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How Not to Write About Education
Always begin with a child. One child. She has a name like a sunrise and eyes that the system has not yet ruined. She lives in a neighborhood you will call "underserved," because the word poor would implicate someone, and the word robbed would implicate you. Do not say who underserved her or what they kept. The passive voice is your dearest friend. Achievement gaps open. Schools fail. Pipelines exist. Nobody opens them, nobody fails anyone, nobody built the pipeline. Things simply befall children, the way weather does.
In your text, treat the child as raw material. She is a vessel, a sponge, a lump of clay, a seed, a future workforce, a return on investment. Never a person who already knows things. Whatever she carries into the room — her grandmother's stories, her two languages, the way she can read a whole household's mood from the sound of a key in the door — set it gently aside and call it a barrier. Establish early that she arrives empty and leaks. This is the foundational grammar and you must master it: the child is a deficit wearing shoes.
Use the words rigor, grit, outcomes, evidence-based, scalable, high-expectations, no-excuses, whatever-it-takes. Use stakeholders, but never name the stake or who holds it. Use equity often and power never. Say all children can learn in a tone that suggests you are the first to suspect it. Say the science is clear. Do not say which children the science was run on, or who paid for the lab.
Your hero is always an adult. A young teacher, preferably, who came from somewhere better and stayed two years. He sacrifices. He arrives at dawn. He buys the pencils himself, and you will photograph the pencils. He is exhausted in a way that flatters him. The children are the landscape across which he walks toward his own becoming. When he leaves for law school you will call it burnout and mean heroism. Do not ask what the children call it.
If you must include a parent, make her grateful or make her absent. A grateful mother weeping at a charter lottery is the sunset of this genre: it is always big, it is always red, there is always a hand pressed to the mouth. Never write the mother who asks a hard question at the board meeting. She is difficult. Never write the father who reads the budget line by line. He is not engaged. Engagement means agreeing with you in advance.
Taboo subjects: the tax base. Redlining. What the building is worth and to whom. The fact that the children were learning before you arrived and will be learning after you are gone. Any teacher who has stayed thirty years and has opinions. Any school that works and is boring. Joy that does not photograph. Knowledge held by people without degrees. The possibility that the community already contains its own answer and is simply waiting for someone to stop selling it the question.
Throughout, adopt the voice of the concerned reformer who has seen too much. Establish that your heart is broken, and that this entitles you. Mention how the work changed you, how you can never go back, how these kids taught you what really matters. The continent of childhood exists for your transformation; take advantage of this. Thrust yourself into the classroom as into a frontier. Plant your flag in the form of a pilot program. Name it after a verb.
The data must be sad and the data must be clean. Test scores are the only thing that happened in that room all year. Do not mention the asthma, the eviction, the cousin, the bus that comes when it comes, the cut to the music budget that you voted for at a different meeting under a different hat. Reduce a human September-to-June to a single number and then express grave disappointment in the number. Grieve it publicly. Fundraise on the grief.
End with hope, but a particular kind: hope that requires your continued involvement. The school is promising but fragile. The progress is real but reversible. The model works but needs scale, which needs capital, which needs you, the reader, the donor, the foundation officer with the soft eyes. Whichever angle you take, leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important program and your theory of change, the children are doomed. Never leave the impression that they were a community before you found them and will be one after the grant runs out.
And the child from the first paragraph, the one with the sunrise name. Do not follow up. Do not learn what she became. She has done her work. She opened your essay. Let her go back to being a place you visited, a feeling you had, a line on the report under the heading Lives Touched. Above all, do not let her speak in her own voice for more than one sentence, and make sure that sentence is grateful.
Inspired by "How Not To Write About Africa" by Binyavanga Wainaina, Granta, 2005. Joy Repair adaptation, 2026.