In This Issue:

1. The impact of being treated like objects on girls and women

2. Why a college professor decided to stop lecturing

3. Three things that bug high-school students

4. Five things that prevent teachers from succeeding with students

5. Jay McTighe on teaching toward performance tasks

6. Innovations that changed the world

7. Classic folk and fairy tales for classroom storytelling

8. Short items: (a) U.S. immigrants’ countries of origin; (b) Summer reading from Kappan;

    (c) Can schools in low-income communities succeed?

 

Quotes of the Week

“We can create organizations that operate consistently outstanding urban schools that serve disadvantaged kids. However, zero percent of those organizations are traditional urban school districts.”

            Andy Smarick (see item #8c)

 

“Learning is not a spectator sport.”

            Eric Mazur (see item #2)

 

“Like the game in athletics and the play in theater, having a clear and authentic performance goal (solid performance on a known task) focuses both teaching and learning.”

            Jay McTighe (see item #5)

 

“The solutions to the challenges and difficulties so many teachers face lie in the classrooms of high-performing teachers. We should be studying these teachers for the solutions to teaching challenges. First, because they’re the ones who have found the highest-value solutions to the problems, and second, because doing so honors the profession.”

            Doug Lemov in Teacher Quality Bulletin Newsletter, April 14, 2016,

http://www.nctq.org/commentary/tqb/tqb.do?id=28

 

“When I die I want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time.”

            A Georgia student criticizing teachers who assign group projects (see item #4)

 

“Walking on the street, tweeting, working – just living – while female shapes who we are and who we think we can be.”

            Jessica Valenti (see item #1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. The Impact of Being Treated Like Objects on Girls and Women

            In this New York Times article, author Jessica Valenti remembers that when she was a teenager commuting to school on the New York City subway, “it wasn’t unusual for a man to grope or flash me. It happened on at least a dozen occasions… When we talk about gendered trauma, we tend to point to moments of physical danger, harassment, or assault. Those are critical to discuss, of course. But we can’t leave aside the snowball effect of all types of sexism over a lifetime… The looks that start when we’ve barely begun puberty, the harassment on the street and online, the violence we survive or are constantly on guard for: What does it do to us?... For me, it’s not one particular message or adolescent incident that bothers me; it’s the weight of years of multiple messages and multiple incidents. It’s the knowledge that this will never be just one day, just one message, just one hateful person. It’s a chipping away of my sense of safety and my sense of self.”

            Valenti has looked at the research and it confirms that the long-term impact is real. When girls and women are looked at as sexual objects rather than as people, it “affects their mental health and their sense of self,” she says. As a columnist writing for The Guardian on feminism, she says, “Very few days have gone by in the last 10 years when I haven’t gotten an e-mail, online comment, or tweet calling me a bitch or making a violent sexual threat.”

            Valenti wonders how to prepare her 5-year-old daughter for the future without making her fearful. “I can tell her what to do if a stranger approaches, teach her about pay inequity, or warn her about sexual harassment,” she says. “But we still have no good way to explain to young women and girls that they need to brace themselves for years of feeling like an object. I don’t know how to talk to my daughter about what all these small moments of feeling diminished add up to, and what they might do to who she is.”

Some feminists advise women to try to use humor, optimism, and independence to combat sexism and use fewer self-deprecating terms like “sorry” and “like.” To Valenti, this isn’t enough. Maybe, she concludes, “we’re doing ourselves a disservice by working so hard to move past what sexism has done to us, what the impossibility and inevitability of living a dehumanized life feels like. It’s a problem that should have a name.”

 

“What Does a Lifetime of Leers Do To Us?” by Jessica Valenti in The New York Times, June 5, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/opinion/sunday/what-does-a-lifetime-of-leers-do-to-us.html?_r=0

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2. Why a College Professor Decided to Stop Lecturing

            In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Dan Berrett describes the pride felt by young physics professor Eric Mazur when he got excellent student ratings at the beginning of his teaching career at Harvard. “The signals Mr. Mazur received as a young professor pointed to one conclusion,” says Berrett: “He rocked. His lectures were clear and well received. His students could solve complex problems about rotational dynamics by calculating triple integrals.”

