Faculty in the Media

"Math is cumulative: If you don’t understand fractions when they’re introduced in third and fourth grade, you’re going to have a lot of trouble when you get to algebra."

"You want to model for them that you're not just focused on your own kid. You're focused on other people's kids too, and the team and how well the team does."

“You can’t just lock a group of kindergartners in a library and expect them to emerge, a couple of weeks later, as readers. It’s more like learning a musical instrument. You can listen to Mozart all your life, but if I put you in front of a piano and say, ‘Play Mozart,’ you will fail."

"If you look at the data over the long term, it's very clear that the declines started prior to the pandemic. ... What is an explanation that can check all of those boxes?"

"These are skills that are in motion. You can’t have a classroom where you say, ‘Okay, fourth period, we’re going to teach social skills.’ It’s not really about the content. It’s learning how to work with others, how to deal with information, and how to make decisions in a fluid, unpredictable world."

"The vast majority of young people are not in four-year residential colleges buying pizza. Many of them are trying to pay rent. Many of them are young parents. Many of them are working the gig economy as their main source of income while trying to raise a young child. We don't think about the 20s as being responsible adults because we don't treat them like that."

"When [early child care and education] centers close down, this doesn't necessarily mean that parents no longer need care for their children. Parents still need to work."

"Research indicates that both children and adults have a great capacity for moral growth, and the cost of assuming their morality is fixed is high."

"Many students use AI without a good understanding of how it works ... and this leads to putting too much confidence in its output. So, teaching them to be critical and discerning about how they use it and what it offers is important. But even more important is helping them understand how their embodied human minds work and how powerful they can be when used well."

"Sometimes folks may underestimate just how well children are sophisticated in their thought, and eloquent in how they describe things. And it's on us, on the adults, to understand their stories."

"It seems clear that interpersonal connections – and the deep-seated principles that govern them, such as the general desire to reciprocate good deeds that others have done for us – are likely to persist. Investing in understanding other people and trying to help them where possible still seems like a worthy bet in the age of AI."

"We need to recognize that what sounds good on paper doesn’t always work, and that — when it comes to critical questions like lowering absenteeism — you have to be collecting evidence."

"Cold-calling is a technique. That’s a toolbox item. It’s secondary to pedagogical practices and where it fits into those practices. Students are anxious in class for a lot of different reasons. This is one thing that sparks anxiety and makes them not able to learn."

"To recognize and respect the context of applicants from low-income, rural or working-class backgrounds is not to diminish the accomplishments of the wealthy; it is to ensure that success is measured by individual effort and achievement, not just by access to opportunity."

"No, I don’t think the compact as proposed should be signed. But it’s still an excellent idea to have a coalition of strong universities work together to negotiate a package of reforms for higher education."

"If you look at educators, the top use case isn’t a category called ‘training and teaching others. It’s ‘documenting/recording information.’ And for sales occupations, the top task isn’t ‘selling or influencing others.’ It’s ‘making decisions and solving problems.'"

"To really just focus on the phonics without having some continuous text that is meaningful is not necessarily going to come with the results that we want in terms of children who can read and who want to read."

"Almost all kids are morally literate. They know adults have values, but moral identity is the bigger thing. When parents expect something, when parents have high moral standards, such as helping neighbors, modeling fairness, these understandings are backed up."

"[Learning to read] is a long process with many milestones that unfold over many years, and it starts primarily with oral language. Years of brain development lead up to the point where formal instruction puts it all together and enables them to read. The process starts in utero."

"We have a science of reading. But now, we need a science of teaching reading that is equally well-developed if we want to support teachers optimally to do what they are trying to do in first- through sixth-grade classrooms."

"There are lingering effects of the pandemic in terms of absenteeism. The pre-pandemic evidence of the impact of absenteeism on achievement was strong — not just for the students who were absent, but for their classmates."

"Policymakers and educators have urgent work to do, as do parents who play an especially critical role in their children’s education."

"Every child has the right to learn to read, and reading is an essential part of our daily lives, and it’s really important for people’s economic outcomes and academic outcomes."

"By cultivating a small 'mentor pod' of peers who are also looking for work, you can help each other think creatively about your goals and job options, polish your materials together, and provide emotional support along the way — independent of whether you have access to a traditional mentor or not."

"At its heart, leading strategically is about anchoring in purpose; making choices about what to do, not do, and how; and then learning as you go."

"Advancing excellent teaching and learning in today’s climate depends on each of us doing the work we’re best positioned to do — with clarity, conviction, and one another."

"Super highly motivated students, they actually are more actively seeking out more challenging materials to learn. So the kind of opportunities provided by AI platforms do accelerate their learning. But for students who are less motivated, what we have seen is that AI actually might present as a shortcut for their learning.”

"We’re thinking about building a language and culture of power and building access for our students."

"Today’s most pressing problems — climate change, pandemics, migration, technological disruption, inequality, democratic decline — do not respect national borders. Global competence, comparative perspective, empathy, and creative problem-solving are necessities, not luxuries, for those preparing to lead."

"At the beginning of the pandemic, the Trump administration suspended all student loan payments, which made sense at that time. But that freeze kept getting extended by month, by month, year by year. So think of how many addresses change over four years and banking details and all that information that you need to have up to date in order to make sure the payments go through properly."