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Our best education articles of 2020, readers and editors pick the most interesting and insightful articles from the past year about teaching, learning, and the keys to well-being at school..

In February of 2020, we launched the new website Greater Good in Education , a collection of free, research-based and -informed strategies and practices for the social, emotional, and ethical development of students, for the well-being of the adults who work with them, and for cultivating positive school cultures. Little did we know how much more crucial these resources would become over the course of the year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, as we head back to school in 2021, things are looking a lot different than in past years. Our most popular education articles of 2020 can help you manage difficult emotions and other challenges at school in the pandemic, all while supporting the social-emotional well-being of your students.

In addition to these articles, you can also find tips, tools, and recommended readings in two resource guides we created in 2020: Supporting Learning and Well-Being During the Coronavirus Crisis and Resources to Support Anti-Racist Learning , which helps educators take action to undo the racism within themselves, encourage their colleagues to do the same, and teach and support their students in forming anti-racist identities.

Here are the 10 best education articles of 2020, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.

Can the Lockdown Push Schools in a Positive Direction? , by Patrick Cook-Deegan: Here are five ways that COVID-19 could change education for the better.

How Teachers Can Navigate Difficult Emotions During School Closures , by Amy L. Eva: Here are some tools for staying calm and centered amid the coronavirus crisis.

Six Online Activities to Help Students Cope With COVID-19 , by Lea Waters: These well-being practices can help students feel connected and resilient during the pandemic.

Help Students Process COVID-19 Emotions With This Lesson Plan , by Maurice Elias: Music and the arts can help students transition back to school this year.

How to Teach Online So All Students Feel Like They Belong , by Becki Cohn-Vargas and Kathe Gogolewski: Educators can foster belonging and inclusion for all students, even online.

How Teachers Can Help Students With Special Needs Navigate Distance Learning , by Rebecca Branstetter: Kids with disabilities are often shortchanged by pandemic classroom conditions. Here are three tips for educators to boost their engagement and connection.

How to Reduce the Stress of Homeschooling on Everyone , by Rebecca Branstetter: A school psychologist offers advice to parents on how to support their child during school closures.

Three Ways to Help Your Kids Succeed at Distance Learning , by Christine Carter: How can parents support their children at the start of an uncertain school year?

How Schools Are Meeting Social-Emotional Needs During the Pandemic , by Frances Messano, Jason Atwood, and Stacey Childress: A new report looks at how schools have been grappling with the challenges imposed by COVID-19.

Six Ways to Help Your Students Make Sense of a Divisive Election , by Julie Halterman: The election is over, but many young people will need help understanding what just happened.

Train Your Brain to Be Kinder (video), by Jane Park: Boost your kindness by sending kind thoughts to someone you love—and to someone you don’t get along with—with a little guidance from these students.

From Othering to Belonging (podcast): We speak with john a. powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, about racial justice, well-being, and widening our circles of human connection and concern.

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What the Future of Education Looks Like from Here

• Posted December 11, 2020
• By Emily Boudreau

After a year that involved a global pandemic, school closures, nationwide remote instruction, protests for racial justice, and an election, the role of education has never been more critical or more uncertain. When the dust settles from this year, what will education look like — and what should it aspire to?

To mark the end of its centennial year, HGSE convened a faculty-led discussion to explore those questions. The Future of Education panel, moderated by Dean Bridget Long and hosted by HGSE’s Askwith Forums , focused on hopes for education going forward, as well as HGSE’s role. “The story of HGSE is the story of pivotal decisions, meeting challenges, and tremendous growth,” Long said. “We have a long history of empowering our students and partners to be innovators in a constantly changing world. And that is needed now more than ever.”

Joining Long were Associate Professor Karen Brennan , Senior Lecturer Jennifer Cheatham , Assistant Professor Anthony Jack, and Professors Adriana Umaña-Taylor and Martin West , as they looked forward to what the future could hold for schools, educators, and communities:

… After the pandemic subsides

The pandemic heightened existing gaps and disparities and exposed a need to rethink how systems leaders design schools, instruction, and who they put at the center of that design. “As a leader, in the years before the pandemic hit, I realized the balance of our work as practitioners was off,” Cheatham said. “If we had been spending time knowing our children and our staff and designing schools for them, we might not be feeling the pain in the way we are. I think we’re learning something about what the real work of school is about.” In the coming years, the panelists hope that a widespread push to recognize the identity and health of the whole-child in K–12 and higher education will help educators design support systems that can reduce inequity on multiple levels.

