Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

EVERY YEAR, TIME MAGAZINE PUBLISHES A LIST OF THE 100 most influential people in the world. The new list came out today, and there are people you would expect (Steve Jobs) and people you could debate (Ashton Kutcher). Then there are people you’ve never heard of.

Introducing Deborah Gist. I didn’t get much space, which is just how these things go, so I’ll take a second here to tell you a little more about why Gist made the list.

When Deborah Gist took over as commissioner of Rhode Island’s schools last summer, she made a battery of bold, smart decisions that would be considered common sense in almost any industry but are shocking and rare in education:

Gist sent a letter to superintendents explaining that all staffing decisions would be based on student needs and teacher qualifications—not just seniority. She also began building a new teacher evaluation system, in which, first of all, teachers will get annual reviews (a radical practice that happens in only 15 other states, according to a 2009 National Council on Teacher Quality report). And 51% of the review will be based on performance—whether a teacher’s students improved on test scores or other metrics over the school year.

Gist made other changes, too—almost all focused on teachers, the one school-based factor that makes the most difference in student learning, according to decades of research. When she learned that Rhode Island’s teacher-training programs had one of the nation’s lowest “cut scores”—or minimum entry requirements for SAT or other tests--she asked a staffer to find out which state had the highest score. Then she set Rhode Island’s score one point higher.

To be sure, Gist is not the first education leader to make audaciously sensible decisions. But she is different from other reformers in that she speaks with a natural compassion for teachers--and she was herself a teacher for 8 years, in Florida and Texas. She seems willing to fight, but she doesn’t seem to enjoy the kill. “She’s not unkind, and she’s not mean. She doesn’t put anybody down,” says Julia Steiny, an education columnist in the Providence Sunday Journal. “She’s just aggressive.”

This spring, Gist made national news after one of the state’s superintendents, acting with her support, fired all the teachers at Central Falls High School, one of the state’s worst-performing schools. The superintendent acted after the union refused to agree to a series of reforms. Yesterday, the union filed suit against Gist, the school district and the superintendent in an effort to block the firings.

It’s still unclear what will happen at Central Falls. But so far, Gist seems to be working hard to prioritize the interests of the school’s students, who have been failed by the system for many years.

In February, Gist did a live “chat” with readers of the Providence Journal. One man, who identified himself as Matt, asked her to apologize for having said in the past that American school leaders recruit the majority of their teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college.

Gist’s reply was exquisite: “Matt: As a traditionally trained teacher, I know this is difficult to hear. I don’t like it either. Unfortunately, it is true. While there are many extraordinarily intelligent educators throughout Rhode Island and our country, the US--unlike other high performing countries--recruits our teachers from the lowest performers in our secondary schools based on SAT scores and other performance data. If you have a source that shows otherwise, I’d love to see that.”

I recently had a nice chat with William Taylor, the DC teacher featured in my Atlantic piece a few months ago. It’s always fascinating to hear about the weirdness that descends on people after they are profiled in a long magazine story.

Mr. Taylor has taken it all very well, marveling at the weirdness rather than joining it. After the piece came out, he got a call from the BBC, which followed him around for a World News America segment that ran this month. You can watch the video here. DC Public Schools also did a nice interview, which you can find here.

In some conversations, he found himself getting associated with Teach for America, even though he came to teaching through a traditional route--not Teach for America--as I explained in the piece. He learned quickly that there are a lot of people out there who distrust Teach for America...regardless of its effectiveness. Which is part of the reason that I wanted to profile him, someone not from that world whose success happens to reflect what Teach for America has learned over decades of research, trial and error.

But anyway, enough about me. Congratulations to William Taylor and his 5th graders as they finish up a school year packed with problems, games, prizes, hard work and the occasional camera. Thank you for letting me into your world for a few moments.

I just finished up a week-long fellowship in Palo Alto (Thank You Stanford!). The university is so beautiful and the weather so ridiculous that you wonder how it can possibly qualify as a school--let alone one of the best schools in the world.

But OK, let’s accept that it is. So one of the things that struck me while I was out there was how cavalier people are with their most valuable asset. Everyone out there rides a bike, which is cool. It is actually a challenge to drive or walk on campus and not collide with a bike. But I was amazed to see that pretty much no one wears a helmet. “Once in a while you’ll see a grad student wearing a helmet,” one professor told me. But the vast majority of the thousands and thousands of bikers whizzing past cars, trucks and other bikes all day long are helmet-less. I know I’m a huge nerd to be thinking about this, but seriously, there is something interesting here.

