August 2015

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 of the courts on desegregation to one of stubborn individualism and privilege: “Save the cities, but spare the suburbs.” After finally listening to the recent...

The Responsibility to Listen First

I have come to believe that we are not listening to the right people when it comes to improving educational opportunity and equity.

In saying this, I should confess that I am part of the problem. I am a white, native English-speaking, heterosexual man working in education who has opinions about what should be done (and not done) to improve educational opportunity and increase equity and who has a platform (albeit a modest one) for making those opinions known. In general, I think that there are too many people like me in conversations about education policy and...

Blog Posts

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 it had been later that same day – March 11, 2020 – that the ...

A Quick Guide to Better Surveys

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. They offer the veneer of scientific objectivity. Results can be auto-generated in colorful graphs and pie charts. However, the apparent ease of survey design does not necessarily mean that surveys are always the best option for gathering data nor does it guarantee that surveys will be well designed to elicit the information...

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...

Testimony Before the Boston School Committee

My name is James Noonan, assistant professor of education at Salem State University and Associate Director of Research for the MA Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment. But I’m speaking tonight as the father of two BPS children and someone who strongly supports the new exam school admissions proposal.

In 1971, before court-ordered desegregation introduced a 35 percent “set aside” for students from under-represented subgroups,...

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 amplified the fullness of the lives lost and gave voice to the vastness of the hole they...

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James M. Noonan, Ed.D.

Assistant Professor of Education

Salem State University