Jon Franklin (1942–2024)

Jon Franklin and Sam

My teacher, mentor and friend for more than 30 years died this week.

Jon Franklin was 82.

He is rightly remembered for his accomplishments in journalism.

This is how the Washington Post remembered him.

And the New York Times

And The Baltimore Sun

And Oregon Arts Watch, written by Brett Campbell. Brett and I were Jon’s students at the University of Oregon in the first year of a collaboration between the journalism school and the creative writing program:

And this is the obituary written by one of his best students, Anne Saker.

And here are some of my thoughts:

Jon Franklin used the narrative structures and techniques of fiction to tell stories plucked from the science beat that were so unusual for the pages of a daily newspaper that the Pulitzer Prize folks had to invent not one, but two new categories to honor them: feature writing and explanatory journalism. He won the first Pulitzer in both categories.

He wrote about science, but his true subject was the human condition. Our stubborn species never tires of reading about what our fellow creatures are getting up to. We feel less lonely and more courageous when we share in others’ struggles and triumphs. Even when struggles end in defeat, a writer of Jon’s stature and vision can reveal something meaningful about ourselves we had never considered, or perhaps forgotten in the blur of daily life.

Jon Franklin fused the modern discipline of journalism with the ancient magic of storytelling to create a new literary genre capable of bridging the gap between the sciences and the humanities that has long divided mainstream culture.

His nonfiction short stories, dramatic essays and books described how discoveries in medicine and brain science shape our understanding of ourselves and our place in a bewildering natural world. He won the first ever Pulitzer Prizes for both feature writing (1979) and explanatory journalism (1985), inaugurating a new era of compelling narrative journalism and science writing.

Then he made the magic explicit, teaching generations of novice writers how to bring true, rigorously reported stories to life using time-honored literary structures and techniques that keep readers wanting to know what happens next.

He understood that he couldn’t teach the magic’s most important elements: vision and courage. But he assured us, his students and fellow writers, that we were not alone in our fears and doubts. He had struggled in that muck, too. He built a community of writers who sharpened each other’s thinking, inspired each other’s courage, and made the writing life for all of us less lonely.

I took my first undergraduate reporting class from Jon Franklin in 1991 at the University of Oregon, where I also earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Nonfiction under Franklin’s guidance in 1996. We stayed in touch over the years and he helped me with a few stories. As my interest in the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and education grew, he recommended the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT to me, and he recommended me to the program.

We spent many hours over the last few years talking about the book I wanted to write about the new science of teaching that I began to research during my year at MIT.

He read many drafts and encouraged me to see and understand why this new science matters in this cultural moment when our nation and our world are so divided by education. This new science reveals that although education is driving us apart, there exists at the heart of education an ancient bond that has always drawn us together.

We all teach and we learn from teaching, which are natural capacities, like walking and talking, that draw our minds together in a bond between individuals and between generations. This teaching bond makes culture, society, civilization, education and history itself possible.

We’ve always taken this bond for granted, but we’ve stretched the teaching bond thin, loading more weight on it without knowing its limits. To understand the forces driving us apart, we must understand the elemental force of the teaching bond that made us human in the first place.

I never took Jon Franklin for granted. The more I thought about the bond that draws students and teachers closer to each other, the more I thought about our relationship. I’m too close to it now, too troubled by grief to express my loss.

We have a limited vocabulary to describe this most basic human connection, which is like the bond between a parent and child, but it is different. It’s like friendship, but it’s different. There is a vulnerability to opening one’s mind to a teacher and for a teacher to open one’s mind to a student. It requires great trust and the willingness to see the world from someone else’s perspective.

Theodore Roethke, a legendary teacher of poets, described teaching as one of the “central mysteries, in spite of its great body of unessential lore.”

“One teaches out of love,” Roethke says in his prodigious notebooks. “It’s an impertinence, an imposition, in the end it’s terrifying.”

This much I can say: The terror goes both ways. So does the love, even when words fail.

Everyone should be so lucky.

I regret that I was not able to finish my book before Jon Franklin died, but his fingerprints will be all over it when it is complete.

Nobody helped me understand the international Mind, Brain and Education movement more than one of its founders, Kurt Fischer, who died March 30. He was far more than a source for a story. He helped me think through my proposal to the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT (my third attempt!), which gave me the chance to step away from deadline education reporting and immerse myself in research that was far away from the social science studies on policy that receive the most attention from reporters.

