Does The Flat World and Education provide all of the answers? No, and it shouldn’t. This book provides some important lines of inquiry and thinking that should be front and center as we discuss implementation of new funding streams as we recover from Covid and as we look at new investments that will come in Title I. As Cardona and his team look to completely reinvent Title II (both under ESEA and, likely, the Higher Education Act), Darling-Hammond’s data and conclusions on teacher induction and ongoing teacher support need to be central to the discussion. They may not be adopted whole cloth (and probably shouldn’t) but if they aren’t part of the debate, we are missing a central point to meaningful education improvement. We have ignored or avoided these discussions for too long. But if we are going to emphasize the science, then we should be looking to the data and the real-life case studies that can be pointed to to demonstrate true impact.

From Eduflack’s latest over on Medium, where I explore lessons we can learn today from the book penned by Linda Darling-Hammond more than a decade ago.