Don't Pump the Brakes

“I am at a particular point on my journey. I have no clue if anything I think is right, but it’s the truest answers I have found thus far” - Tom Rademacher, It Won't Be Easy Fulbright swag! I started to write this post on the Amtrak down to Washington, D.C. As I sat on the train, I could not help but be contemplative about the next major step in my life while simultaneously being reflective of the incredible journey thus far. This Fulbright orientation has been over a year in the making – I applied almost a year ago today, and found out that I was accepted into the program in April. As I read through the list of Fulbright grantee’s from around the world and their inquiry project proposals, I became increasingly excited to meet some of the best educators our world has to offer. The orientation itself was genuinely one of the most inspirational weeks of my life. I was able to network with teachers from Morocco, principals from India, and counselors from New Zealand. It ...

It is hard to believe that we are officially graduates of Columbia’s Summer Principals Academy ! It has been such an incredible two years , as I have learned so much and made friends with some of the most transformational educators our country has to offer. The last week of our program was exhilarating to say the least, but more on that to come in a future post… Two weeks ago, in my Ethical and Legal Issues in Education Leadership class (ORLA 4033), we had to develop a personal code of ethics. We were instructed to consider the ethical principles that will guide our work as educators and reflect on how we can apply the concepts from this class to make morally, ethically, and legally-sound choices regarding future decisions. One of our professors, Dr. Mario Torres (a visiting professor from Texas A&M), encouraged us to start our assignment with a quote that resonated with us, and I immediately thought of a story from three years prior. A full year before I even applied to C...

As Steve Politi of the Star-Ledger has pointed out , the group of high school students that made up the East Side High School Basketball team this year was “a group that decided that the road less traveled was the one to take, and that they would take it together to the old brick building on Van Buren Street in Newark,” instead of choosing to attend an exclusive private high school on a basketball scholarship. As such, we spent a lot of time in March driving all over the state watching our Red Raiders upset team after team , all the way through the state championship and to the final game of the Tournament of Champions. A sign we made for our last home game of the season Although we ended up coming up exactly two points short of being the first public school in nearly 20 years to win a tournament of champions trophy, you would be hard-pressed to find a Newarker that couldn’t be prouder of a team that worked so hard to get as far as they did. For as our own Jamar Gilbert h...

In recent times, in seems as though everyone talks about how complex and controversial education reform is and how many elements need to evolve for schools to become better. While many solutions put forward push for massive institutional change and heavy financial commitments, I ask, "How about a simple solution?"  This post is exactly that.  Let's start with an even simpler question: What science classes did you take in high school, and in what order? If you are with the overwhelming majority of people who graduated high school in the last few decades, you undoubtedly took Biology first, then Chemistry, followed by Physics, if you chose to take it. Most high schools in America, whether an elite private school in Westchester or a public SIG school in Chicago, offer these three science classes in that order. Perhaps the better question is, why do schools sequence science classes in the way that they do? Most people, myself included,...