After I was accepted for the 2012-2013 school year, I spent much of my time in Cambridge hanging around the Mind, Brain and Education master’s program Kurt helped create at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (see HGSE’s remembrance). I audited one of Kurt’s classes as well as others in the program taught by his colleagues and former students.

Kurt Fischer also believed in the book I wanted to write about efforts to shift the scientific discussion from how the brain learns to how the brain teaches, a subject that until recent years has been largely unexplored by cognitive science. Kurt and Antonio Battro invited me to the 2013 Mind, Brain and Education International School in Erice, Sicily to talk about my project and offer my perspective as a journalist.

Antonio also wrote a lovely tribute to Kurt:

One day in Cambridge we were having lunch with Kurt at the popular restaurant
Casablanca, near to our offices (a place of fond memories for many students and
teachers, now unfortunately closed “forever”, as I recently saw posted at the door).
We were certainly inspired that day because we made two bold projects: to create an
international organization to promote the new ideas of the cognitive neurosciences in
education, and to publish a journal affiliated with that organization. These ideas soon
became a reality and IMBES, the International Mind, Brain and Education Society,
and the quarterly Mind, Brain and Education, were founded. The Journal was
published in 2007 by Blackwell and edited by Kurt with David B. Daniel as managing
editor. I became associate editor. The first IMBES conference was held at Fort Worth,
Texas, in November 2007. Kurt became the first IMBES President, and I had the
honor to succeed him for a second period. Both IMBES and the Journal are still
thriving today.

As I near completion of the book that I started seven years ago in Cambridge, I am sad that Kurt won’t see my project come to fruition, but I’ll be forever grateful for his generous help, attention and faith that this story was worth telling.

My long journey into understanding the biology of teaching and learning began at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 at a 10-day neuroscience boot camp for non-experts organized by Martha Farah, one of this generation’s leading cognitive neuroscientists.

This August, I returned to Philadelphia for a 10-year reunion for participants in the annual boot camp and other programs offered by the Center for Neuroscience &Society.

The packed agenda included methods updates, progress reports on neuroscience in law, economics, and education, plus discussions of the replicability crisis, brain stimulation and network neuroscience. I led on a breakout session on neuromyths in education and live-tweeted much of the event at #PennCNS10Years (the bald head in the photo below is mine).

Neuroscience & Social Justice: A discussion on the current issues in the study of SES + the brain, w/our own Martha Farah, @jhigginsST and many more here at our #PennCNS10Years event. ⚖️ 🧠 pic.twitter.com/nhRLPU3MrI

— Penn CNS (@PennCNS) August 3, 2019

After about 20 years of reporting on the news, I’ve written my first Op-Ed. The opinion, published today in The Seattle Times: the chance to learn to read and write should be a fundamental right in the U.S. because literacy makes all other rights meaningful.

Children with brains re-engineered for reading can think the thoughts and feel the feelings of others who have lived different lives than their own, even if they lived long ago or far away. Children who can learn from what they read may claim humanity’s accumulated culture, knowledge and wisdom, which is their birthright.

Perhaps they will increase that inheritance.

But without that re-engineering, children can expect to live shorter, less healthy, less happy and less prosperous lives than their better educated fellow citizens.

I last updated this website in 2013, shortly after moving to Seattle when I finished my Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT. Much has happened since then, so I’ve spent the afternoon updating the site with links to stories from my nearly three-year stint with The Seattle Times’ Education Lab project as well as updates to my resume and biography.

The banner photo is the view from Erice, an ancient mountaintop village in Sicily that is home to the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture.  I was invited there in the summer of 2013 to give a talk at The Eighth International Summer School on Mind, Brain and Education titled  “A journalist’s quest to understand how teaching makes us human.”

In September of 2013, I began working for The Seattle Times, where I wrote in-depth stories about the neuroscience of reading, the relationship between emotions and thinking in the classroom, and the benefits of professional mental health coaching to prevent expulsions from preschool (see the Stories tab for links to those stories and many more). I completed my contract on July 1, 2016 and I’m now working on a nonfiction book about how researchers in many fields are beginning to create a new science of teaching.

