Author: Nate Noorlander

A Suggestion for Improving Student Writing

An excerpt from Nate Noorlander’s recent article on Bookshark’s blog, published 1 August, 2024: Students seem to like writing as much as adults like public speaking: It’s almost universally dreaded. But there are few assignments that can tell us as much about how well a student can think. Can they stay organized? Can they communicate […]

Media Literacy Is an Essential Skill. Schools Should Teach It That Way

An excerpt from Nate Noorlander’s EducationWeek article, published 12 July, 2024: You can read this essay in a number of ways. You might skim it and forget it—the fate of most internet content. Or you might take it seriously, consider it against your own intuition and experience, and note points of agreement and disagreement. From a […]

One “ping” to rule them all

I was once in a faculty meeting to decide on a coherent school smartphone policy. We were in the drama room on the stage of a kind of amphitheater, sixty of us sitting across from each other in a large circle. You could tell the teachers apart by the way they dressed and who they […]

Does Homeschool Work? “Sourcing” to cut through the statistical noise

A famous study from 1999 by Lawrence M. Rudner surveyed nearly 21,000 homeschooled students and found that their median test scores were typically in the 70th to 80th percentiles, and that 25% of homeschooled students were enrolled in a grade level that was higher than their public school counterparts.  This study was widely cited by […]

Parent Question: “Will this course make my child proud of her country?”

We regularly get questions about the slant of our history courses; these questions often boil down to a similar fundamental concern: How far have our courses been captured by one side or the other in the American culture wars? Do we have a partisan approach that unjustly celebrates, or, conversely, unjustly denigrates the “American story”?