… For the global community

As much as the pandemic isolated individuals, on the global scale, people have looked to connect with each other to find solutions and share ideas as they faced a common challenge. This year may have brought everyone together and allowed for exchange of ideas, policies, practices, and assessments across boundaries.

… For technological advancements

As educators and leaders create, design, and imagine the future, technology should be used in service of that vision rather than dictating it. As technology becomes a major part of how we communicate and share ideas, educators need to think critically about how to deploy technology strategically. “My stance on technology is that it should always be used in the service of our human purpose and interest,” said Brennan. “We’ve talked about racial equity, building relationships. Our values and purposes and goals need to lead the way, not the tech.”

… For teachers

Human connections and interactions are at the heart of education. At this time, it’s become abundantly clear that the role of the teacher in the school community is irreplaceable. “I think the next few years hinge on how much we’re willing to invest in educators and all of these additional supports in the school which essentially make learning possible,” Umaña-Taylor said, “these are the individuals who are making the future minds of the nation possible.”

Cutting-edge research and new knowledge must become part of the public discussion in order to meaningfully shape the policies and practices that influence the future of education. “I fundamentally believe that we as academics and scholars must be part of the conversation and not limit ourselves to just articles behind paywalls or policy paragraphs at the end of a paper,” Jack said. “We have to engage the larger public.”

… In 25 years

“We shouldn’t underestimate the possibility that the future might look a lot like the present,” West said. “As I think about the potential sources of change in education, and in American education in particular, I tend to think about longer-term trends as the key driver.” Changing student demographics, access to higher education, structural inequality, and the focus of school leaders are all longer-term trends that, according to panelists, will influence the future of education. 

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How technology is reinventing education

Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and other education scholars weigh in on what's next for some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom.

Image credit: Claire Scully

New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

What education policy experts are watching for in 2022

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, daphna bassok , daphna bassok nonresident senior fellow - governance studies , brown center on education policy @daphnabassok stephanie riegg cellini , stephanie riegg cellini nonresident senior fellow - governance studies , brown center on education policy michael hansen , michael hansen senior fellow - brown center on education policy , the herman and george r. brown chair - governance studies @drmikehansen douglas n. harris , douglas n. harris nonresident senior fellow - governance studies , brown center on education policy , professor and chair, department of economics - tulane university @douglasharris99 jon valant , and jon valant director - brown center on education policy , senior fellow - governance studies @jonvalant kenneth k. wong kenneth k. wong nonresident senior fellow - governance studies , brown center on education policy.

January 7, 2022

Entering 2022, the world of education policy and practice is at a turning point. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt the day-to-day learning for children across the nation, bringing anxiety and uncertainty to yet another year. Contentious school-board meetings attract headlines as controversy swirls around critical race theory and transgender students’ rights. The looming midterm elections threaten to upend the balance of power in Washington, with serious implications for the federal education landscape. All of these issues—and many more—will have a tremendous impact on students, teachers, families, and American society as a whole; whether that impact is positive or negative remains to be seen.

Below, experts from the Brown Center on Education Policy identify the education stories that they’ll be following in 2022, providing analysis on how these issues could shape the learning landscape for the next 12 months—and possibly well into the future.

I will also be watching the Department of Education’s negotiated rulemaking sessions and following any subsequent regulatory changes to federal student-aid programs. I expect to see changes to income-driven repayment plans and will be monitoring debates over regulations governing institutional and programmatic eligibility for federal student-loan programs. Notably, the Department of Education will be re-evaluating Gainful Employment regulations—put in place by the Obama administration and rescinded by the Trump administration—which tied eligibility for federal funding to graduates’ earnings and debt.

