- The heroic journalism of the Boston Globe in exposing pedophilia enabled by the Catholic Church was the focus of last year’s Oscar-winning Spotlight. Now the paper has trained its attention on New England preparatory schools, where some allegations of misconduct date back a half-century or more. Its survey of the claims is penetrating and comprehensive: Nearly seventy such schools have faced complaints of sexual harassment or abuse in the last twenty-five years, with accusations lodged by two hundred alleged victims. And we have no reason to believe that the exploitation is limited to private schools; as a 2004 literature synthesis undertaken by the Department of Education makes clear, sexual misconduct plagues schools across the country and in every sector.
- At one point, forty-four states were affiliated with one of the two next-generation testing consortia (PARCC and Smarter Balanced) that arose with the widespread adoption of the Common Core. This spring, just twenty-one of those states will be administering the tests. Chalkbeat has published a thorough account of the political machinations that overtook the assessments, as well as the efforts of legislators to pull away from them. In dozens of states, what followed was chaos. Curricular experts were overruled by lawmakers, instructional materials were withdrawn, and their hastily adopted replacements fell victim to technological mishaps. As a policy analyst with the New America Foundation put it, “A lot of this has to do with sort of perception wars around the assessments and less to do with the practicality of choosing the best assessments for our kids,”
- Grit—the melding of motivation, perseverance, and tolerance for boredom that allows our greatest scholars and athletes to spend hours honing their skills—has been getting an awful lot of play lately. It’s occasioned by the release of a new book by Angela Duckworth, the researcher most closely associated with the emergence of grit as an attribute worthy of attention (and promotion in schools). But if you only have time to read one of the quickly multiplying takes on the book, let it be David Brooks’s column in the New York Times. In it, he praises Duckworth but offers a different gloss on grit—not as a superhuman indefatigability in the face of exhaustion and tedium, but an inward drive pushing people toward the goals and values they care about most. Of course, there probably isn’t a succinct, tough-sounding label for that quality (some might call it passion), but it’s still worth thinking about.
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