For decades, before it became a blight on the city landscape, the massive Sears building in Memphis was a symbol of what the “Bluff City” might one day become. Built during the Roaring Twenties, with a vivid art-deco exterior and more than one million square feet of space, the building…

Four years ago, on the eve of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I made the dispiriting prediction that, regardless of who won (and, at the time, the notion that Donald Trump would win seemed inconceivable to most of us), America was witnessing the birth of a new civic (dis)order. Four…

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete. — Buckminster Fuller Before these six acres were left to the trees, before the buildings were razed and the families displaced, before the $31 million promise or the thousands of visitors, and before there was ever a…

My fellow grown-ups: Now that the End Days are upon us (kidding/not kidding) and your kids are out of school for the foreseeable future, how should you structure their time? This is both a helpful and a horrifying question. It’s helpful because we’re all about to huddle indefinitely in close…

In his State of the Union address tonight, President Trump will renew a call for tax breaks in order to provide more scholarships for students to attend private schools. The Education Freedom Scholarships would provide up to $5 billion in federal tax credits to individuals and businesses who donate to…

It has been more than fifty years since James Baldwin first named the knotted pathology that has ensnared White and Black America in an intimate dance of mutual self-destruction for, well, ever. “The failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person,” he wrote…

OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century? There are a lot of inspiring schools out there, so I want to…

As an educator, I can’t think of a more important, elusive, and agonizing question than this doozy: How do you measure success? So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered a new source of inspiration for how we should answer it, by way of a 27,000-acre fish farm at…

We’re doing it again. 2019 is barely a week old, yet everyone seems to be searching for the singular person, policy or program that can restore order and usher in the better world we seek. From the excitement over the looming presidential race (and the promise of a return to…