But the biggest and most concerning hole has been in the  substitute teacher force —and the ripple effects on school communities have been broad and deep. Based on personal communications with Nicola Soares, president of  Kelly Education , the largest education staffing provider in the country, the pandemic is exacerbating several problematic trends that have been quietly simmering for years. These are: (1) a growing reliance on long-term substitutes to fill permanent teacher positions; (2) a shrinking supply of qualified individuals willing to fill short-term substitute vacancies; and, (3) steadily declining fill rates for schools’ substitute requests. Many schools in high-need settings have long faced challenges with adequate, reliable substitutes, and the pandemic has turned these localized trouble spots into a widespread catastrophe. Though federal pandemic-relief funds could be used to meet the short-term weakness in the substitute labor market (and mainline teacher compensation, too ), this is an area where we sorely need more research and policy solutions for a permanent fix.

First, what’s to come of the vaccine for ages 0-4? This is now the main impediment to resuming in-person activity. This is the only large group that currently cannot be vaccinated. Also, outbreaks are triggering day-care closures, which has a significant impact on parents (especially mothers), including teachers and other school staff.

Second, will schools (and day cares) require the vaccine for the fall of 2022? Kudos to my hometown of New Orleans, which still appears to be the nation’s only district to require vaccination. Schools normally require a wide variety of other vaccines, and the COVID-19 vaccines are very effective. However, this issue is unfortunately going to trigger a new round of intense political conflict and opposition that will likely delay the end of the pandemic.

Third, will we start to see signs of permanent changes in schooling a result of COVID-19? In a previous post on this blog, I proposed some possibilities. There are some real opportunities before us, but whether we can take advantage of them depends on the first two questions. We can’t know about these long-term effects on schooling until we address the COVID-19 crisis so that people get beyond survival mode and start planning and looking ahead again. I’m hopeful, though not especially optimistic, that we’ll start to see this during 2022.

The CTC and universal pre-K top my list for 2022, but it’s a long list. I’ll also be watching the Supreme Court’s ruling on vouchers in Carson v. Makin , how issues like critical race theory and detracking play into the 2022 elections, and whether we start to see more signs of school/district innovation in response to COVID-19 and the recovery funds that followed.

Electoral dynamics will affect several important issues: the selection of state superintendents; the use of American Rescue Plan funds; the management of safe return to in-person learning for students; the integration of racial justice and diversity into curriculum; the growth of charter schools; and, above all, the extent to which education issues are leveraged to polarize rather than heal the growing divisions among the American public.

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The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2021

Education Next

Our annual look back at the year’s most popular Education Next articles is itself a popular article with readers. It’s useful as an indicator of what issues are at the top of the education policy conversation.

When we crafted the introduction to this list a year ago, for the top articles of 2020 , we observed, “This year, as our list indicates, race and the Covid-19 pandemic dominated the discussion.” Since then, a new president has been inaugurated, but our list signals that the public hasn’t entirely turned the page: both the pandemic and race-related issues attracted high reader interest in 2021, just as they did the year before.

Several articles directly or indirectly related to the pandemic and its effect made the top-20 list. The no. 1 article, “ Pandemic Parent Survey Finds Perverse Pattern: Students Are More Likely to Be Attending School in Person Where Covid Is Spreading More Rapidly ,” by Michael B. Henderson, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West, reported on what the article called “a troubling pattern: students are most likely to be attending school fully in person in school districts where the virus is spreading most rapidly.” The article explained “To be clear, this pattern does not constitute evidence that greater use of in-person instruction has contributed to the spread of the virus across the United States. It is equally plausible that counties where in-person schooling is most common are places where there are fewer measures and practices in the wider community designed to mitigate Covid spread.”

Other articles whose findings related to the pandemic or had implications for education amid or after the pandemic included “ A Test for the Test-Makers ,” “ The Shrinking School Week ,” “ The Covid-19 Pandemic Is a Lousy Natural Experiment for Studying the Effects of Online Learning ” “ The Politics of Closing Schools ,” “ Addressing Significant Learning Loss in Mathematics During Covid-19 and Beyond ,” and “ Move To Trash: Five pandemic-era education practices that deserve to be dumped in the dustbin .”

Articles about race-related education issues also did well with readers. “ Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law ,” “ Teaching About Slavery ,” “ Ethnic Studies in California ,” and “ Segregation and Racial Gaps in Special Education ” all dealt with those topics.

Perhaps the conflicts over pandemic policies and Critical Race Theory helped provide a push for school choice. Choice—whether in the form of vouchers, scholarships, or charter schools—was the subject of several other articles that made the top 20 list, including “ School Choice Advances in the States ,” “ School Choice and the ‘Truly Disadvantaged,’ ” “ What’s Next in New Orleans ,” and “ Betsy DeVos and the Future of Education Reform .”