But then Mazur gave his students the Force Concept Inventory, a test of their basic understanding of Newtonian physics, and was shocked by the results: more than half of the students did poorly, even though he’d covered the subject just a few weeks earlier. When students took the test again at the end of the course, they made only slight gains. Comparing answers on “plug and chug” and conceptual questions, Mazur found they did better on calculating, not deeper understanding. He realized that what he had been teaching his students was memorizing formulas.

Other data points suddenly jumped into focus: In his otherwise stellar student evaluations, a few students jotted that the subject was boring (one said, “Physics sucks”). What’s more, young women’s grades were lower than those of their male classmates. Mazur recalled some adults saying they’d aced physics in school but never really understood it. And he remembered what sparked his own love of science: designing and carrying out experiments in the lab, not classroom lectures. Mazur began to see the lecture method as ineffective, even unethical.

            The turnaround came when Mazur followed up on one question on the Force Concept Inventory that only half his students had answered correctly: Compare the forces in a collision between a car and a truck. To Mazur, the answer seemed clear from Newton’s third law: the forces were equal. But many students clung to misconceptions (The truck is heavier!) and weren’t convinced by the equations Mazur was scribbling on the board. Frustrated, he told students to discuss the answer with the student sitting next to them.

“The tenor of the room changed,” Berrett reports. “The students grew animated and the staid lecture hall began buzzing. Mr. Mazur had developed an entire method around that experience.” And he’s never turned back. Here’s his method:

-   Students do most of the lower-level computational physics for homework and are accountable for mastering it.

-   In class, Mazur gives brief lectures on core ideas, and then poses carefully framed conceptual questions to which all students must respond using clickers.

-   He displays the results, and if 30-70 percent of students haven’t answered a question correctly, he asks students to convince their neighbors.

-   Mazur circulates, listening to what students are saying to each other.

-   He poses the clicker question again and almost always, there are significant learning gains – students are good at teaching each other.

-   If necessary, Mazur follows up with a further explanation.

The results of this “peer instruction” approach have been dramatic. Three years after he

changed his approach, students’ scores on the Force Concept Inventory had doubled, and four years after that, they had tripled – the result of Mazur’s increasing skill as a teacher and his students’ steadily improving peer instruction. “I’d been fooling myself for many years thinking I was an effective professor,” says Mazur. “But it was a house of cards… Deep down, everybody realizes that there are huge failures in the system.”

            As Mazur has traveled the nation talking about this approach, there have been some spirited defenses of the lecture method:

-   It’s endured for centuries because it works.

-   Lectures demand that students pay close attention, connect ideas, and understand how to build an argument; discarding them means acquiescing to the erosion of educational standards and letting students off the hook.

-   A lecture is only as passive as the listener; students need to learn to think about what they’re hearing and organize it into salient points. The responsibility for learning should be on the student, not the instructor.

-   Lectures affirm the importance of expertise and let students see how a masterful thinker works through a problem.

-   Lectures can be inspiring.

But Mazur pushes back on the pushback. “The lecture creates the perfect illusion,” he says. Students and professors walk out of class convinced they’ve both gotten something out of the exchange, but research shows that students consistently overestimate how much they learn in a brilliant lecture, and professors are fooling themselves about their efficacy. “As a primary vehicle for teaching,” says Mazur, “it’s completely outmoded… Learning is not a spectator sport.” You don’t learn how to dance by watching a expert dancer, nor do you learn how to drive by observing the instructor. You have to do it yourself.

Mazur has also developed a new yearlong course, Applied Physics 50, designed to fulfill physics requirements for students majoring in other science disciplines. In it, students work in teams grappling with real-world problems like designing a secure safe using magnets or building musical instruments for low-income children in Venezuela. Homework is graded on accuracy, effort, and how well students evaluate their own work. If a student skips a problem set, the score for the entire group goes down. Peers, Mazur has found, motivate each other more effectively than the professor.

 

“The Making of a Teaching Evangelist” by Dan Berrett in The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2016 (Vol. LXII, #38, p. A20-A22), no free e-link available; see Memo 241 for a summary of Mazur’s book, Peer Instruction, and Memo 562 for a video of Mazur in action.

