Faculty in the Media

"Our leaders have been asleep at the wheel, and I hope they wake up before Massachusetts loses its lead in K-12 education."

"There’s a confidence crisis in public education. We need leadership and a sense of urgency in our field."

"The gravitational pull of the elites is, unfortunately, drawing attention away from problems within higher education that are more consequential and widespread: an unsustainable economic model, unfavorable demographics, outdated pedagogy and curricula, and, maybe most important, a stubborn resistance to transformational change."

"The only thing we can count on is that things are going to change. AI is ... just giving us a new way to think about the importance and the necessity of adaptability."

“Among Gen Zers, there is a lot of concern about the world, and there’s a wanting to do something meaningful that will make it better.”

"The question isn’t whether to use AI but how and with what benefits and costs."

"Teachers are facing a difficult choice.The questions are how do we create incentives in the teaching profession that lead teachers to teach in a more ambitious way, and how can we maintain high standards in teacher training so that teachers are trained to teach the way we know through 30 years of work that teachers should be teaching?"

"The problem is that our educational systems are geared to teaching reckoning, and their quality is measured by assessing reckoning, the GRE, the SAT, the LSAT, et cetera, et cetera. And, so, what we're doing is preparing human beings to lose to AI as opposed to preparing human beings with skills that complement AI." 

"Young people don’t always know what’s a foundational skill-building activity and what isn’t. So they can’t make decisions about what to offload, if anything."

"Changing when and how the test is administered can make a real difference in access even without any kind of explicit consideration of neighborhood or school in the admissions policy."

"The research shows that when you teach to the high standards, regardless of students' past performance or their income level or background, students rise to the occasion and make the largest gains."

"Meaning and purpose are the deep engines of our lives. ... We can talk about banning cellphones in schools, which I think is a good thing, and providing more therapists, which I also think is a good thing, but my guess is that helping other people and making a positive difference in others’ lives is significantly more likely to strengthen Gen Zers’ mental health than those other strategies."

"Immigration policy has had a chilling effect. There is less likelihood that families will come to the border with their children ... knowing that separation and incarceration are possibilities."

"Getting the policy passed is phase one. Phase two is implementing it with fidelity to the intentions of the original legislation. … This is something we needed to correct an imbalance. It will take time for the results to show up."

"The systemic issue is we don't have a sense of trust and integrity around the work, then we're trying to layer on EdTech as a solution, and kids are finding ways around it because they're missing the core thing that is going to give them pride in the work."

"Getting the campus mental health story right isn’t about softening the reality of the struggles young adults are facing, or dismissing the data. Some pressures young people face today are genuinely new. But resisting the 'crisis' frame lets us tell a more complex and accurate story about what we are seeing — and how we can help."

"Those test scores already exist. Asking not to see them creates more inequality than it eliminates. Covering your eyes or asking others to figure out whether they should close our eyes for us, that creates this unnecessary dilemma."

"There are lots of opportunities to use AI to adapt learning materials into different languages, which can expand access for bilingual learners."

"Helping others is good for our mental health, and lots of Gen Zers lack meaning and purpose, which is really not good for your mental health. They’re finding meaning and purpose in helping others.”

“Students are aware, intuitively, that this push to excel in school doesn’t pay off in the way we give lip service to. ... Why would you be doing well in school, when the jobs that are around you are not the kinds of jobs that people have to do well in school to get?”

"I spent nearly four decades as a teacher and administrator at three liberal arts colleges in three states, and this I know to be true: The form of undergraduate education provided at these schools, where it is the top priority, is the form that research universities aspire to but rarely manage to provide."

"We’re heading in the right direction, but we’re starting from a low point.”

"If a child is holding a print book, the only thing that they could do is read the text and understand the story … Ebooks open up a lot of opportunities, and they’re also a form of distraction."

"Calling this a developmental stage implies a universality or normalcy that we should all experience. It suggests there are developmental tasks or expectations that are necessary to encounter or achieve in order to move on to another stage.”

"What our brain does when we're learning is it creates synapses, and those synapses become stronger and stronger every time we retrieve a concept, every time we revisit a concept. But it has to have effort. It has to have some friction."

"Our major universities operate not as coherent, nonprofit enterprises but as a collection of semi-autonomous units loosely knit together under the banner of a popular brand. We should be unsurprised that amid such profusion, to borrow from Yeats, 'the centre cannot hold.' The result might not be 'mere anarchy,' but it is something less than order."

"This is a decline that started more than a decade ago. And, honestly, the reason why it sort of slipped under the radar screen all this time is because we weren't holding folks accountable for student results. ... The first step is when states and governors and state legislatures say, hey, look ... we're going to be held accountable for what's happening with our students' achievement."

"We’re trying to highlight that something good is happening in some of these places. And hopefully, if we can, rebuild the public sense of agency with respect to public education."

"To give good advice to young people, we have to stop just saying, you know, 'it’ll all work out’ and 'it was okay for me,’ and instead share authentically the messy parts of our own stories."

"It is our responsibility as citizens and teachers to learn how to respect, relate and cooperate across lines of difference of both identity and ideology. The responsibility of citizens in a constitutional democracy is to ensure that pluralism fuels creativity and cultural richness rather than division. For this, the ethic of civic friendship and civil disagreement are required."