Who knows what 2022 will bring? We hope for our readers the year ahead is one of good health and of continued learning. We look forward to a time when pandemic-related articles no longer dominate our list.

The full Top 20 Education Next articles of 2021 list follows:

1. Pandemic Parent Survey Finds Perverse Pattern: Students Are More Likely to Be Attending School in Person Where Covid Is Spreading More Rapidly Majority of students receiving fully remote instruction; Private-school students more likely to be in person full time By Michael B. Henderson, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West

2. Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law Can a school require students to “confess their privilege” in class? By Joshua Dunn

3. Teaching about Slavery “Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all” By Danielle Allen, Daina Ramey Berry, David W. Blight, Allen C. Guelzo, Robert Maranto, Ian V. Rowe, and Adrienne Stang

4. Ethnic Studies in California An unsteady jump from college campuses to K-12 classrooms By Miriam Pawel

5. Segregation and Racial Gaps in Special Education New evidence on the debate over disproportionality By Todd E. Elder, David Figlio, Scott Imberman, and Claudia Persico

6. Making Education Research Relevant How researchers can give teachers more choices By Daniel T. Willingham and David B. Daniel

7. Proving the School-to-Prison Pipeline Stricter middle schools raise the risk of adult arrests By Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Stephen B. Billings, and David J. Deming

8. What I Learned in 23 Years Ranking America’s Most Challenging High Schools Most students are capable of much more learning than they are asked to do By Jay Mathews

9. A Test for the Test Makers College Board and ACT move to grow and diversify as the pandemic fuels test-optional admissions trend By Jon Marcus

10. Addressing Significant Learning Loss in Mathematics During Covid-19 and Beyond The pandemic has amplified existing skill gaps, but new strategies and new tech could help By Joel Rose

11. The Shrinking School Week Effects of a four-day schedule on student achievement By Paul N. Thompson

12. Computer Science for All? As a new subject spreads, debates flare about precisely what is taught, to whom, and for what purpose By Jennifer Oldham

13. The Covid-19 Pandemic Is a Lousy Natural Experiment for Studying the Effects of Online Learning Focus, instead, on measuring the overall effects of the pandemic itself By Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Joshua Goodman

14. School Choice Advances in the States Advocates describe “breakthrough year” By Alan Greenblatt

15. The Politics of Closing Schools Teachers unions and the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe By Susanne Wiborg

16. Move to Trash Five pandemic-era education practices that deserve to be dumped in the dustbin By Michael J. Petrilli

17. School Choice and “The Truly Disadvantaged” Vouchers boost college going, but not for students in greatest need By Albert Cheng and Paul E. Peterson

18. The Orchid and the Dandelion New research uncovers a link between a genetic variation and how students respond to teaching. The potential implications for schools—and society—are vast. By Laurence Holt

19. What’s Next in New Orleans The Louisiana city has the most unusual school system in America. But can the new board of a radically decentralized district handle the latest challenges? By Danielle Dreilinger

20. Betsy DeVos and the Future of Education Reform My years as assistant secretary of education gave me a firsthand look at how infighting among education reformers is hampering progress toward change. By Jim Blew

Congratulations to all of our authors!

— Education Next

P.S. You can find the Top 20 Education Next articles of 2020 here , 2019 here , 2018 here , 2017 here , 2016 here , 2015 here , 2014 here and 2013 here .

P.P.S. You can find the Top 10 Education Next blog posts of 2021 here.

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Spring 2024.

Vol. 24, No. 2

We Recommend You Read

The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2020

Race and the pandemic dominate the discussion

by Education Next

Public-School Attendance Zones Violate a Civil Rights Law

The Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 may offer creative litigators a strategy to redraw school-assignment maps.

by Tim DeRoche

In Pandemic, Private Schools Face Peril

Policy choices may help to preserve options for families

by Juliet Squire

• Our Mission

What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

Opinion How the Black female head of a top D.C. school was ‘punished for leading’

Shirley Moody-Turner is the editor of “The Portable Anna Julia Cooper.”

