- “Irony is often amusing,” writes Calhoun School Headmaster Steve Nelson in his new philippic against rigor in early childhood education, proving once again that he lacks even a basic understanding of what that word means. It’s not totally clear what gets taught at Nelson’s $45,000-per-year academy, but the Gadfly’s definition of irony is this: when the half-million-dollar mouthpiece of one of the ritziest schools on the Upper West Side descends from Olympus to admonish teachers of impoverished students against actually trying to teach them anything. “Play-based,” content-free learning might be fine for the children of hedge fund managers, who will have lots of opportunities to screw up before easing into careers as progressive school principals. But it’s not cutting it for kids from low-income families, who often arrive at school with huge skills deficits and consequently have to, you know, learn something. Now it’s time for Nelson to learn a lesson of his own: Stick to finger painting in the Imagination Station, and quit lecturing those who are actually trying to help the poor.
- In other Big Apple news: Bill de Blasio is beginning to get a reputation—and not just for chronic dawdling and eating pizza like your great-uncle. Last week, in a fiasco that brought back memories of the great charter school imbroglio of 2014, the New York mayor’s move to clip Uber’s wings within the city blew up in his face. The popular car service proved even more deft at marshalling public outrage than Eva Moskowitz did last year, highlighting its mostly minority workforce and customer base as the big losers of a proposed cap on the company’s services. As Derrell Bradford put it, “Uber and charter schools are opposite sides of the same disruptive, empowering coin.” Why is Hizzoner’s first political instinct to jump in with both feet and place crude limitations on innovation, only to earn a rebuke from the little guys he’s supposed to be looking out for?
- Who is Linda Brown? (That’s a sincere question, not an Ayn Randian invocation of the virtues of selfishness.) For one thing, she’s the director of Building Excellent Schools, a Boston-area educational leadership program that sets out to train the founders and principals of life-changing charter schools. And according to a revelatory article at the crack new site The Seventy-Four, she’s getting ready to step down after a career spent seeding excellent new places of learning for disadvantaged kids (including a network of charter schools we’re proud to authorize in Columbus). Brown has become something of a cult figure in reform circles, her name spoken in hushed tones by the leaders of no-excuses charters from D.C. to Denver; the piece’s title even dubs her “the grandmother of America’s best charter schools.” As Fordham has made clear, school leadership is one of the most important and least appreciated factors in improving outcomes for students who start out behind—and BES has consistently earned its place among the best training programs in the country. Good work, Linda.
