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In the political economy of U.S. schooling, so-called “standardized” tests are not neutral yardsticks. By design and in practice they embed cultural-linguistic hurdles and reproduce concentrated social advantage. In today’s capitalist, bourgeois school system, these regimes are policy instruments that sort, exclude, and legitimize austerity and privatization, useful to monopoly capital’s project of attacking public education (Hursh, 2013; Saltman, 2014). Bias is not a slur; i

If only my geometry teacher had realized I was a “kinesthetic learner,” I might have understood right triangles while doing cartwheels across the classroom.

The Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) has long been celebrated as one of Chicago’s great civic treasures. But behind its sleek glass exhibits and corporate “innovation” rhetoric lies a story of creeping privatization, ideological capture, and attacks on public education under the banner of partnership. Nowhere is this clearer than in the museum’s partnership with Collins Academy STEAM High School in North Lawndale. Through its Science Leadership Initiative (SLI), MSI prese

How do you know if an activity fulfills the criteria for authentic or student-centered instruction? Start by specifying for whom and by what criteria. “Authentic” isn’t a look or a theme; it’s a social relation. An activity meets disciplinary authenticity when students engage in the practices of the field (posing and refining questions, using warrants, revising to peer critique), not just producing polished artifacts. It meets community authenticity when people affected by t

In my experience, integration works when it is built around authentic public problems and a coherent question rather than a loose “theme.” For example, I recently framed a mathematics unit with community data, field observations, and resident voice such that the math functioned as a civic language: students used gap calculations, rates, and comparisons to advance public claims, not just to complete exercises. That alignment is consistent with research showing that integrated

The AHEAD (2019) video on Universal Design for Learning makes a sensible point: variability among learners is not an exception but the rule (CAST, 2018). Good teaching, therefore, is not about finding a mythical “average” student but about designing flexible entry points into complex ideas. Yet this is where good teaching is often misunderstood. In many classrooms, it becomes tangled up with the old “learning styles” myth, as though presenting information in three formats (vi

When asked to describe the “benefits of technology for instructing culturally diverse students,” it is important to begin by naming the prejudices and bias in the question itself. Both “technology” and “culturally diverse students” are presented as neutral, technical categories. Critical literature on education and technology reminds us that digital tools are never just tools; they are embedded in social relations of power, ownership, and labor, and are deeply entangled with

Author(s) & Year   Title / Focus   Type of Study or Work   Key Findings or Arguments   Relevance to Current Study   Critical Notes   Apple (2004)   Ideology and Curriculum   Theoretical / Critical Pedagogy  Argues curriculum reflects ideological control and reproduces class relations.  Frames curriculum as a site of ideological struggle.  Highlights how “best practices” can be mechanisms of control under neoliberalism.  Giroux (2011)   On Critical Pedagogy   Theoretical  Link

This anonymous survey is part of a teacher-led action research project at Thorndike Academy designed to explore how educators experience and implement evidence-based, multimodal instructional strategies to meet the needs of diverse learners. "Multimodal" refers to designing lessons that engage students through multiple modes of meaning, such as language, images, data, movement, and digital media to deepen understanding. "Diverse learners" are students who vary by culture, la

This critical participatory action research project emerges from the daily contradictions of teaching in a public school system caught between democratic ideals and neoliberal management. At Thorndike Academy High School in Chicago’s North Lawndale community, students navigate structures shaped by historic racial segregation, chronic underfunding, and the growing influence of corporate and philanthropic “reform” agendas. These forces have reframed educational purpose through

Teaching today is shaped by profound pressures and profound possibilities. New teachers are often handed an overwhelming list of strategies, tools, and techniques and told that their effectiveness depends on how well they “manage” classrooms, implement programs, raise test scores, or integrate technology (Au, 2011; Nichols & Berliner, 2007). Yet the real work of teaching is far more human, relational, and communal than any checklist suggests. Classrooms are living social envi

In Chicago’s public schools (CPS), immigrant students from Mexico, Somalia, and Palestine embody both the promise and the contradiction of education in the United States. They arrive in classrooms carrying the weight of displacement, labor exploitation, racism, xenophobic hysteria, surveillance, and the constant threat of deportation (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2010; Bigelow, 2008; Abu El-Haj, 2015). Yet too often, “culturally relevant instruction” is reduced to symbolic gestures:

Subject Area:  Mathematics   Grade Level:  High School     Lesson Length:  Flexible, designed as a 5-day sequence, but could be adapted for a longer inquiry  Objectives/Goals  By the end of this sequence, students will:  Critically analyze  messaging from the MSI Blue Paradox  exhibit and identify how responsibility for systemic problems is framed.  Investigate lived experiences  of being blamed or held individually responsible for collective problems in their community or sc