It’s that rarest of days: I had a story in today’s paper. Being an education reporter in the summer reminds me of Osama bin Laden: no class.

The story may be the wonkiest thing I’ve ever written, about why education research sucks so damned hard. (Well, I phrase it differently in the article.)

Comments

29 July | 16:31 | unimportant

It really irks me when people say that New Math didn't work. I was taught new math when I was going to school, and was doing fine, developing some pretty advanced concepts right up until I moved to a school district that didn't have it. Memorization by rote destroyed my will to live in any math class I then took. It was discontinued because the parents of the students got pissed off that they couldn't understand their children's homework, not because it was so awful a way to learn math.

29 July | 16:59 | josh

Well, different people will tell you different things about how well New Math worked. (As is the case with the other great left-vs.-right curriculum debate, whole language reading instruction vs. phonics.) But it is fair to say, I think, that it was adopted in a low of places without a lot of research into its effectiveness before hand. (Of course, to get that research done, you have to test it out -- in schools. It's a vicious cycle...)

30 July | 0:39 | Lisa

I'll probably fail my "New Teachers Teaching Writing" class cuz I just quoted your article instead of writing some pleasant reaction to an assigned "research-based best practices" article. Or maybe I'll fail for using "cuz."

Comment Preview

said:

Joshua Benton

Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)