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TIME Editor Nancy Gibbs '78 Honors Friends Teachers in Column

In a recent column in TIME Magazine, editor Nancy Gibbs '78 writes that Friends teachers Philip Schwartz, Dorothy Flanagan and Mariana Raymond were her "classroom wizards" and seeded her imagination and shaped her character.
In a recent column in TIME Magazine, editor Nancy Gibbs '78 writes that Friends teachers Philip Schwartz, Dorothy Flanagan and Mariana Raymond were her "classroom wizards" and seeded her imagination and shaped her character. Nancy's column is reprinted below, but you can access it at Time.com here

And, to read more about Nancy and how the teachers at Friends played an instrumental role in shaping her imagination and career, check out the Spring 2010 issue of News From Friends magazine. Nancy is featured in the storyteller issue.
 
Honor Thy Teacher
by Editor Nancy Gibbs
Published in TIME Magazine on October 23, 2014

Mrs. Flanagan. Miss Raymond. Mr. Schwartz. Those are mine, but if you’re lucky you have them too, the teachers who seeded our imaginations and shaped our characters. Years later, nothing makes me more grateful as a parent than my daughters’ encounters with classroom wizards.

Teachers matter: one Texas study found that cutting class size by 10 students was not as beneficial as even modest improvement in the teacher. A McKinsey survey of the world’s best schools–in Finland, South Korea, Singapore–found that they consistently draw 100% of their teachers from the top third of graduates; in the U.S., almost half come from the bottom third. That may explain why our kids’ performance falls below that of students in Estonia and why one-third of those who make it to college in the U.S. need remedial education.

In her cover story, Haley Sweetland Edwards tracks a crusade led by some deep-pocketed education reformers. Rather than working incrementally through traditional channels, they have gone to court: Is a bad teacher a violation of a student’s civil rights? And if so, are tenure rules that keep bad teachers in classrooms unconstitutional?

Edwards was struck in her reporting by the messiness of education politics. “In most cases, if you know that someone is a Democrat or a Republican, you pretty much know how they stand on a given policy question,” she observes. “In education, all bets are off. That’s compounded by the strange politics of Silicon Valley, where liberal libertarianism is in the drinking water.” Edwards joined TIME last spring in our Washington bureau, and this is her first cover story. As the daughter of a former California public-school teacher and the wife of a Washington, D.C., charter-school teacher, she has now ensured that Thanksgiving dinner will be especially lively this year.
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Friends Seminary — the oldest continuously operated, coeducational school in NYC — serves college-bound day students in Kindergarten-Grade 12.