I was recently at my parents’s house and found my box of awards. You know the one I mean: the one that has all those participation ribbons and those good works and the more special awards, the ones you worked really hard to receive and tried to act like you didn’t care if you got …
As I watched the Republican #GOPDebate last night, I was struck by two things in particular. First, any reference to God used the masculine pronoun and second, any reference to the president used the masculine pronoun. Huckabee did it. Jeb did it. Cruz did it. It would be easy to say that these references represent …
It’s not surprising to find that education is a huge market: The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the …
I’ve been on enough runs that I know a good one within the first couple of steps. I know whether my breathing is labored or whether it feels like my legs are stuck in molasses. When either of these things are off, then I know that the run is going to be one that I …
New forms of labeling students like Common Core, don’t change the underlying assumption: In education, as in society, holding individuals accountable for their actions is a powerful paradigm within a meritocracy. If all is equitable, then human choices and behaviors are more easily assigned in a causational way to individuals. Political and public discourse as …
Really, Congress can’t regulate? Maybe not directly, but certainly indirectly they have! To backtrack: the Common Core State Standards are not federal standards. After all, the U.S. Constitution gives Congress no authority to fund or regulate schools or control curriculum, standards, or policy. But at its annual fall meeting in 2008, after previous informal discussions, …
If you think that you are the only one battling day in and day out (yes, I know it is summer, but I also know teachers and I know they haven’t stopped battling) for your classroom back, you’re in a bigger fight than you think you are. Within hours, social media sites buzzed with the …
It’s easy to get caught up and confused when reading about educational policy: The report is a mishmash of misleading statistics and incoherent arguments, intended to exaggerate the failure of public education. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, introduces the report with this claim: “It will come as no surprise to …
Teachers are joining forces and uniting their voices: The high-stakes testing era started with the advent of No Child Left Behind in 2002, and though NCLB has largely been discredited, the Obama administration’s policies have expanded the use of test scores as assessment tools not only for students, but also for teachers and principals. Many …
I do understand that student-centered education is radical at this point in our educational history: Rethinking Schools has been pressing for radical reform of public education and for student-centered, social justice education since we began 25 years ago. But with debate about education policy now sharply politicized and polarized, there are added reasons to look …
