Natalie Wexler | |
---|---|
Born | 1955 (age 68–69) |
Citizenship | American |
Alma mater | Bryn Mawr School Radcliffe College (AB) University of Sussex (MA) University of Pennsylvania (JD) |
Occupation | Writer |
Known for | Literacy advocate, legal historian |
Spouse | James Feldman |
Natalie L. Wexler is an American education writer focusing on literacy and equity issues.
Wexler is a graduate of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and Radcliffe College (A.B. 1976, magna cum laude), where she wrote for the Harvard Crimson . [1] [2] After college she worked as a reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal . [3]
Wexler also has degrees from the University of Sussex (Master of Arts 1977), and the University of Pennsylvania Law School (Juris Doctor 1983), where she served as editor-in-chief of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review . After graduating law school, she worked as a law clerk for Judge Alvin Benjamin Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and then for Associate Justice Byron R. White of the United States Supreme Court. Following her clerkships, she practiced law at Bredhoff & Kaiser in Washington, D.C. [4] She later served as an associate editor of the eight-volume series The Documentary History of the Supreme Court, 1789-1800. [5]
Wexler has written articles and essays for a number of publications, including the New York Times, [6] The Atlantic, [7] and the Washington Post. [8] Beginning in 2010 she shifted her focus to education writing and served as education editor of the website Greater Greater Washington for several years. [9] [10] She is currently a senior contributor to Forbes.com focusing on education. [11] She has been interviewed on many TV and radio shows and podcasts, including Morning Joe [12] and NPR’s On Point [13] and 1A . [14]
In 1986, she married James Feldman, an attorney who was a Supreme Court clerk for Justice William J. Brennan. [4]
Wexler's first non-fiction book as a solo author, The Knowledge Gap (2019), addresses the achievement gap between schoolchildren on the higher and lower ends of the socioeconomic scale. [15] Wexler argues that, particularly in elementary schools, reading comprehension is taught as a set of skills that can be acquired and tested through exercises like "finding the main idea," when in fact comprehension depends largely on the reader's background knowledge and vocabulary. [16] Wexler rejects the idea that reading comprehension "can be taught in a manner completely disconnected from content" and argues that the increasing time devoted to skills-based comprehension exercises in schools has crowded out the systematic teaching of knowledge. [7] More privileged children have the opportunity to acquire more academic knowledge and vocabulary outside of school, while many less privileged children arrive at high school unprepared to read and understand texts that assume background knowledge they have not been given access to. Wexler therefore concludes that the achievement gap is largely a gap in knowledge rather than skills and supports the adoption of elementary literacy curricula that focus on building knowledge. [7] The Knowledge Gap examines attempts to implement this kind of curriculum in several schools and school districts in the United States and the United Kingdom. Wexler's argument has been compared to that of E.D. Hirsch, an education scholar who has been advancing similar ideas since the 1980s. [17] [16]
Wexler’s previous education book, The Writing Revolution (2017), was written with Judith C. Hochman and provides a guide to implementing the method of writing instruction that Hochman developed. [18] In contrast to most other approaches to writing instruction, the method begins at the sentence level and is designed to be embedded in the content of a school’s core curriculum. [19]
Wexler has also written three novels: A More Obedient Wife (2007), based on the lives and letters of two early Supreme Court justices and their wives; The Mother Daughter Show (2011), a satire set at an elite Washington, DC private school; [20] and The Observer (2014), set in the early 19th century and based on the life of Eliza Anderson Godefroy, the first American woman to edit a magazine.
Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing to beginners. To use phonics is to teach the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters (graphemes) or groups of letters or syllables of the written language. Phonics is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code. It can be used with any writing system that is alphabetic, such as that of English, Russian, and most other languages. Phonics is also sometimes used as part of the process of teaching Chinese people to read and write Chinese characters, which are not alphabetic, using pinyin, which is.
Sandra Day O'Connor was an American attorney, politician, and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. O'Connor was the first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. A moderate conservative, O'Connor was known for her precisely researched opinions. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan, she was considered a swing vote for the Rehnquist Court and the first four months of the Roberts Court. Before O'Connor's tenure on the Court, she was an Arizona state judge and earlier an elected legislator in Arizona, serving as the first female majority leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate. Upon her nomination to the Court, O'Connor was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate.
Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States.
Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death in 2020. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton to replace retiring justice Byron White, and at the time was viewed as a moderate consensus-builder. Ginsburg was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O'Connor. During her tenure, Ginsburg authored the majority opinions in cases such as United States v. Virginia (1996), Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. (2000), and City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York (2005). Later in her tenure, Ginsburg received attention for passionate dissents that reflected liberal views of the law. She was popularly dubbed "the Notorious R.B.G.", a moniker she later embraced.
Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that invalidated an Arkansas statute prohibiting the teaching of human evolution in the public schools. The Court held that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits a state from requiring, in the words of the majority opinion, "that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma." The Supreme Court declared the Arkansas statute unconstitutional because it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. After this decision, some jurisdictions passed laws that required the teaching of creation science alongside evolution when evolution was taught. These were also ruled unconstitutional by the Court in the 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard.
Synthetic phonics, also known as blended phonics or inductive phonics, is a method of teaching English reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words.
The George Washington University Law School is the law school of George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Established in 1865, GW Law is the oldest law school in the national capital. GW Law offers one of the largest range of courses in the U.S., including 275 elective courses in business and finance law, environmental law, government procurement law, intellectual property law, international comparative law, litigation and dispute resolution, and national security and U.S. foreign relations law.
Elena Kagan is an American lawyer who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 10, 2010, and has served since August 7, 2010. Kagan is the fourth woman to become a member of the Court.
Sonia Maria Sotomayor is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman, first woman of color, the first Hispanic, and first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court.
Seattle University School of Law is the law school affiliated with Seattle University, located in Seattle, Washington, United States.
University of Illinois Chicago School of Law is the law school of the University of Illinois Chicago, a public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1899, it became affiliated with the university in 2019. The school offers programs for both part-time and full-time students, with both day and night classes available, and offers January enrollment.
The University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Civil Law or "UST Law" is a law school in Manila, Philippines. It is administered under the jurisdiction of the University of Santo Tomas, the oldest and the largest Catholic university in the Philippines. It is one of the three law schools of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, with the other two being the Faculty of Canon Law and the Graduate School of Law.
Literacy in the United States was categorized by the National Center for Education Statistics into different literacy levels, with 92% of American adults having at least "Level 1" literacy in 2014. Nationally, over 20% of adult Americans have a literacy proficiency at or below Level 1. Adults in this range have difficulty using or understanding print materials. Those on the higher end of this category can perform simple tasks based on the information they read, but adults below Level 1 may only understand very basic vocabulary or be functionally illiterate. According to a 2020 report by the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have English prose literacy below the 6th-grade level.
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.
iCivics, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the United States that provides educational online games and lesson plans to promote civics education and encourage students to become active citizens. iCivics was founded in 2009 by retired Supreme Court of the United States Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. iCivics's stated mission is to “ensure every student receives a high-quality civic education, and becomes engaged in – and beyond – the classroom.”
In the United States, elementary schools are the main point of delivery of primary education, for children between the ages of 4–11 and coming between pre-kindergarten and secondary education.
Roberta Ann Kaplan, also known as Robbie Kaplan, is an American lawyer focusing on commercial litigation and public interest matters. Kaplan successfully argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of LGBT rights activist Edith Windsor, in United States v. Windsor, a landmark decision that invalidated a section of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and required the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages. She was a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison before starting her own firm in 2017. In 2018, she co-founded the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund.
Eric David Miller is an American attorney and jurist serving as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Jay D. Wexler is an American legal scholar known for being the first to study laughter at the Supreme Court of the United States. His work also focuses on church-state issues, constitutional law, and environmental law. Wexler is a professor of law at the Boston University School of Law.
The Baseball Study was an academic experiment that tested how reading comprehension is impacted by prior knowledge. In 1987, education researchers Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie tested middle school students on the topic of baseball, evaluating their results based on the participant's reading abilities and prior knowledge of baseball. They concluded that prior knowledge was just as important as reading proficiency in the student's abilities to comprehend written text.