featured writings

Progressive education is a world-building project rooted in the radical hope that schools can become something fit for human beings.

A sketch for nonlinear, asynchronous writing workshops that honor neurodivergent learners by replacing timed assignments with student-led spaces, concept maps, and conversation.

How asking students to generate their own math problems, mistakes, driving questions, and conjectures produces deeper understanding than traditional drill and assessment.

A survey of the research documenting student and teacher crises in mental health and engagement, and the project-based, self-determination-oriented practices that evidence shows can address them.

A look at how Taylorism and behaviorism shaped American schooling through industry's lens, producing reward-and-punishment classrooms that manage compliance rather than nurture human development.

Why educators increasingly shy away from the word 'progressive' to describe their schools, and what the movement stands to lose when its practitioners stop claiming its name.

A talk tracing the roots of critical pedagogy and arguing that progressive education begins by honoring the human impulse toward wonder, inquiry, and mystery rather than the banking model of testing and recall.

Three imagined day-in-the-life vignettes, from a typical public school to a fully reimagined one, contrasting what schooling looks like at different stages of progressive change.

A music educator explores how Seymour Papert's constructionist learning theory and makerspaces could expand music education beyond the traditional band, orchestra, and choir model.

A family fishing trip becomes an extended analogy for applying the principles of Universal Design for Learning to classroom practice.

An argument that classroom technology only becomes transformative when paired with student agency, room for failure, and unstructured play rather than repackaged rote instruction.

A history teacher recounts how abandoning tightly planned, standards-driven lessons for student voice and choice rekindled genuine learning and his own sense of purpose.

A language educator reflects on reshaping his game-based teaching around students themselves, using the Game Terakoya project to pursue genuine transformation rather than surface-level engagement.

A case for reclaiming free, risky, rule-light play in schools as essential to children's learning, wellbeing, and healthy development.

A middle school student and her English teacher sit down to discuss how a shift from grades to feedback changed their classroom, their motivation, and how they think about learning.

A history of how American grading practices emerged in the late 1800s, why reformers have pushed back for over a century, and what the research says about moving beyond grades.

A look at the growing movement of undergraduate and graduate programs dropping standardized tests, what research says about GPAs as predictors of college success, and why the Mastery Transcript offers a better alternative.

A high school Economics teacher describes how he cut required content to make room for a semester-long, project-based Economic Engagement Project rooted in student curiosity and community connection.

A response to critics of our earlier piece, arguing that behaviorist models drawn from Pavlov, Skinner, and Ebbinghaus are too narrow a foundation for understanding how real students learn in real classrooms.

A critique of the Sold A Story podcast and the broader Science of Reading movement, arguing that literacy cannot be reduced to a curriculum package and requires investment in teacher professionalization.

An argument that "The Science of Learning" flattens the complexity of cognition and schooling by reducing learning to a narrow set of testable, memory-focused practices that ignore the embodied, social, and emotional realities of kids.

How university corporatization, partnerships with weapons manufacturers, and the violent suppression of pro-Palestinian student protest reveal the need for radical democracy on campus.

How classrooms function as carceral spaces that control and objectify students, and what abolitionist practices can begin to build something different.

How translanguaging pedagogy counters the monolingual bias of schools and affirms the full linguistic and cultural identities of multilingual students.

A school counseling intern reflects on how art and creative expression restore student agency and resist the obedience and conformity embedded in school systems.

A special education teacher describes a classroom project that helped students understand their own IEPs, advocate for themselves, and take ownership of their learning.

How Maslow's hierarchy and well-intentioned SEL practices can flatten students into deficit assumptions, and why collective reflexivity offers a more humanizing response.

Why dystopian storytelling dominates our cultural imagination, and how solarpunk and critical pedagogy can help educators imagine and build better futures.

How schools' relentless focus on college and career readiness is harming student well-being and why we need to redefine what success in education means.

How neoliberal values and market-driven thinking have eroded the humanities in education, and why humanistic study matters more than ever.

Using Baudrillard's theory of simulation and hyperreality to examine why traditional critiques of schooling get co-opted and what progressive educators can do instead.

How the Teachers Pay Teachers marketplace commodifies lesson planning and substitutes shallow, compliance-driven activities for genuine student engagement.

An overview of how neoliberal market logic shapes common school practices, from gamified curriculum and standards-based grading to mindfulness programs used to prop up an unchanged system.

A critique of technique-driven, behaviorist pedagogy in 'no excuses' charter schools and how scripted classroom control dehumanizes students in the name of college readiness.

The only antidote to a world of manufactured confusion is a shift toward making students builders of meaning, not consumers of it.

An examination of how testing companies manufactured the pandemic learning loss narrative to sell schools more assessments, interventions, and professional development.

An argument that the College Board's AP and SAT tests are inequitable, overpriced, and useless indicators of college readiness that schools should abandon.

An argument against the push toward academic, career-focused kindergarten programs and in favor of play-based early childhood education.

A social studies teacher recounts the parent complaints, administrative pressure, and right-wing harassment campaign that drove him to resign after teaching about January 6th and Charlottesville.

An examination of the limits and unintended side-effects of applying medical-style evidence-based research methods to education.