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3. Three Things That Bug High-School Students

            In this column in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Maureen Downey reports on some common gripes that have come up in recent interviews with high-school students – and they’re not about homework, testing, or bullying:

• Teachers allowing a few students to commandeer classroom discussions. “Repeatedly,” says Downey, “students told me they could learn twice as much in half the time if teachers rein in their rambling peers… The teens made a telling observation about what happens in classrooms where kids decide how much and when to talk – the students end up being in charge.” These teachers may be proud of moving from lectures to student-initiated discussion, “but is that productive in a class of 33 kids,” asks Downey, “where a few extroverts reduce discussion to recitation?”

            • Teachers failing to set limits on 10-minute student presentations on their projects, with some rambling on for 30-40 minutes, resulting in other presentations being deferred.

            • Group projects in which one or two “smart” students do all the work because grades matter to them. This results in a free ride for less-motivated students and resentment from the strivers. In a social media meme making the rounds, one such student said, “When I die I want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time.”

 

“What Teens Resent: Classrooms Controlled by Students Rather Than Teachers” by Maureen Downey in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 2, 2016, http://bit.ly/1Uuofze; spotted in Madeline Will’s column in Education Week Teacher, June 3, 2016

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4. Five Things That Prevent Teachers from Succeeding with Students

            In this article in Teacher Quality Bulletin Newsletter, Erin Burns, a North Carolina high-school teacher and turnaround team leader, shares her insights on habits that can stand in the way of teachers’ effectiveness:

            • Rigid, boring lessons – “Many low-performing schools fear any activity that doesn’t have a rigid structure,” says Burns. “Rigidity does not always equal rigor.” Worksheets and multiple-choice drills turn students off and don’t help them understand concepts at a deep level. By contrast, she describes a highly engaging biology lesson in which students modeled DNA and protein synthesis by decoding a “DNA recipe” and creating Rice Krispie treats. “Though there were slight moments of chaos because students were so excited,” says Burns, “every student was engaged. Students would frequently reference these types of engaging lessons and activities at the end of the year, as they had made a memorable impact.”

            • Being disorganized – Not being able to put your hands on the materials you need when you need them wastes valuable time and adds to teachers’ workload, says Burns. She created a central repository for her team using Google shared drives so all teachers could combine their resources, as well as a teacher-created lesson plan template in PowerPoint and accessible ideas for lessons so teachers don’t need to create lessons from scratch.

            • Reactive classroom management – If teachers aren’t proactive, one student refusing to take off his headphones or hand over her cellphone can result in a stressful confrontation that ruins a lesson for 29 ready-to-learn kids. Burns recommends building positive relationships with students who are behaving well, identifying potentially disruptive students and building bridges with them – as well as getting them the emotional support they need and reaching out to their parents. Simply walking around the classroom talking to students as individuals makes a big difference: “How did you do at the game last night?” “Did you get that new job you applied for?”

            • Not assessing frequently enough – “It may be unpopular in this anti-testing environment to suggest more testing, not less, but it works,” says Burns. Her teacher team has moved from one big test every few weeks to frequent mini-tests and quizzes with immediate feedback to students. Now kids have “multiple attempts to show mastery of a concept as opposed to just giving up and having to accept the F,” she says. “We’ve built in opportunities for students to retest and replace poor quiz grades on large interim assessments. They always have the opportunity to work towards a higher grade and grow their knowledge of the topics covered as the semester progresses.”

            • Focusing too much on summative test scores – “When I first started working with my team,” says Burns, “many of my teachers simply needed a shift in outlook because they were constantly told that their students’ poor test scores were all their fault… I pushed my team to grow their students as individuals. Our goal was beyond hitting a specified proficiency number, but to simply make sure our students left our classes knowing more biology than when they entered. The proficiency number would increase eventually if we just focused on growing students one by one. Allowing teachers to focus on growth instead of a seemingly impossible, looming proficiency goal allows them to stop acting out in frustration to student behavior and lack of engagement and starting focusing on their individual student growth goals. When leaders create a culture of focusing on the positive, it trickles down to teacher-student interactions.”