In January 1902, Anna Julia Cooper, one of the most highly educated Black women in the country, was appointed the seventh principal of Northwest D.C.’s famed M Street High School, the first and most prestigious public high school for Black education. Black people from around the country aspired to send their children to M Street, and its roster of teachers and graduates read like a Who’s Who of Washington’s Black educational and cultural elite. Under Cooper’s leadership, M Street students won scholarships and gained admissions to top colleges and universities — including Harvard, Brown, Yale and Dartmouth.

But just four years into Cooper’s tenure , days before the start of a new school year, the White director of Washington high schools persuaded the D.C. Board of Education not to reappoint M Street’s acclaimed principal. When Cooper arrived for the first day of school, the janitor barred her from entering the building. Police officers observed from across the street. They were ordered to arrest Cooper if they deemed she was creating a disturbance. With her students watching from the windows, Cooper — always a model of dignity and decorum — exited the school grounds.

Cooper’s story, now largely forgotten , was part of a wider movement to control the direction of Black public education in the early 20th century. Then, like now, battles over education — and especially the question of who was permitted to lead elite institutions, training the next generation to excel — were proxies in the larger culture wars. Today, with female and minority leaders of universities facing resistance from people who assume they have not earned the right to hold their positions, Cooper’s story is an illuminating one. What happened to her illustrates not only how the tactics around removing such leaders have persisted for more than a century, but also what was at stake — and still is — in the battles over educational access and leadership.

Born enslaved in Raleigh, N.C ., in 1858, Cooper began her fight for an equal education early in life. As a student at St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, she successfully petitioned for the right to take what were designated as “boys'” classes, including courses in Greek, Latin, French, science and math. She went on to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she again protested for access to the full curriculum. She graduated from Oberlin with a BA and MA in mathematics and began writing, teaching and lecturing around the country on Black civil rights and gender equality. In 1892, she published a book that garnered international acclaim, “A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South,” arguing for Black women’s unique role in the struggles for racial and gender equality.

In 1887, Cooper was recruited to join the faculty at the famed M Street High School. She taught there for 14 years and served one year as vice principal before agreeing to serve as the school’s principal. She did so, however, at precisely the moment when the sovereignty of Black public schools — M Street, in particular — was under attack.

For decades, the public school system in D.C. was looked to as a shining example of what was possible for Black education. Since 1868, M Street had operated under a Black superintendent, and through a combination of Black political influence, community support, committed teachers and congressional appropriations, the Black community managed to secure the resources and maintain relative autonomy to create a model public school system for Black students in the District.

By the end of the 19th century, however, with the backlash over Reconstruction gains in Black civil and political rights and the national ascendancy of Jim Crow segregation, Black control over Black schools came under attack. In 1900, Congress restructured school oversight in the District so that the Black superintendent — now reassigned to be an assistant superintendent — no longer oversaw M Street High School directly, instead placing it under the supervision of the White director of public high schools, Percy M. Hughes. As Hughes took his post, Cooper took hers.

Within months of Cooper’s appointment, rumors began that she allowed an atmosphere of truancy and lax discipline. Allegations were taken to Hughes, and complaints filed, but Cooper persisted, and her students continued to excel. According to her early biographer, Louise Hutchinson, Cooper’s students outscored White students on citywide tests and exams, and Cooper continued to send her students to top colleges and universities throughout the country. Despite these successes, Hughes insisted that M Street adopt an inferior “colored curriculum” more suited to the Black students’ presumed abilities.

Cooper refused. She saw attempts to regulate M Street’s curriculum as part of a larger effort to limit her students’ access to higher education and channel them into trade jobs and vocational training. She underscored her commitment to a classical liberal arts education by inviting Harvard-educated W.E.B. Du Bois, a famed advocate of social and political equality and Black higher education, to address her students at M Street.

In 1904, Hughes took formal charges against Cooper to the D.C. Board of Education, initiating a series of extremely public and vitriolic hearings over whether to remove Cooper from her post. Throughout the fall of 1905, the “M Street controversy,” as it came to be known, played out night after night at board meetings and day after day in the local press.

The tactics used to discredit Cooper followed a recognizable pattern: public shaming, presumed incompetence, questioning her professional judgment and other innuendoes used to cast doubt on her fitness to lead. Even though Cooper was one of the most respected educators in the country, Hughes, along with T.S. Leisenring, a White representative of “taxpaying citizens” who had no children in either the White or Black public schools, questioned Cooper’s fitness as an educator and her ability to uphold academic standards. They alleged that Cooper’s “sympathetic methods” allowed undeserving students to advance and asserted that M Street students were not prepared to pursue the same curriculum as students in the White high schools.

