May/June 2006

Making Schools Safer for LGBT Youth

by Michael Sadowski

Shelby is an openly gay junior at a large suburban high school near Boston. On most days, she says, she feels lucky to attend a relatively affluent, liberal school that offers her “an excellent education, opportunities to pursue my passions, and a fairly safe place for me to express my sexual orientation.” Issues like same-sex marriage, now legal in Massachusetts, have been discussed in several of her classes, and incidents of homophobia are addressed swiftly.

Nonetheless, Shelby says the undercurrents of homophobia run deep among her peers.

The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.

Rx for a Profession

The Connecticut Superintendents’ Network uses a “medical rounds” model to discuss teaching and learning

By Robert Rothman

Like many school administrators, Mary Conway, superintendent of the Plainfield (Conn.) School District, used to devote the bulk of her time and energy to the routine operations of her 3,000-pupil rural district. Over the past four years, though, she and her leadership team have begun to turn their focus from bus schedules and meal programs to topics like student reading performance. Conway attributes this shift in perspective to her participation in the Connecticut Superintendents’ Network, a group of two dozen administrators from urban, rural, and suburban districts throughout the state who meet monthly to discuss research, visit classrooms, and reflect on their role as superintendents in supporting instructional improvement.

The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.

Better than Best

How insights from cognitive science can moderate the debate over education reform

by Michael J. Feuer

A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal captures an all-too-familiar critique of the teaching profession: “The Best Ways to Make Schoolchildren Learn? We Just Don’t Know.” I add the italics to highlight a motif pervasive in debates over education policy: What ails our schools is imperfect knowledge, and if only educators could be as sure of classroom practice as, say, medical doctors are of surgical technique, we would know, once and for all, the best ways to teach all children.

The idea that there is one best way to teach all children, and that we can know with a high degree of confidence what that is, has inspired—and frustrated—education reformers for centuries. But it’s not obvious that the search for unequivocally “best” solutions is well suited to the complexity of schools and teaching.

The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.

To subscribe to Harvard Education Letter, click here.