 

“Five Habits That Lead to Ineffective Teaching – and How to Fix Them” by Erin Burns in Teacher Quality Bulletin Newsletter, April 13, 2016

http://www.nctq.org/commentary/tqb/tqb.do?id=28

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5. Jay McTighe on Teaching Toward Performance Tasks

            In this online article, author/consultant Jay McTighe says teachers of music, visual arts, and career and technical subjects, as well as those who work with students on theater, athletics, and yearbooks, naturally start with a performance or product in mind – the Friday night game, the concert, the public art display, the yearbook deadline. Having a similar focus on a meaningful, real-life performance task can energize academic classrooms. “Planning our teaching ‘backward’ from desired performances on rich, authentic tasks helps teachers focus on what matters most,” says McTighe. “With this performance orientation, teachers are less likely to simply march through lists of content objectives or pages in a textbook, or to have their students compete worksheets on discrete skills.” He recommends five practices that set students up for success on authentic performance tasks.

            • Practice #1: Plan each curriculum unit backward from authentic performance tasks. Here are the key steps, as articulated in the Understanding by Design process:

-   Decide on an authentic performance task with the six GRASPS components: A goal; a real-life role for students; an audience other than the teacher; a realistic situation; a culminating product; and standards on which the product will be judged (usually a rubric).

-   Deconstruct the performance task. What are the concepts, knowledge, and skills students will need? McTighe highly recommends the Literacy Design Collaborative website https://ldc.org/how-ldc-works/mini-tasks for examples of units in ELA, science, technical subjects, and history/social studies.

-   Give students appropriate choices in how they tackle the performance task.

-   Pre-assess. What are students’ entry-level skills and knowledge?

-   Plan lessons.

-   Use formative mini-tasks. These are simplified or scaffolded versions of the summative task and provide feedback to students along the way.

-   Allow time for practice and revisions.

The last two, says McTighe, are often neglected in classrooms, but they’re essential for students to “put it all together.” Is this teaching to the test? Yes, in the sense that teachers and students are working with the assessment in mind, but there’s nothing wrong with that as long as the assessment is high-quality and measures what’s important. “Have you ever heard coaches apologize for coaching to/for the next game,” asks McTighe, “or theater directors say they are sorry when their actors rehearse for the play?”

            • Practice #2: Present authentic performance tasks as the learning targets. Lesson objectives on the board are not enough, says McTighe. Students should know “not only what they will be learning today, but also why they are learning it and how this learning will prepare them for something worthwhile in the future.” Throughout the curriculum unit, there should be a clear statement on the wall that starts with, We are learning this so that you will be able to… Examples from other arenas: colored belts for karate proficiency levels or Boy Scout and Girl Scout merit badges. The performance tasks are known up front, as are the criteria on which performance will be judged. “Like the game in athletics and the play in theater,” says McTighe, “having a clear and authentic performance goal (solid performance on a known task) focuses both teaching and learning.” See the full article (link below) for examples of performance tasks on curriculum units on Roman roads, fracking, and fuel efficiency.

            • Practice #3: Present the evaluative criteria, rubrics, and models up front. This helps students focus on the purpose and important dimensions of authentic performance, says McTighe: “When students know the criteria in advance, they don’t have to guess about what is most important or how their work will be judged. There is no ‘mystery’ as to the elements of a quality product/performance or the basis for its evaluation (and grading)… If we expect learners to produce high-quality work, they need to know what that looks like, and how it differs from work of lesser quality.” Students might be enlisted in constructing the rubric, which gets them more involved, creates better understanding of what’s involved in quality work, and also makes it easier for them to self-assess as they proceed.

            • Practice #4: Assess before and while you teach. Pre-assessments are just as important to an effective curriculum unit as a physical exam is to a doctor’s medical decisions. Knowing students’ skill and knowledge levels, misconceptions, and attitudes is the starting point for decisions on content, activating prior knowledge, pacing, and differentiation. Ongoing check-for-understanding assessments are also essential for keeping tabs on students’ learning and making mid-course corrections. At their best, formative assessments are timely, specific, understandable to students, and help students revise, refine, practice, and re-try. Here’s McTighe’s acid test for good feedback: “Can learners tell specifically from the given feedback what they have done well and what they could do next time to improve?” And this formative feedback should not be averaged into the final grade – it’s part of the learning process.

