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The job of high school teachers is to impart knowledge and deliver measurable results, which requires finding a way to reach, and ideally even inspire, their students.

“How would you keep the attention of 15 teenagers and bond with them?” one Friends teacher texted me, insisting on anonymity because of a school policy that discourages teachers from speaking to the media without permission. “You MUST joke and be yourself and connect with them on their terms. It’s the only way to be good at this.”

Any teacher who spends three decades in the classroom, speaking extemporaneously for hours on end to a roomful of teenagers, is going to have awkward moments. Frisch might have had more of them, and they may have been a bit more awkward. But that was how he connected, and it was perhaps a way of connecting that is no longer possible. “Everybody knew this guy was off — weird behavior, quirky,” said one parent who, fearing retribution against her child, insisted on anonymity. “Maybe in the ’70s that would have been O.K., but not when you’re paying $45,000 a year in tuition.”

There aren’t enough seats in the historically more desirable uptown institutions — Spence, Dalton, Trinity — to meet demand; and for families who live in neighborhoods like the Village, TriBeCa or Battery Park, Friends is a much more convenient option. Friends now sees itself as a competitor to these schools, and in some respects, it has become indistinguishable from them.

Even before Frisch’s termination, there was a feeling among some in the Friends community — parents, teachers and especially alumni — that in its race to keep pace with a changing city, the school was losing touch with the Quaker ethos that had long distinguished it.

The school’s Quaker identity calls for it to be faithful to its progressive tradition, but in the new age of identity politics, it is not always easy to know what the right stance on a particular issue should be. Just a few months before the Frisch incident, some 20 parents had raised questions about the scheduled speaking engagement of a visiting scholar, Dave Zirin, a sportswriter for the Nation magazine and a Friends alumnus who had been critical of Israel in his writings. In 2012, there were heated objections to a musical performance in the meetinghouse by Gilad Atzmon, an Israel-born saxophonist and self-described “proud, self-hating Jew” who has written that Palestinians were “brutally ethnically cleansed” and suggested that if Israel starts a nuclear war with Iran, “some may be bold enough to argue that Hitler might have been right after all.” The Harvard Law School professor emeritus and noted gadfly Alan Dershowitz publicly criticized Friends — and Lauder personally — for refusing to cancel the appearance.

Lauder did not consider the “Heil Hitler” episode a close call. “Personally, I was appalled,” he told me. “I couldn’t imagine, even as a joke — and I grew up watching ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ — that in a class that had nothing to do with history or World War II or Nazism or teaching German language that an incident like that could happen.” I asked Lauder why he felt he needed to go so far as to fire Frisch. “One of our pledges is to make all of our students feel safe,” he replied. “And that is something that I take very, very seriously.”

That no one has accused Frisch of being an anti-Semite was beside the point: His invocation of the Nazi salute in a classroom full of high school students, regardless of his intentions, was enough to end his career. On today’s campus, words and symbols can be seen as a form of violence; to many people, engaging in a public debate about the nuances of their power is to tolerate their use.

Frisch, who first learned about the claims after his termination, denied ever having told a student to kill himself and said that he had no memory of the inappropriate touching that had been described.

we spoke at length about the “Heil Hitler.” Frisch said he was embarrassed, both by the fact that he had made the gesture in the first place and by his subsequent failure to recognize the seriousness of such a lapse in judgment. But he was also surprised by the school’s reaction to it. “I trusted while I was at Friends that because of my long-term commitment to the school, that as I need to change to meet the changing dynamics of the classroom, the school would help me learn and provide the support I needed to make those changes,” he told me.

The dynamics of the classroom are changing. These changes are partly specific to the hothouse environment of the campus in 2018. But they also connect to something much bigger. High schools have become genuinely unsafe: The “Heil Hitler” salute happened on the very same day as the Parkland massacre. And beyond the confines of the campus, a crude, violent bigotry that had long seemed part of the distant past has suddenly resurfaced, with neo-Nazis literally marching in the streets. The question now is what do we want our response to this new world to be

During the 12 days that he spent in limbo between his suspension and termination, Frisch, in the spirit of the Quaker commitment to reconciliation, drafted a letter of apology to his students that he was never allowed to send. Among other things, he planned to say that he was worried about the rise of anti-Semitism and that he was still learning lessons from his mistake. “You think about things like Charlottesville,” he told me. “Now, we don’t make jokes like this.”

Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.

This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s.

If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another

As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows. The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.

"It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."

Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA. But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.

The fever never really cooled, of course. It transmuted into the raging xenophobia and nativism that put Donald Trump in the White House

What the fellow told me that day still holds true: Lots of Republicans know in their hearts that this problem is real

Certainly, some Republicans seem to believe that scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to cook the books on climate change. But they’re not all that crazy. And you can see this in the way that bits and pieces of sensible climate policy keep sneaking through Congress.

As long as nobody in those red districts back home is really watching, Republican members of Congress will adopt low-key measures to help cut emissions. They especially like ones that offer additional benefits, like building up the tax base in rural communities, as wind and solar farms do.

they tell you the political situation may not be quite as hopeless as it looks. Lurking below the surface of our ugly politics is, I believe, a near consensus to do something big on climate change.

Even if Democrats take Congress and the White House in 2020 and push forward an ambitious climate bill in 2021, they are likely to need at least a handful of Republican votes in the Senate

We ought to hope for more than that. The policy will be more durable if it passes Congress with substantial bipartisan majorities, as all of our landmark environmental laws did.

the Republicans — some of them, at least — are starting to sense political risk in continued climate denial. Their constituents, battered by the fires and torrential rains and the incessant rise of tidal flooding, are knocking on the closet door.

Frank Luntz, the pollster who wrote a scurrilous memorandum 17 years ago counseling Republicans to obfuscate the science of climate change, is among those who have come around

In middle and high school, that's where the loss of instruction time comes.

has to be an engaged study of the past.

[National History Day] is not just for gifted and talented students; this is a program that does extremely well with kids in the lower quartile.

riginal research, you have an opportunity to form your own opinion on a topic. You're looking at original material. They do have to read secondary material so that they can have context. Have you talked to any teachers about how they're discussing the killing of Osama bin Laden with students? What should teachers be saying to their students? What's the importance of recent history in history class? I haven't had the chance to talk to any teachers since [last] Sunday. But I can tell you that what I hope they're doing is helping young people put this in perspective. I hope they're helping students understand the history of terror and understand why 9/11 happened in the first place. You have to understand the history of the Middle East and the history of the United States' role there, so you can draw some meaning and understanding. Using the word understanding doesn't mean condoning; it just means you need to understand why it may have happened. See how your school stacks up in our rankings of Best High Schools. Have something of interest to share? Send your news to us at highschoolnotes@usnews.com. More High School Notes posts Reader Comments Add Comment Start the discussion! Be the first to comment on this story. var RecaptchaOptions = { theme : 'clean' }; Add Your Thoughts Title Comment 3000 characters left About You Name Email State - state - AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE DC FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY International Please enter the two words below into the text field underneath the image. Recaptcha.widget = Recaptcha.$("recaptcha_widget_div"); Recaptcha.challenge_callback(); Your comment will be posted immediately, unless it is spam or contains profanity. For more information, please see our

Projects such as The Great War Archive, which combine popular interest in the war with specialist expertise, and which recognise that an archive is different from a tribute or a memorial, suggest that it is possible to create high-quality content based on user submissions.

the exploitation of popular enthusiasm to encourage thought, rather than to enforce the "correct" opinion

