Weekend Reads: A teacher’s take on how teaching can help fix America goes viral

  • Have you heard about Nathan Gibbs-Bowling yet? The Washington state teacher of the year went viral this week. (Tacoma News Tribune)
  • In a blog post, Gibbs-Bowling diagnoses America’s big problem — most people just don’t care about poor people of color — and offers a solution: stronger teaching, distributed more fairly. (A Teacher’s Evolving Mind)
  • Go inside a Denver school that successfully employed joy as a tool to turn itself around. (Chalkbeat)
  • Some teacher turnover boosts student achievement, a new study of D.C.’s schools concludes. (Washington Post)
  • School choice is the new normal, and so are the challenges that come with moving away from centralized bureaucracies. (Flypaper)
  • More schools are teaching students in two languages. Get to know one of them. (Hechinger Report)
  • Looking back on the charismatic professor who argued in the early 1900s against teaching math to most kids. (The Atlantic)
  • Are Detroit’s schools in as singularly bad shape as they seem? A Nashville father sees local parallels. (Dad Gone Wild)
  • The founder of the Green Dot charter school network might run for mayor of Los Angeles. (L.A. Times)
  • An L.A. teen with immigrant parents and a teacher who treats math class like a varsity sport earned one of just 12 perfect AP Calculus scores last year. (L.A. Times)