            • Practice #5: Expect students to self-assess and set goals. This encourages metacognition, which has always been the hallmark of good learners. “Teachers are often pleasantly surprised at how honest students can be with the assessment of their own work and that of their peers,” says McTighe. Here are some prompts to get students thinking about what they’re producing before they turn it in:

-   What aspect of your work do you think was most effective? Why? How so?

-   What aspect of your work do you think was least effective? Why? How so?

-   What specific action(s) would improve your performance based on the feedback?

-   What advice would you offer to next year’s students to help their performance on this task?

-   What did you learn from working on this task – about the content, topic, process, and/or yourself?

All this tells students that self-assessment and goal-setting are part of a learner’s job.

            For a collection of authentic performance tasks and associated rubrics, see the Defined STEM website – free trial at http://www.definedstem.com/learn/free-trial.cfm.

 

“How Should We Teach Toward Success with Performance Tasks?” by Jay McTighe in PerformanceTask.com, March 3, 2016, http://bit.ly/21itRRV; McTighe can be reached at [email protected].

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6. Innovations That Changed the World

            In his 2014 book, How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson makes the argument that human inventiveness in six areas had a surprising ripple effect and opened the door to modern civilization:

            • Glass – In ancient times, people found silicon fused into glass in the Libyan desert and figured out how to make glass. Venetian glass makers brought great wealth to their city, but they were exiled to the nearby island of Murano because their furnaces kept getting out of control and burning down their neighborhoods. Competition among craftsmen working side by side on the island spurred improvements in technique. As Gutenberg presses began churning, many Europeans realized they were far-sighted and needed spectacles to read printed matter. The eyeglass industry got lots of people experimenting with lenses, and the microscope and telescope followed, making it possible to examine what had previously been too small or too far away to be seen by the human eye. And mirrors, says Johnson, were a key factor in Renaissance self-portraits, perspective, and an increasing orientation around the individual versus the collective.

            • Cold – In the early 1800s, Frederic Tudor made a successful business of shipping ice from New England to the Southern states and the Caribbean, and his idea became a major industry. That Chicago’s stockyards were able to ship beef to four continents was possible only because of ice-refrigerated boxcars and ships. The development of refrigeration in the decades after the Civil War made it possible to more easily preserve food and medicine. Then Clarence Birdseye developed flash freezing of fish and vegetables. Home refrigerators and air conditioning spread rapidly, the latter spurring a migration to the Sun Belt and a major political realignment that changed who occupied the White House and the U.S. Congress. Before air conditioning and refrigerators, large cities around the world were mostly in temperate zones, but now they began to flourish in the tropics – Chennai, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Karachi, Lagos, Dubai, and Rio de Janeiro. And being able to freeze ova and sperm opened new possibilities in human reproduction.

            • Sound – With the phonograph, microphone, telephone, and radio, the world got smaller and noisier as voices and music were transmitted to the masses. Jazz was heard by millions (it sounded better than classical music on the radio), bringing about a cultural shift and paving the way for the U.S. Civil Rights movement. To ensure secure communication during World War II, voice encryption was invented, and sonar revolutionized underwater warfare. Ultrasound made it possible to safely examine the fetus during pregnancy.

            • Clean – Into the 19^th century, it was widely believed that bathing was unhealthy – people smelled! In addition, germ-borne diseases like cholera were common in rapidly expanding cities without sewers to dispose of human waste. But germ theory made clear the source of diseases and, led by Chicago and Jersey City, urban areas developed sanitary systems and ways of delivering clean water. These innovations, and the realization that doctors should wash their hands before they operated on people and delivered babies, resulted in a 43 percent reduction in mortality in the average American city, and a 74 percent reduction in infant and child mortality, which in turn spurred the growth of mega-cities. Public swimming pools led to a revolution in women’s fashions and an industry to produce and market new products. Super-clean environments were necessary for the development and manufacture of microchips so essential to the high-tech revolution.

            • Time – The precise measurement of hours, minutes, and seconds was unnecessary in the pre-modern era – “There were no buses to catch, or TV shows to watch, or conference calls to join,” says Johnson. “If you knew roughly what hour of the day it was, you could get by just fine.” But precision was needed to calculate longitude, which was essential to safe navigation on the high seas, and a competition in Great Britain produced the first accurate, portable timepiece and played a key role in maritime commerce and warfare. Before too long, “clocking in” also changed people’s concept of work. At first, clocks were synchronized with the sun, which meant that time varied on an east-west axis. In the 1880s, the world was divided into time zones with Greenwich, England as the prime meridian – a sign of the country’s worldwide domination. Clocks and watches got more and more accurate, from wind-ups to quartz to extremely precise atomic clocks. Carbon dating made it possible to pinpoint the provenance of fossils and artifacts – our concept of time went from the micro to the macro.

