Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Ray" in All Categories

Teachers are the most important determinant of the quality of schools. We should be doing everything we can to help them get better. In recent years, however, a cocktail of box-ticking demands, ceaseless curriculum reform, disruptive reorganisations, and an audit culture that requires teachers to document their every move have left the profession deskilled and demoralised. Instead of rolling out the red carpet for teachers, we have been pulling it from under their feet. The result is predictable.

From the introduction by Les Standiford: "The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and 'edge' might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city... We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the 20th century.