Larry Strauss

For years now, so-called education reformers have sought to measure what we have already known, that children of privilege, children with educated parents and/or strong family support and the enrichments that is the most powerful kind of education, tend to know more and have sharper academic skills that children of...

So-called accountability measures seek to compel incompetent or unmotivated teachers to be effective -- or to replace them if they can't or won't improve -- but anyone close to an actual classroom knows that the best teachers are the ones who compel themselves to serve their students and for whom...

When I read about the battle over so-called ethnic studies in Arizona and elsewhere, I am reminded of my own personal struggle against ignorance.

It began the day I was born and continues to this day.

I think that I am not alone in this struggle.

There is just so...

I work in a school district that has been shamed by sexual predators posing as teachers and the cumulative failures to prevent or stop them. Last week LAUSD teachers were required to participate in a training -- the second in two weeks, third of this school year --...

When I began teaching fulltime, back in the early 90s, our school dismissed students at noon every Friday afternoon in order to have meeting time. The stated purpose was collaboration -- teachers were to use these two hours each week to devise ways to integrate curriculum and innovate instruction so...

A former student of mine, now a police officer and one of my volunteer assistant basketball coaches, disappeared a few seasons ago for several months. When he resurfaced, he told me he had been assigned suddenly by narcotics to go undercover as a student in a local high school (he...

As I read about prison over-crowding and the inability of our states to pay the bill for incarcerating so many humans, I am reminded of the children who have passed through my classroom on their way to jail and the lessons I've learned from them.

Much has been made of...

Sometimes my students ask me why I became a teacher. No simple answer really. It was a combination of things, probably starting when, though I am three-and-a-half years younger than my brother, I became the older brother. I'm not sure when exactly that happened...

Growing up in New York City nearly half a century ago, I watched my parents try to get help for my developmentally disabled brother. There was very little available and my parents were told, on multiple occasions, by education and psychiatric professionals, to dispose of their defective child in an...

Every year around this time I see people walk into the main office of the high school at which I teach and ask how they can get their children into our school. Since I am hardly ever anywhere near the main office my observations probably represent only a small number...

My very first day as a full-time teacher, I arrived at what was then a chaotic and dysfunctional high school to discover that my first period class had 34 students, my second period had seven, and my third period had 49 (with only 42 desks at which to seat them)....

Whenever people suggest that it must be tough being an inner-city high school teacher, my response is that what is tough is being an inner-city high school student.

This time of year I am reminded how true that is.

With college applications due within the next two to five months,...

Some days when I actually spend most of my day teaching composition and reading, I think about what a luxury it is for a teacher to be able to do that.

Because so much of what we do -- what we are asked to do, required to do, compelled by...

So our students just filled up our classrooms for the first time last week and pretty soon the I'll be compelled to assign a letter grade to each of them on a progress report -- and entering those grade demarcations will remind me that our education system reflects little knowledge...

There is an obvious solution to the lagging academic performance of U.S. students:

Increase the teacher work day. To 24 hours.

Then we could assign and grade assignments covering every academic standard and customize those assignments for each student and provide more detailed feedback, communicate with all the parent...

My grandfather was an illegal alien. He came to this country, through Ellis Island, under false pretences -- he was 14 years old and without his parents and he lied about his age. Immigration officers either believed his lie or didn't care. It was late 1914 and they conscripted him...

Falsifying the test results of children is an indefensible act -- especially when such fraud may be covering up real deficiencies that could plague those children and ultimately limit their educational and professional options -- but what happened in Atlanta is neither a surprise nor, I strongly suspect,...

The school district in which I teach (the second largest in the U.S.) recently announced a new policy limiting a student's homework liability to 10% of his or her term grade.

I understand the good-hearted intentions. I know what life is like for many of our students in this city.

As another school year lurches into the collective memory, relegated to the digital archives, I find myself reflecting again on the purpose of grades?

The conventional understanding about those lettered evaluation marks is that they are meant to measure student performance -- skills and knowledge -- and apprise those students...

All too often in the education debate we trade in the currency of generalities.

I suppose that is unavoidable since the problems are so vast and diverse and since so many people engaged in the debate spend little or no time in a public school and even less time in...