Conor Williams

My wife gets called “Supermom” relatively frequently. It actually bothers her. “I’m just doing what I’m supposed to do!” she says. But it’s increasingly difficult for working parents in the United States to do all the things they’re “supposed to do.” Last week, the President’s Council of Economic Advisors released a report on the state […]

It sometimes feels like we’re short on lots of things in the United States right now. Like sleep. And time. And political will. And drinking water. And topsoil. And heck, we’re even running short on children these days. The United States is getting older—we’re not replacing our graying Baby Boomers with new children. Why does […]

I’ve written about my own travails dealing with Washington, D.C.’s education system before. In a column in today’s Washington City Paper, I write about how the District’s education politics remain fundamentally driven by the politics of privilege, class, and race. Mothers on the playground literally wrung their hands while worrying over how the proposals could “change the […]

In a democratic community—especially a gridlocked democratic community—public rhetoric always has a somewhat strained relationship with facts. When we want to persuade our opponents that our proposed reforms are critically important, it’s tempting and sometimes even necessary to use the most dramatic words available. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a function of making […]

During a recent visit to a district elementary school, a principal said something that triggered some interesting reflections for me. Between visits to various pre-K classrooms, I asked her why she thought the school’s student achievement scores had steadily declined over the last five years. She shrugged and said, “What are you supposed to do with […]

Here at New America, we’ve been closely following debates about family involvement in schools for some time (here and here, for instance). As rancorous as education debates can be, family involvement is one of those things that almost everyone agrees on. But it’s a tough thing to encourage by means of policy. We don’t generally […]

There’s a common assumption lurking in lots of discussions about education reform: Instruction in basic skills is somehow in tension with enrichment. But when we distinguish “core” subjects from others, we’re setting up a hierarchy of priorities that has serious implications for instructional choices. What’s more, this dynamic often pushes beyond the skills and subjects […]

About a month and a half ago, Demos’ Matt Bruenig launched an Internet scuffle with a post suggesting that recent conservative proposals to rejigger the tax code in parents’ favor are unnecessarily complicated. If we want to address child poverty, Bruenig asked, why should we “create three different child-related tax carve outs and then also two different […]

Despite all the sturm und drang of education reform debates, despite all the noise and nonsense, the trajectory of American public education hasn’t changed a whole lot. Even the biggest, most comprehensive reforms have mostly ended up as tinkering around the edges. Richard Whitmire’s new book, On the Rocketship, takes a look at Rocketship Education’s unapologetically ambitious effort to break the […]

Most analysts in the education policy conversation agree that teacher quality is the most important in-school variable shaping students’ educational outcomes. It’s a huge lever—new technology, fancy curricula, and better content standards are almost meaningless without a great teacher to make them work. But while there’s considerable agreement on the importance of getting talented instructors […]