It is certainly true that the 1914-18 war is popularly seen as the "bad war" and 1939-45 as the "good war." I think the one view is sustained in order to support the other. Although no expert, it seems to me that in reality the two world wars were marked more by their similarities than their differences (Europe-wide military/imperial rivalry causes collapse of inadequate alliance system > Germany invades everywhere > everywhere invades Germany). However, there is an extreme reluctance in Britain to admit that WW2 was anything other than a Manichean struggle between the elves and the orcs, so WW1 becomes a kind of dumping-ground for a lot of suppressed anxiety and guilt which might otherwise accrue to our role in WW2 - just as it might in any war. So we make a donkey out of Haig in order to sustain hagiographic views of Churchill. "Remembrance" of both wars continues to be a central feature of British public consciousness to an extraordinary, almost religious degree, and I think this has a nostalgic angle as well: if "we" squint a bit "we" can still tell ourselves that it was "our" last gasp as a global power. Personally I think it's all incredibly dodgy. "Remembrance," it seems to me, is always carried out in a spirit of tacit acceptance that the "remembered" war was a good thing. Like practically all of the media representation of the current war, Remembrance Day is a show of "sympathy" for the troops which is actually about preventing objective views of particular wars (and war in general) from finding purchase in the public consciousness. It works because it's a highly politicised ritual which is presented as being above politics and therefore above criticism. All these things are ways of manipulating the suffering of service personnel past and present as a means of emotionally blackmailing critics of government into silence. I reckon anyway.

t is clear that only at the last minute Aptheker remembered the slaves and threw in the phrase about their “response.” Historically this is a crime. The non-slaveholding whites who supposedly pushed the South into the Civil War were not in any way democrats. They were small planters and city people who formed a rebellious but reactionary social force, hostile to the big planters, the slaves and the democratically minded farmers in the non-plantation regions. What particular purpose this new development is to serve does not concern us here. What is important, however, is its logical identity with the hostility to Negro radicalism and independent Negro politics which has appeared in Aptheker’s work from the very beginning to this climax-pushing the Negroes aside for the sake of non slaveholding whites in the South. However fair may be the outside of Stalinist history and politics, however skillful may be the means by which its internal corruption is disguised, inevitably its real significance appears. There is no excuse today for those who allow themselves to be deceived by it. For all interested in this sphere, it is a common duty, whatever differences may exist between us, to see to it that the whole Stalinist fakery on Negro history be thoroughly exposed for what it really is.

only a fraction of the manuscripts had been digitised. "They cover geography, history and religion. We had one in Turkish. We don't know what it said."

Mali government forces that had been guarding Timbuktu left the town in late March, as Islamist fighters advanced rapidly across the north. Fighters from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) – the group responsible for the attack on the Algerian gas facility – then swept in and seized the town, pushing out rival militia groups including secular Tuareg nationalists.

As well as the manuscripts, the fighters destroyed almost all of the 333 Sufi shrines dotted around Timbuktu, believing them to be idolatrous. They smashed a civic statue of a man sitting on a winged horse.

The rebels enforced their own brutal and arbitrary version of Islam, residents said, with offenders flogged for talking to women and other supposed crimes. The floggings took place in the square outside the 15th-century Sankoré mosque, a Unesco world heritage site.

They weren't religious men. They were criminals

teachers collaboratively prioritize their standards

requires teachers to look at the standards vertically. This vertical alignment allows teachers to identify important prerequisite skills students need

higher quality assessments

aligned, purposeful, and essential in identifying those students in need of intervention, remediation, or enrichment.

narrowing the focus

It is far easier for teachers to go in depth when they have fewer priority standards

deepening students’ understanding of essential content, strategies, and skills

debate and discuss the significance of the standards they teach

easier for teachers to choose high quality resources

teachers have clarity around what is essential to teach

We call these prioritized standards “power standards.”

distinguishes the standards that are essential for student success

“those standards that, once mastered, give a student the ability to use reasoning and thinking skills to learn and understand other curriculum objectives.”

support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

learning that is essential for success

goes beyond one course or grade level

important in life

students will need to read informational texts proficiently and substantiate their claims using evidence from the text when reading, writing, and speaking

multidisciplinary connections

relevant in other disciplines

learning that is applied both within the content area and in other content areas

standard represents learning that is essential for success

Does this standard contain prerequisite content

think of a triple Venn Diagram, and that for the overall success of students each circle in that Venn Diagram has equal importance

skills necessary for the next

power standards are those that teachers will spend most of their instructional time teaching

focus of teacher assessments

If every teacher in the grade level or course is emphasizing something different, you do not have a guaranteed curriculum for students.

Not all standards are equally important at every grade level or in every course

work collaboratively in vertical teams