Recently, I saw an interview with a celebrity that floored me. In the interview, Wilmer Valderrama on CBS Mornings talks about his experiences with being ... Read More The post Something Bigger Than Me (Recruiting Teachers with Students and Teachers) appeared first on The Jose Vilson ..read more

Note: Thanks to the thousands of you who’ve subscribed to my newsletter thus far. I’ll be writing more regularly here, but if you’d like to ... Read More The post The Haitian Community and What We Teach Ourselves appeared first on The Jose Vilson ..read more

I got a story to tell. Yesterday, I was running errands when one of my former students stopped me at the local supermarket. She’s a ... Read More The post Middle School Prepares Us For Social Science Thinking, Too appeared first on The Jose Vilson ..read more

A few weeks ago, after skimming through the formatting of my dissertation one last time, I said a little prayer. The last call was, “God, ... Read More The post A Brief Reflection on My Dissertation and Teachers’ Labor appeared first on The Jose Vilson ..read more

In 2015, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal invited me to discuss education reform and my book, This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education. I was still a classroom teacher then, imbued in the idea that teachers, particularly those doing STEM-related topics, should continuously seek professional development and stay curious about the math they didn’t know. Of course, I hadn’t taken into account that people would call into the show because a gentleman called in to proclaim the virtues of rudimentary math. In critiquing the Common Core State Standards, he said, “Can’t we just get ..read more

Recently, Christina Cross, a Black woman sociologist at Harvard, found her work at the crosshairs of the same person who brought us the bastardization of critical race theory. (Yes, it was.) Many scholars, from her sociology department to the primary investigators of the original study, defended her against his claims of plagiarism, but people jumped regardless. As I observed scholar after acclaimed scholar defending her work, it gave me hope that perhaps we had learned lessons from the last three years of ideological malpractice. Yet, it also made me reticent to uplift this newfound courage c ..read more

Here’s something I never got to tell you. About seven years ago, I wrote this post that went viral. I didn’t expect to see some popular public intellectuals sharing it with their audiences, and other public figures rebuking me publicly, either. Yes, the leader of the schools would try to reach out to me as did a few of his people. (I didn’t respond, but I did write another post about Capital Prep Harlem and another post in response to that.) I did foresee that a fair amount of scandal would follow both the school leader and the mogul. In researching Capital Prep schools back then, I saw how th ..read more

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending my fourth SXSW EDU in Austin, TX. As Ron Reed mentioned before introducing scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw as the opening speaker, the conference has grown significantly since 2011. Whereas in the beginning, it felt more focused on digital learning and ed-tech, this year felt more like it was a hub for relevant education conversations. Thus, organizers implicitly asked participants to choose their own adventure. And that they did. For my part, I partook four events: a multilingual learner and teacher meet-up with Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a mentorship session ..read more

Sometime in the summer of 2020, a small, vocal set of parents and advocates decided that teachers should get back to work. They overshadowed the public praise for teachers and schools in favor of opening up schools all willy-nilly. Of course, studies and polls kept disrupting that narrative, but the narrative persisted. Parents of school-aged children support their local teachers and schools, and much of the narrative came from adults without children. Studies showed that learning loss proponents overstated their claims given that the United States fared better than most industrialized countri ..read more

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the latest celebration of TED-Ed Educator Talks at the TED Headquarters in NYC. For those who are unfamiliar, TED-Ed has created a cohort experience for educators to develop their own TED talks over the last couple of years, and it’s led to a lot of great speeches for educators across the field. A plethora of organizations – including EduColor – have gotten a chance to nominate and advocate for educators from their networks to contribute ideas that can build towards a TED talk. From there, organizations work with TED to elevate their “ideas worth spre ..read more