Jack Schneider

Privilege, equity, and the Advanced Placement Program: tug of war

The Advanced Placement Program is growing at a striking rate in US high schools and at the same time being abandoned by high‐status schools. This paper explores the history of the Advanced Placement Program, from its roots in the 1950s as a programme for challenging high‐achieving students at high‐status schools, through its equity‐motivated expansion in the latter decades of the 20th century, up to the present as it faces threats to its credibility and prestige. In so doing, it also explores the difficulty of combating inequality with school reform, particularly in light of continuing moves by privileged groups to gain a measure of distinction. In the case of the Advanced Placement Program, a greater push for equity has, ironically, incited a reaction that may, in the end, result in greater inequity.

Was Bloom's Taxonomy Pointed in the Wrong Direction?:

Placing knowledge at the bottom of the Bloom pyramid sends the wrong message about the importance of knowledge in learning.

Making the Grade: A History of the A-F Marking Scheme.

This article provides a historical interpretation of one of the defining features of modern schooling: grades. As a central element of schools, grades—their origins, uses and evolution—provide a window into the tensions at the heart of building a national public school system in the United States. We argue that grades began as an intimate communication tool among teachers, parents, and students used largely to inform and instruct. But as reformers worked to develop a national school system in the late nineteenth century, they saw grades as useful tools in an organizational rather than pedagogical enterprise—tools that would facilitate movement, communication and coordination. Reformers placed a premium on readily interpretable and necessarily abstract grading systems. This shift in the importance of grades as an external rather than internal communication device required a concurrent shift in the meaning of grades—the meaning and nuance of the local context was traded for the uniformity and fungibility of more portable forms.

Socrates and the Madness of Method.

From Socratic to sarcastic, a diversity of teaching methods claim a relationship to the ancient Greek scholar. But is there really a connection?

Putting the public back into public accountability

Although current accountability systems have received a great deal of criticism for being too narrow and too focused on sanctions, relatively little concern has been directed at a related problem: the failure of accountability systems to meaningfully engage the public. Derek Gottlieb and Jack Schneider suggest that a better system would consider the plural and often non-instrumental standards by which communities evaluate their schools. In such a system, state officials, district leaders, teachers, parents, students, and other stakeholders would come together to determine how schools will be evaluated and how to respond to the results of those evaluations.

Backtalk: The plight of the engaged scholar

Scholars can make significant contributions to the work of teachers and schools. But they know they’re often viewed as being little more than frivolous add-ons who are distracting educators from doing the real work of teaching and learning.

Backtalk Let’s start talking and listening to each other

Education is rife with polarization, perhaps in large measure because of the Internet. People are spending a lot of time talking only with people they agree with, while talking at or past people who disagree with them. What we really need to do, the author says, is to have a discussion in which we start talking and listening to our adversaries.