Then there were the rumors about Cooper’s alleged relationship with a fellow teacher and former boarder 10 years her junior, John Love. Because married women were barred from teaching and single women were under constant scrutiny, Cooper’s status as a widow allowed her to remain a teacher but left her vulnerable to attacks about her status and personal affairs. Though not part of the formal “charges,” the rumors allowed her accusers to impugn Cooper’s character, question her propriety and ultimately attempt to shame her into silence.

Hughes also took aim at Cooper’s ability to lead, calling her judgment into question and insinuating that her gender made her too soft on students. After an allegation that one of her M Street students was found to be “intoxicated” and that others smoked cigarettes near school grounds, undercover police were brought in to surveil the students for two weeks, looking for possible infractions. When none were found, Cooper closed the issue, but Hughes and his allies would continue to assert that Cooper was unable to maintain the strict discipline necessary to operate the Black high school effectively.

Finally, in perhaps the most honest allegation, Hughes charged Cooper with insubordination. He found Cooper unwilling to teach the curriculum he had assigned or to hold back or deny graduation to students he deemed had not met the requirements. In sum, he found her headstrong and beyond his efforts to control.

In many ways, Hughes was correct in this final assessment. Cooper was committed to the belief that Black people were entitled to the same learning opportunities as anyone else. She refused to have her right to make decisions about the operation of her school undermined. She believed in and fought for her students, and she would not let someone so unfamiliar with and hostile to them overstep her authority.

Seeing the beloved principal of their esteemed school under assault, members of the Black community rallied. They understood what was at stake, not just for Cooper but also in determining who exercised control over Black education in the District.

Willis T. Menard, son of the first Black man elected to Congress (though he was blocked from taking his seat), summed up the sentiment of the Black community in a Sept. 1, 1905, letter to The Post: “Mrs. Anna J. Cooper … is very popular with the colored patrons of her school, and has done more for the advancement of colored youth than the combined efforts of her predecessors.”

Night after night, parents, students, teachers and local leaders fought in her support. They matched the disparaging remarks of those testifying against her with rallies, petitions and editorials. They fought for Cooper, and they fought to maintain autonomy over M Street.

On Oct. 30, they scored a temporary victory. More than a year after the first allegations were brought against her, the D.C. Board of Education announced that the charges against Cooper would be dismissed. She would be retained as principal of M Street.

Infuriated that the board would not fall in line, Hughes took his case to a congressional committee. As Alison Stewart explains in “ First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School ,” Hughes charged the board with “insubordination,” and had it reorganized. Just weeks before the start of the school year in 1906, the reorganized board reviewed all the teachers in the D.C. public school system. It determined that four members of M Street would not be reappointed: Love, a history and English teacher and Cooper’s rumored romantic interest; C.J.B. Clarke, the assistant principal of Black schools who had been accused of abetting Cooper in her efforts to graduate “undeserving” students; Mary Nalle, a teacher and one of the first four students of the original M Street school; and Cooper herself.

Hughes had finally succeeded in deposing the principal who had refused to relinquish control over M Street. But he did not undo the school’s curriculum. The board, perhaps having received too much scrutiny over Cooper’s ousting, left M Street’s classical curriculum intact. “Our course of study was saved, but my head was lost in the fray,” Cooper would later write .

Cooper’s rise, and her well-engineered fall, represent a historic case of a Black woman “punished for leading.” Her removal was about wresting control for Black education out of the hands of the Black community, and trying to limit access to higher education for Black students. But it was also more than that. Cooper was a highly visible leader charged with stewarding a prestigious academic institution, during a moment of intense political and social backlash against racial advancement and gender equality. She was recruited to lead at a moment when the position for which she was hired was most vulnerable.

As we face another moment of such backlash, with efforts at diversity and inclusion in the crosshairs and schools again becoming a battleground for the culture wars, it’s worth revisiting Cooper’s case as other women, people of color and their allies are punished for leading along similar lines. It’s also worth noting what happened, in the end, to both Cooper and her school.

