The Courage to Stand for Diverse Schools
My name is James Noonan. I live in Roxbury. I’m an associate professor of education and parent of two students at the Nathan Hale School. I’d like to speak to you about the values you bring to your work on this committee. I hope and trust that each o...
Read more
My Racial Autobiography
Recently, I made a change to my course on Culturally Responsive Leadership. I asked my students to write and share a racial autobiography, inspired by Glenn Singleton's example and the work of Drs. Mark Gooden and Ann O'Doherty. Understanding one's own...
Read more
A Return to Normal But At What Cost?
Last weekend, my wife and I were in a restaurant and unmasked for one of the first times in three years. While we were sipping our drinks, my brother sent me a text message: “Happy third anniversary to Tom Hanks getting Covid!” Which then reminded us i...
Read more
A Quick Guide to Better Surveys
This post is also available as a downloadable PDF. Surveys are common currency in data-driven improvement. The allure of surveys is easy to understand. Thanks to mobile technology, surveys are more easily designed and deployed now than ever before. Th...
Read more
What We Learned in the Pandemic
The decision by the Commissioner of Education, Jeff Riley, to deny approval of remote learning days at the Curley K-8 School in Boston seems part of a determined plan by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to move forward at all costs,...
Read more
Testimony Before the Boston School Committee
The following comments were delivered, via Zoom, during a meeting of the Boston School Committee on a proposal to update the admissions criteria for "exam schools" in the Boston Public Schools. My name is James Noonan, assistant professor of education...
Read more
Living in a Time of Two Plagues
As the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 approached 100,000—the largest country total in the world—the New York Times devoted four pages of its Sunday edition to cataloging the lives of 1,000 people who had died. Read together, the one-line obituaries ampl...
Read more
Parent Activism in the Age of Foundation Budget Formulas
My daughter is losing her computer teacher to a budget cut. Well, maybe. The principal tells us that the teacher is okay with it. The district tells us that in fact there is no cut. But explanations ring hollow when you’re upset and looking for someone...
Read more
The Rhetoric of Resegregation
The issue of school segregation – particularly, the trend toward re-segregation – is once again in the news in Boston, with a Boston Globe analysis finding that 60 percent of schools were “intensely segregated” (defined as at least 90 percent students ...
Read more
Seeing Good
Recently, I attended a community meeting where I was one voice in a diverse chorus of stakeholders tasked with closing schools I knew nothing about. Of course, this was not the task-as-presented, but it became the task-as-enacted. And ever since walki...
Read more
Reading Racism
Somewhat clumsily, I’m learning how to read Little House on the Prairie to my three-year-old. Recently, Mia rediscovered the mini-library of “Little House” books – given as a gift to her and her sister from old family friends – on a bookshelf in her r...
Read more
Making Space for Uncertainty in Professional Development
Ask teachers about professional development (PD) and you are likely to be met with a shrug or a grimace, but as Ann Webster-Wright has argued, there is a revealing gap between teachers’ rhetoric about professional development and their own experiences ...
Read more
Our Collective Responsibility for School Integration
In his historical portrait of federal, state, and local efforts to integrate schools, James Ryan, former law professor at the University of Virginia and current dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), boiled down the essential message ...
Read more
The Civic Negligence of Schools
I have been thinking lately about the civic responsibility – and negligence – of schools. Specifically, I have been thinking about the disservice schools (and the people who make decisions about curriculum in schools) have done to young people when it ...
Read more
More Humble Teaching
It wasn’t until I literally could not speak the same language as the teachers in a professional development session I was leading that I changed the way I taught and the way I thought about teaching. In early 2006, I was one of six people invited to r...
Read more