Faculty in the Media

"For any individual who’s thinking about whether they should make this decision to go to college, it’s still by and large a very good decision. It’s not risk-free. Not everybody benefits. ... It’s just a good investment for people to make, and it pays off over the course of a lifetime."

"What’s different here is that the changes we are making are not in response only to congressional appropriations, but also clear signals from the administration of the need to reduce spending."

"This question has been so thoroughly investigated. One could argue, why throw even more money at a question that has been answered, when that money could be better spent trying to figure out what does cause autism, not what doesn't cause autism?"

"If humans are trained simply on knowing a bunch of facts and doing well on psychometric tests, they’re going to lose to AI in the workplace, because they’re doing what AI does well rather than what people do well."

"We would be just as right to sound the alarm about a parent or caregiver mental health crisis than about a teen mental health crisis."

"Very few parents have detailed knowledge of exactly where in the syllabus their child is, but even fewer know how that compares to where children would have been in 2019."

"Despite our best efforts, I’m still not sure we have a clear understanding of what typical reading comprehension instruction looks like."

"Young professionals often have abundant — but easily overlooked — opportunities for what we call micro-mentorship: short, actionable advice that can make a tangible difference."

"In my moments of doubt, I remind myself that this is supposed to be hard. What we are setting out to do something extraordinarily ambitious: to provide a high quality education to every child in America, regardless of how they are situated."

"The state’s schools should be able to chart a stable course forward since they are controlled and financed by this state and its local governments. It won’t exactly be business as usual in this turbulent political environment. There will be many distractions. State educators and advocates will need to be nimble, committed, and resilient."

"The obvious problem is that it’s hard to support reading comprehension if students are not reading."

"Overlooking the lessons learned from three decades of education policies aimed at advancing equity is unlikely to transform the economic and social opportunities for the poor in Mexico or enhance the overall population’s knowledge and skills."

"I think really what ... drives the continuing popularity of the elimination of the department as a talking point in Republican primary politics, is simply the depth of the tradition of local control in American education. The sense that really a strong federal role is in tension with that tradition."

"Higher ed has been experimenting with offering different types of levels of degrees for decades upon decades upon decades. To me, this is sort of a natural outgrowth of what we've seen in the field happening for a long time now."

"I see the pandemic as an accelerant, as something that was going to happen anyway." 

"The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools."

"In short, Massachusetts schools may be number one for some students but not for all of them. Students’ skills are falling and growing more unequal."

"Our Massachusetts diploma used to be the admired national standard, but now college admissions officers and employers are baffled as to what a Massachusetts diploma actually means since the Commonwealth has reverted to a hodgepodge of variable local standards, coupled with some of the least rigorous course requirements of any state in the country."

"Oftentimes we think that politics is all about material goods, resource allocation and the like. I want to say it’s actually about something more fundamental. It’s about human dignity, and human dignity resides in the capacity of people to be the authors of their lives."

"It’s particularly important for schools to engage with families that might feel disoriented by their setting or that their cultural practices are unwelcome, according to Carola Suárez-Orozco."

"It’s important to keep in mind that there are two Massachusetts stories in this round of NAEP results. One is the 'best in the nation' story. The other is that we continue to have persistent learning loss due to the pandemic and that we have declined substantially from peak achievement levels early in the prior decade."

"When you have a supportive team, a supportive leader, the resources, and you also have the skill and the capacity and the knowledge of how to do it the right way, I’ve seen things really move tremendously, sometimes in a short period of time, if you’ve got the real backing of the leadership."

"If you have open choice in schools, it often leads to different kinds of segregation and clustering. Oftentimes, that will line up along racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic lines."

"The share of students receiving summer school and the share of students attending summer school was lower than needed. The recovery efforts were not intensive enough."

"Good teachers have strong knowledge of their students as individuals — how they think and think about themselves as learners — as well as of their students’ culture and community."

“What you’re seeing is a consequence of the success we’ve had in educating more people. Graduating college no longer gives you a leg up, as recent cohorts have seen the highest graduation rates ever.”

“The goal of good hiring is to establish a match between the person who’s coming in, either as a transfer from another school or as a new hire, and the expectations of people in that school."

“The challenges that community colleges face are just fierce.”

“Anytime, any place you bring up school closings, it’s a battle, and it’s a battle that often leaders pay a price for waging."

“Kids’ primary pathway to learning math is in school, and the only way to improve math instruction is through the constant improvement of what happens between teachers and students.”