Op-Eds & Articles

By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published in Education Next With all the buzz about the District Race to the Top and jockeying to fit it into differing agendas, you might miss its simple premise: “There are great teachers … who have figured out how to personalize education and we…

By Bryan Hassel and Celine Coggins; first published on Education Week. If you are a teacher who helps students learn exceptionally well, this is your moment—schools and policymakers must vastly expand your impact, now. Today, our nation is at a crossroads; we simply cannot fall short educationally for another decade…

By Lucy Steiner and Sharon Kebschull Barrett; first published in School Administrator magazine. When the Minneapolis Public Schools first set out to hire turnaround school principals, administrators followed their usual process — which focused largely on reputation and anecdotal support and considered mainly internal candidates. Yet success at the complicated…

By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published on Education Next. There’s been a lot of chatter about increasing teacher pay—even doubling it. With the release of TNTP’s The Irreplaceables, talk about paying teachers more and retaining the best will likely increase. Whether or not your political perspective leaves you…

By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published on Education Next Everybody loves a good infographic (even you wonky researchers – just wait ‘til nobody’s looking), and we hope this one will change how you view education reform efforts. For word nerds, here’s a summary: Our nation is falling behind globally…

By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published on Education Next. As ESEA talk heats up, reform groups are tossing ideas on the table (e.g., here). We can debate the details, but most have some merit. Here’s the problem: even if our nation fully implemented most of the recommended legislation…

Blog post argues that digital tools should be used both to make teaching more manageable for the average teacher, and to give massively more students access to excellent teachers.

Rick Hess was right to question the simplistic hyping of Khan Academy’s online video lectures in this Straight Up post. But we think he’s only got it half-right: it’s less a matter of OVER-hyping than MIS-hyping the true potential of what Khan is doing. Just to summarize, Khan…

By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published in Education Next. In the 1990s Continental Airlines was struggling, even more than its troubled U.S. airline peers. As the company’s then-president Greg Brenneman explained in a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), “Continental ranked tenth out of the ten largest U.S….

By Bryan Hassel; first published in Education Next. Everyone has read the ubiquitous feature story about a charter school–Jane and John Q. Public and their friends, sitting around somebody’s kitchen table, dream up a different kind of school for their kids. Putting in hours of sweat equity, charging start-up costs…