After being deposed from her position at M Street, Cooper taught for four years at a school in Missouri. But by 1910, the winds shifted, and she was called back to M Street, where she would teach at the school (renamed Dunbar in 1916) for the next two decades. After retiring from M Street, she continued to work well into her 90s, serving as the president and then registrar of Frelinghuysen University and advocating for educational opportunities for Black students and working-class residents of D.C. In 1925, she earned her doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris, becoming only the fourth Black American woman to hold a PhD.

And Cooper’s courageous stand and visionary leadership helped preserve liberal arts education for an entire generation of Black leaders. Educators Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander and Eva Dykes , author and poet Jean Toomer , surgeon Charles Drew and civil rights lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston all went on to graduate from the high school. They, and in turn the people they served, were all beneficiaries of Cooper’s long fight to preserve advanced education at M Street.

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Afghanistan’s school year starts without more than 1 million girls barred from education by Taliban

FILE - A girl reads a book in her classroom on the first day of the new school year, in Kabul, Saturday, March 25, 2023. Afghanistan’s schools open Wednesday for the new educational year, while thousands of schoolgirls remain barred from attending classes for the third year as Taliban banned girls from school beyond sixth grade. The Taliban stopped girls’ education beyond sixth grade because they said it didn’t comply with their interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)

FILE - Afghan school girls attend their classroom on the first day of the new school year, in Kabul, Saturday, March 25, 2023. Afghanistan’s schools open Wednesday for the new educational year, while thousands of schoolgirls remain barred from attending classes for the third year as Taliban banned girls from school beyond sixth grade. The Taliban stopped girls’ education beyond sixth grade because they said it didn’t comply with their interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)

FILE - Students walk together from school in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, June 7, 2023. Afghanistan’s schools open Wednesday for the new educational year, while thousands of schoolgirls remain barred from attending classes for the third year as Taliban banned girls from school beyond sixth grade. The Taliban stopped girls’ education beyond sixth grade because they said it didn’t comply with their interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)

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ISLAMABAD (AP) — The school year in Afghanistan started Wednesday but without girls whom the Taliban barred from attending classes beyond the sixth grade, making it the only country with restrictions on female education.

The U.N. children’s agency says more than 1 million girls are affected by the ban. It also estimates 5 million were out of school before the Taliban takeover due to a lack of facilities and other reasons.

The Taliban’s education ministry marked the start of the new academic year with a ceremony that female journalists were not allowed to attend. The invitations sent out to reporters said: “Due to the lack of a suitable place for the sisters, we apologize to female reporters.”

During a ceremony, the Taliban’s education minister, Habibullah Agha, said that the ministry is trying “to increase the quality of education of religious and modern sciences as much as possible.” The Taliban have been prioritizing Islamic knowledge over basic literacy and numeracy with their shift toward madrassas , or religious schools.

The minister also called on students to avoid wearing clothes that contradict Islamic and Afghan principles.

Abdul Salam Hanafi, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister, said they were trying to expand education in “all remote areas in the country.”

The Taliban previously said girls continuing their education went against their strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia, and that certain conditions were needed for their return to school. However, they made no progress in creating said conditions.

When they ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, they also banned girls’ education.

Despite initially promising a more moderate rule, the group has also barred women from higher education , public spaces like parks, and most jobs as part of harsh measures imposed after they took over following the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from the country in 2021.

The ban on girls’ education remains the Taliban’s biggest obstacle to gaining recognition as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan.

Although Afghan boys have access to education, Human Rights Watch has criticized the Taliban, saying their “abusive” educational policies are harming boys as well as girls . The group, in a report published in December, said there has been less attention to the deep harm inflicted on boys’ education as qualified teachers — including women — left, and inclusion of regressive curriculum changes as well as an increase in corporal punishment have led to falling attendance.

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Guest Essay

One Way to Help a Journalism Industry in Crisis: Make J-School Free

By Graciela Mochkofsky

Ms. Mochkofsky is the dean at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Many uncertainties haunt the field of journalism today — among them, how we can reach our audience, build public trust in our work, and who is going to pay for it all. But one thing is certain: as complicated and dark as the world looks today, it would be much worse if journalists were not there to report on it.

Research shows that towns that have lost sources of local news tend to suffer from lower voter turnout, less civic engagement and more government corruption. Journalists are essential just as nurses and firefighters and doctors are essential.