I ride a bike to work most days. Mostly I love it because it is the fastest way to get around and I can count it as exercise if I get really busy. But I have gotten so used to wearing a helmet that I no longer think it is nerdy. I just don’t think about it at all.

Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, you have about 15,000 people working really hard and paying a lot of money to get a degree. These are people whose main advantage in the world resides in their heads. They are smart and ambitious, it’s fair to say, since Stanford only accepts 8% of the kids who apply.

The university has gone to great lengths to make biking safer (“Meet Sprocket Man, the superman of bicycle safety!” Yes, true story!), but there is a powerful no-helmet culture--even among hardcore geeks (and I saw a lot of them). It’s kind of fascinating, when you think about it. It’s like watching a bunch of aspiring supermodels eat ice cream and fries between posture classes.

Now, some people will argue that helmets don’t make you safer, and there is clearly a dearth of good controlled studies on this (to read more about this, check out this study of what happened after certain countries made helmets mandatory). But it’s also true that the vast majority of people who die in bike accidents are not wearing helmets--and they die from head injuries.

Two months ago, a student named Yichao Wang was hit by a car on Stanford’s campus as he biked home at night. He was thrown 128 feet into an intersection after he failed to yield to a Honda Civic, the police would later conclude. He was not wearing a helmet. He suffered critical brain injuries and spent the next 16 days in a coma. Wang was a Ph.D. student from Singapore who was studying how membranes can absorb pharmaceutical residue during the wastewater treatment process. His family flew in from China and held a vigil at his bedside at Stanford Hospital. He died on Feb. 19.

I just wrote a review of a strange and compelling book that I want to tell you about. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, is by Rebecca Solnit, an author and essayist.

The book chronicles five disasters--the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. But instead of rehashing the old stories of suffering and redemption, Solnit focuses on the ways many people seemed to thrive in some ways in the midst of all that loss. It is a rarely discussed truth about disasters--they provide a sort of clarity and community that is lacking in normal times. And Solnit makes the point that if we are too become a more resilient society, we need to understand the “joy” of disasters as much as we understand the pain.

I found the book to be thoughtful and smart--right up to the point when Solnit lectures us on the media and the rest of the “elites” who perpetuate disaster myths. I am not one to defend the media coverage of disasters, as is evidenced throughout this blog, but I found her condemnations to be more preachy than productive. We have to understand why reporters mischaracterize disasters if we hope to do better; righteous indignation is satisfying, but it doesn’t get us anywhere at this point.

That said, the book is a provocative exploration of the dark chasm between disasters as we expect them to be and as they are. The review came out today in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and you can download the full review at no charge here here.

I’ve been doing some TV interviews about this week’s TIME cover story on paying kids to learn in school. People keep asking me: “What will happen as a result of these findings?” If we know that paying kids to perform in school can work if it’s done right (and studied carefully), are more schools going to do it?

Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a no brainer--especially since this kind of program costs literally 1/10th of what other reforms with similar results cost. But the truth is, I really don’t know what will happen. We know that DC is continuing its program, as is Dallas, which is fantastic. And New York and Chicago continue to experiment with various kinds of incentives. But we don’t know if this research will translate into policy everywhere. And why don’t we know?

Because not everyone has the courage of Joel Klein, New York City’s Schools Chancellor. Klein let Harvard economist Roland Fryer into his school system three years ago to test what would happen if you paid kids to get good test scores. This is a big deal. It was controversial and no one knew if it would work. Using private funds, Fryer paid more than 8,000 kids some $1.5 million in New York, with Klein’s support.

As it turns out, the New York City model did not work--at least not in any way that’s easy to measure. The kids enjoyed the money, and they weren’t harmed in any way. But their standardized test scores and grades did not go up compared to kids who did not get paid.

But, and this is key: some of the other models (particularly in Dallas) did work. So Klein and the NYC schools took a risk so that the rest of the country could learn. The question is, will they? “You want to look at these things and expand those that are successful and certainly try to figure out why certain things didn’t work,” Klein told me. “What you don’t want to do is to resist all innovation on the theory that some of it might not work.”

In education, big policy decisions almost never get made according to evidence. Then again, there almost never is evidence. Now we have some. I look forward to seeing what happens.