#204: The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman

Want a feel-good education story to start your school year strong? Here’s one about I Promise, a new public elementary school in Akron, Ohio. Founded by LeBron James, I Promise focuses on a number of best practices: welcoming children into the building every morning, giving each child a nickname, and promoting empathy via daily talk circles. The academic results are there, too: 90% of students met their reading and Math goals, placing them in the 99th percentile nationally. Don’t mind the naysayers, who claim that I Promise’s success is not sustainable, only the result of LeBron’s largesse. (17 min)

For many people, it’s not easy to talk about homelessness — and even harder to talk about homeless people. This excellent special report by the San Francisco Chronicle — a collection of 43 short vignettes, photographs, statistics, and videos, reported over the course of 24 hours — centers the lived experiences of people living on the streets of San Francisco. “I don’t like it when people are afraid of me,” Ken Reigenborn says.

+ Do you teach in San Francisco? This piece could easily turn into an entire unit. Let me know if you want to plan together!

In this outstanding article, Eve Fairbanks writes about how the horrific drought in segregated Cape Town brought its residents closer together — just one week after her lead article on millennial nuns. Ms. Fairbanks, a white woman who has lived in South Africa for nine years, writes confidently about race, the legacy of apartheid, and how local, slow-moving disasters offer opportunities for dialogue. Ms. Fairbanks writes, “We call it wisdom, now, to assume people are motivated by things like self-interest, status and fear. It’s not savvy to wonder if we can be motivated, en masse, at times, by things like the wish to show respect, or by love.” (31 min)