologies of economically depressed Drew, Mississippi. Davis, who squeaked through one of the worst high schools in the state, watches in horror as the pride of his commencement ceremony gives way to unemployment and family dysfunction. He finds a modicum of hope in vocational training, but odds this steep should never weigh against a kid fresh from his senior prom. The United States as a whole, and this region most especially, must come to grips with its inequities and embrace a full program of upward mobility—before more young people are doomed to the same hell.
- The lecture is dead, long live the lecture! Over the weekend, Molly Worthen, an assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, penned an op-ed for the New York Times’s Sunday Review defending the lecture—the beleaguered teaching method we all skipped or slept through in our riotous college days. The favored alternative is “active learning,” which is so strongly backed that educators like Harvard physicist Eric Mazur have opined that lectures might even be “unethical.” And in the hard sciences, Mazur may have a point. Mixing chemicals in the orgo lab and observing kinematics in the physics lab really does deepen understanding and raise scores. But in the humanities, Worthen argues that lectures—in which experts build arguments instead of reciting encyclopedia entries—are still the best way to educate students, especially when paired with smaller discussion sections. “Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize, and react as they listen,” she argues. And in the 140-character, six-second age, students have little experience with such prolonged exchanges. They ought to gain some, and maybe lectures can help.
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