And to continue to have journalists, we need to make their journalism education free.

This might sound counterintuitive given the state of the industry. Shrinking revenue and decreasing subscription figures have led to a record number of newsroom jobs lost. Much of the local news industry has fallen into the hands of hedge funds focused on squeezing the last drops of revenue out of operations by decimating them. Billionaires who appeared as saviors just a few years ago have grown tired of losing money on the media organizations they bought. Public trust in the value of news is at historical lows, while a growing percentage of people are avoiding the news altogether.

Generative artificial intelligence, which is on the verge of reshaping almost everything around us, is bringing yet another technological disruption to the industry. Against this grim backdrop, authoritarian leaders are increasingly targeting journalists as political enemies both at home and abroad.

And yet there are still tens of thousands of jobs in news media in America, with exceptional journalism being produced every day. Some major organizations have even found ways to thrive in the digital age. Prominent foundation leaders have started an effort to pour hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars into local journalism, and a movement has formed to push for federal and local legislation to direct public funding to news. An initiative to replant local news has founded dozens of nonprofit newsrooms in cities around the country. And a small but growing number of organizations are redefining the way news agendas are set, focusing on rebuilding public trust within small communities.

No matter how the news industry evolves, we will continue to need journalists. Successful business models for media are necessary, but the most crucial element for strong, independent journalism is the people who make it. Given the present stakes in the industry, our society and the world, we need mission-driven, imaginative news leaders who are not bound by the models of the past, who have the motivation and freedom to reimagine the field, and the empathy and commitment to serve the public interest, undaunted by attacks and threats.

We must also move beyond the lack of economic and demographic diversity that has long been a problem in the industry. News has too often been reported by predominantly middle-class, white, male journalists, resulting in coverage that has repeatedly missed the issues that are most important to the people receiving the news, contributing to the public’s lack of trust in the media.

In a resource-starved industry, few newsrooms can offer the type of mentoring, guidance and time that it takes to shape a great journalist. This is now primarily the responsibility of journalism schools. It is the civic duty of these schools to find and train reporters and news leaders, instill in them an ethical foundation, help develop their critical thinking skills, allow them to try and fail in a safe environment, open doors and provide a support network. (Journalism schools should also contribute research in a variety of areas, from the impact of A.I. to new business models to identifying and responding to emerging threats.)

But the cost of a journalism education has become an insurmountable barrier for exactly the kind of people we need the most. And those who, with great effort, manage to overcome that barrier, carry a weight that could limit their professional options.

Reporters burdened with debt are less likely to take professional risks and more likely to abandon the field. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median reporter salary in America is less than $56,000 a year, or about $27 per hour. In low-income areas, where news deserts are more prevalent, annual salaries can be as low as $20,000. A Wall Street Journal report about the debt-to-income ratio of alumni of 16 journalism masters programs found that many graduates leave with debts that exceed their postgraduate income.

As the dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, I can tell you that half measures won’t solve this quandary. My school was founded in 2006 as a public alternative to elite journalism schools in the city and it remains one of the most affordable in the nation.

Our in-state students pay about a quarter of the cost of an equivalent degree from top-tier schools with which we successfully compete. This year alone, 90 percent of our students are on scholarships, and a record 25 percent are attending tuition-free. We also waived the $75 application fee this admission cycle and saw an increase of more than 40 percent in our applicant pool.

Thanks to these policies, we have succeeded where the media industry keeps failing. Over 50 percent of our students are people of color and from underserved communities. Many couldn’t have attended our school if we hadn’t offered significant scholarship support. But that’s not enough. Though we rank as one of the journalism schools with higher-medium-income and lower-median-debt alumni, our students still don’t graduate fully debt-free.

This is why this year, we began a campaign to go fully tuition-free by 2027. While other schools might face different financial challenges, we hope that many more will follow us.

We need journalists whose only obligations are to the facts and the society they serve, not to lenders; who are concerned with the public interest, not with interest rates; who can make risky decisions and take the difficult path if that’s what the mission requires, free of financial burden. Journalism schools can help achieve that. In tough times, it is natural to mourn the past or lament the present, but what we really need is bold action.

Graciela Mochkofsky is the dean at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author, most recently, of “ The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land .”

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