The education reform movement has long painted a gloomy picture of how American kids perform on international tests and on our own “gold standard” of testing, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The standard story is this: we once ruled the world in education, but we’ve been in decline and we’re falling further behind. At best, our test scores have been flat for decades while the rest of the world is catching up fast.

The degree to which these tests actually measure learning, or are at least based on a theory of learning, is very much open to debate.  But if we’re going to use these tests, let’s report what the data actually say. Kids are doing extraordinarily better on these tests, especially in math, than they did in decades past. I said so in this story for the Akron Beacon Journal.  The NAEP scores of all students have improved dramatically, but the scores for black and Hispanic students are still too low. Usually we hear about the low scores without hearing about the improvement. We need to hold both things in mind at the same time, especially when so-called reformers are eager to privatize education in order to save it.

Bob Somerby, author of The Daily Howler, blogs with mordant humor bordering on despair about the mainstream press corps’ failure to inform our national political discussion. I started reading Somerby, who once taught in the Baltimore schools,  a few years ago because I liked his analysis of education coverage. He’s been especially critical of how test scores get reported.

Bob’s post today at the Howler has the relevant data from international tests. You may be surprised to learn that on the 2009 PISA, U.S. kids on average scored higher in reading than the U.K., France and Germany (though yes, Korea, Finland and Canada scored higher). If you disaggregate those scores by race, American white students are third behind Korea and Finland, slightly better than Canada. However,  U.S. Hispanic students score a little higher than Turkey and U.S. black students are closer to Mexico at the bottom of the list.

Read the whole thing. Somerby paints a complicated picture that shows that we have an astonishing degree of variability in our schools, which appears to be driven by race and class.  That variability gets lost in an average score. He raises a good question about the Common Core, which imposes new, tougher uniform standards in 45 states that have signed on to get federal money through President Obama’s Race to the Top competition. If students can’t meet the standards we have now, will they meet the higher standards because we all will have higher expectations for them? Doesn’t that sound like magical thinking?

Congratulations to Gigi Luk of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is among the new class of postdoctoral fellows recently selected by the National Academy of Education. She will receive $55,000 for an academic year of research. Luk studies how speaking more than one language improves brain function in other areas such as attention and executive control in typically developing children. She is now interested in how billingualism affects children with learning disabilities. Here’s the National Academy of Education’s description of her research goals:

Bilingualism and Reading Difficulty: An Interaction Between Life Experience and Reading Development
Being bilingual may confer cognitive advantages beyond communicative purposes. Research has shown bilinguals outperform monolingual peers on tasks assessing executive functions, a set of skills critical for efficient goal-oriented control of attention and other cognitive resources. Simultaneously, bilingual toddlers and elementary school children’s single language proficiency is often found to be inferior to their monolingual peers. These seemingly contradictory consequences of bilingual experience have been studied extensively in typically developing children. However, it is unclear whether the cognitive advantages associated with bilingualism also apply to atypically developing populations, particularly those who have reading difficulty. If the experience of managing two languages enhances executive functions skills, then bilinguals with reading difficulty may enjoy compensatory cognitive benefits in processes relating to reading from their bilingual experience. Alternatively, bilingualism may be a cognitive burden and further hinder reading development for struggling readers.

Previous research has examined the roles of Spanish and English representations in short-term memory, visual-spatial and language memory in English Language Learners who speak Spanish as the first language and are learning English as a second language. However, little education research has been conducted on bilingual children who are functional bilinguals and speak a non-Spanish language in addition to English. To complement prior research focusing on English Language Learners, this project will involve bilingual children who are fluent in two alphabetic languages and report using both languages on a daily basis, similar to those who have been reported to show cognitive advantages in previous research.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has an interesting post about a study showing that middle school students remembered the information in a text about Galileo or Marie Curie significantly better if the information was presented in the form of a personal story about the scientist’s struggles rather than the typical textbook expository style. We professional storytellers, especially science journalists, have long believed that was the case.

You don’t have to think of narrative just as the story of an individual or group of people; you can think more abstractly conflict, complications, and the eventual resolution of conflict as the core of narrative structure.
I prefer to think of narrative in this broader sense because it is more flexible, and gives teachers more options, and also better captures the aspects of narrative structure that I suspect are behind the advantage conferred.