Author Archive

The Battle for New York Schools: Eva Moskowitz vs. Mayor Bill de Blasio by Daniel Berger portrays the battle between the person who runs the most successful charter school association in New York City and its Mayor. I’m left wondering why the public schools aren’t looking to build on the success of this group of charters that is having amazing success, at least in terms of the standardize tests. Your school might want to see what they are doing.

Daniel Bergner

• Daniel is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of four books of nonfiction: What Do Women Want?, The Other Side of Desire, In the Land of Magic Soldiers, and God of the Rodeo.  In the Land of Magic Soldiers received an Overseas Press Club Award for international reporting and a Lettre-Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. God of the Rodeo was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Daniel’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Talk, and the New York Times Book Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. His writing is included in The Norton Reader. You can email him at bergnerdaniel@gmail.com and reach him on Twitter at @bergnerdaniel.

Eva Moskowitz

• With a degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins, Eva founded her first Success Academy in 2006 for kindergarteners and first graders in the Harlem section of New York City. Since then it has grown to the largest charter group in the city with nearly 9,500 students in 24 elementary schools, seven middle schools, and a new high school that opened in August. Most students are black and Latino and poor enough to qualify for subsidized meals. These are the same type of children that the city’s public school have had little success educating.
• The 2014 results from New York State Tests on English and math place her schools in the top 1% of all the state’s schools in math, and in the top 3% in English. At one school, where 95% of students are black or Latino, 98% scored at or above grade level in math, with 80% receiving the highest of four ratings. You would think the mayor would be thrilled with this performance, but he has chosen to engage Moskowitz in a ferocious political battle. While they are both liberal crusaders, they have profoundly divergent ideas about how the mission should be carried out. De Blasio has moved to block the expansion of the Success Academies, but Moskowitz is using her own political resources to move him out of the way. The outcome of this clash may determine education’s future.

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Exams Measure What We know, But They’re Also the Best Way to Learn by Benedict Carey takes a look at how pretests that resemble final exams can improve learning. This is from the New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2014. Click here for the full article. Click below to buy his book.

Benedict J. Carey

• Benedict is a science reporter for The New York Times who focuses on brain and behavior topics. He writes about neuroscience, psychiatry and neurology, as well as everyday psychology. The territory includes the large and the small, memory molecules and group behavior, narcissism and nostalgia, drug uses and drug addiction. You can email him or reach him on Twitter @bencareynyt.

The Set Up

• Benedict starts by asking if you would study more effectively if on day one of a difficult course you were presented with the final exam without answers. Certainly you would focus on the key questions and work hard to find high quality answers. This is the idea behind pretesting, one of the most exciting developments in learning-science. A recent study at U.C.L.A. by Elizabeth Ligon Bjork found that pretesting raised performance on finals by an average of 10%. The key idea here is that testing might be the key to studying rather than the other way around. A test is not only a measurement tool, it’s a way of enriching and altering memory.

Test Dread

• Many of us have had the “bombed test” experience, and most of us have only taken tests that counted at the end of a unit, a semester, or a year. The problem is often due to a misjudgment of the depth of what we know. We simply think we are fluent when we are not, and we assume that further study won’t help. We move on forgetting that we forgot. The best way to overcome this illusion is testing, which also happens to be an effective study technique in its own right. This has been understood for some time as we know it is easier to memorize something if you stop and try to recite it after some initial study rather than studying until you have memorized the entire piece. Recitation is a form of self-examination.

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