Peg Tyre Interview: phonics, grammar, choosing a school, parents and crime

I recently had an opportunity to talk [42mb mp3 file] with the intriguing Peg Tyre. Tyre recently wrote "The Writing Revolution" for The Atlantic:

For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School's dismal performance--not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school's principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject--one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.

Peg has authored two books: The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids The Education They Deserve, The Trouble with Boys and blogs here.

An excerpt:

Peg: You cover crime for a long time and you realize that it's very banal. You start to realize that one person killed another person in a horrendous way, but if you look at their lives, it looks like it was two trains on a track heading for each other. The miracle would have been if they didn't end up killing each other.

Interviewer: [laughing]

Peg: They became a kind of inevitability to the conflicts that I saw. I asked my self, my intellectual journey of why is this happening? Why are theses trains set on a collision course? What I came to was lack of opportunity. You dig deeper into that, and it's lack of education.

Interviewer: Right.

Peg: I actually come at education... Most journalists come at education because they have kids or they think that kids are cute or they have parents who are teachers and they have warm feelings about school. I have really mixed feelings about school. Yes, kids are cute, but I actually come at this from a social...I don't know. It's sort of like a harder nosed perspective.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Peg: Also, I hate education blah blah. I hate people using school words and pretending that their having a dialogue when they're really just jargoning at each other.

Interviewer: [laughing]

Peg: I hate people telling me they have the answer to poverty, that they have the answer to the achievement gap, when you know and I know every intelligent person who's listening to this knows that it's more complicated than that. I'm not exactly misanthropic, but I'm an investigative reporter by trade, so I'm just like a "show me" kind of gal. I'm just like, "Yeah, really? Very interesting froth. Show me."

Listen to the interview via this 42mb mp3 file , or read the transcript.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 7, 2012 9:31 AM
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