            • Light – Tallow candles were smoky, smelly, and expensive – 150 years ago, reading at night was a luxury. Then people discovered that oil from sperm whales could produce whiter, cleaner light. More than 300,000 whales were killed to satisfy the demand this created until the discovery of petroleum provided cheaper fuel – and saved the whales. Artificial light altered human sleep patterns: a tallow candle could provide 10 minutes of reading time after sunset; a kerosene lamp could give three hours; each electric bulb (hats off to Thomas Edison) produced up to 300 days of light. Electric light also transformed the way the world looked at night from outer space. Flash photography lit up the night, including Jacob Riis’s photographs shining a spotlight on the squalor of New York City’s tenements. Lasers and bar codes revolutionized inventory control, and fusion may (or may not) lead to clean energy.

 

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books, 2014)

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7. Classic Folk and Fairy Tales for Classroom Storytelling

            In this School Library Journal article, consultant Judy Freeman has pointers for telling stories to children: choose the right story for the audience; learn the story really well (start by reading it through three times); practice; and find your audience. In a sidebar, she suggests 21 classic folk and fairy tales that lend themselves to oral presentation:

-   Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock (Holiday House)

-   “Butterball” in The Troll with No Heart in His Body (Houghton Mifflin)

-   “The Cow-Tail Switch” in The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories (Holt)

-   Epossumondas (Harcourt)

-   Fin M’Coul, the Giant of Knockmany Hill (Holiday House)

-   The Funny Little Woman (Dutton)

-   Grandma and the Great Gourd: A Bengali Folktale (Roaring Brook)

-   How Chipmunk Got His Stripes: A Tale of Bragging and Teasing (Dial)

-   The Hungry Coat: A Tale from Turkey (Margaret K. McElderry)

-   Mabela the Clever (Albert Whitman)

-   Martina the Beautiful Cockroach: A Cuban Folktale (Peachtree)

-   Monkey: A Trickster Tale from India (HMH)

-   Pandora (Harcourt/Silver Whistle)

-   “The People Could Fly” in The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (Knopf)

-   “Sody Sallyratus” in Grandfather Tales (Houghton Mifflin)

-   “Talk” in The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories (Henry Holt)

-   Tasty Baby Belly Buttons: A Japanese Folktale (Knopf)

-   The Three Billy Goats Gruff (Harcourt)

-   Too Much Noise (Houghton Mifflin)

-   Tops & Bottoms (Harcourt)

-   Two of Everything: A Chinese Folktale (Albert Whitman)

 

“Story Is King: How to Be a Great Storyteller” by Judy Freeman in School Library Journal, June 2016 (Vol. 62, #6, p. 40-43), www.slj.com

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8. Short Items:

            a. U.S. immigrants’ countries of origin – This set of interactive maps shows, state by state, where immigrants to the U.S. came from in different eras:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/07/a-shift-from-germany-to-mexico-for-americas-immigrants/

 

“From Germany to Mexico: How America’s Source of Immigrants Has Changed Over a Century” by Jens Manuel Krogstad and Michael Keegan, Pew Research Center, October 7, 2015

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            b. Summer reading from Kappan – The editors of Phi Delta Kappan magazine combed through the 150 articles published this academic year and picked six to feature for summer reading. Check them out and comment on them at http://www.kappanonline.org (no password required).

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            c. Can schools in low-income communities succeed? – In this Fordham Institute article, Andy Smarick comments on recently developed graphic displays comparing income, race, and student achievement across the U.S.. His biggest takeaway: “We can create organizations that operate consistently outstanding urban schools that serve disadvantaged kids. However, zero percent of those organizations are traditional urban school districts.”

 

“Is District the Operative Word?” by Andy Smarick, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, May 6, 2016, http://edexcellence.net/articles/is-district-an-operative-word

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