The latest in Jay Mathews's Washington Post series on innovative teachers features Rafe Esquith, a middle school teacher in Los Angeles who has created an oasis of excellence inside his educationally arid public school. There are many reasons that Esquith's students are learning more and working harder, including his ebullient personality, passion, and stringent requirements that include a fake-money system of economic incentives and extended instructional day. The heart of the matter, though, seems to be his jettisoning of the facile notion that learning, to be effective, needs to be "fun." In fact, learning is hard work, and as Esquith constantly tells his students, "There are no shortcuts." His class was among the examples of "no excuses" classrooms profiled in the recently published No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom. That book has been drawing a positive response, including two recent columns by William Raspberry, who has (generally) echoed the Thernstroms' findings and called for African-American parents to think hard about why the achievement gap has proved so intractable.
"Pursuing happiness, through hard work," by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, October 14, 2003
"An attitude gap," by William Raspberry, Washington Post, October 13, 2003
"A gap that won't go away on its own," by William Raspberry, Washington Post, October 6, 2003