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 …
Many schools that are marketing to young parents are going to have a tough sale because they are a part of a growing number of recent college graduates who couldn’t find work in their profession after investing 4 years and thousands of dollars in the chance for a better job. Many young graduates take lower-paying …
Is college helping students prepare for professional life or reinforcing the SES? Post-secondary education is not, in fact, functioning to dissolve long-standing class hierarchies. There are various ways of examining these trends, which I’ve outlined below. However you look at it, the cultural and political implications of the deepening of the income achievement gap are …
Gaming in education is a topic that many educators are exploring, but is it even possible in the education climate that requires so many levels of approval? There needs to be a momentous change in attitude if this is to become legitimate. Recently in my university course, I wasn’t there when the topic of Scratch …
If school was like Twitter: At first, this ideas sounded intriguing. We would get together in random chats, organizing our thoughts and sharing resources according to shared categories that grow organically. I’d have the permission to speak and to listen, engaging strangers at times and somehow making close friendships in the process. When things got …
I know you’re tired. I know the weight of the school year and the expectations to increase students’ test scores has felt like a an unbearable burden that you weren’t trained to bear. I know that there has been more negative feedback than positive feedback. You are making a difference step by step in your …
There’s a great episode of How I Met Your Mother, where Marshall who always dreamed of being an environmental lawyer tells his wife that he actually likes his job as a corporate lawyer. They are attending an event in the Natural History Museum and she sees the College Marshall and sees that he is extinct. …
I write, more than you probably all want to read, about re-envisioning school and education. You might think me a young idealist, a dreamer and that’s ok, but when I talk to students like I did on Saturday and ask them, “What is school?” and their very first response is “It’s a place where…” I …
Maybe “offshoot” is the best thing that a teacher can hope for: So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today’s content knowledge is an offshoot of successful ongoing learning in a changing world – in which ‘learning’ means ‘learning to perform in the world.’
Most teachers have to take standardized test for certification purposes, but those aren’t the test scores that decide whether teachers are effective. They are test scores from tests that teachers don’t take: The question of whether teacher evaluations are reliable indicators for teacher effectiveness has long been controversial. But New York City reignited the debate …
