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 …
It isn’t a coincidence that charter schools keeping showing up: The reading passage on the test was a paean to charter schools, with pie charts and bullet points, all intended to show that charters were decidedly superior to the public schools in which the test-taking students were enrolled. It even had the nerve to identify …
This morning, I am participating in the service to honor graduates of high school, college and graduate school. When you participate in these kinds of events, it inevitably draws up memories of your own graduations. It makes me think how important it is to create times, especially as we get older, to stop and remember …
The fact that Harvard, Stanford and MIT have bought in should only give us more pause as to why we haven’t: But once an Ivy League university does it, then an innovative practice can be validated. Perhaps online instruction did not look so hot to many professors until MITx, the university’s new online learning program, …
Dismantling Philly Public Schools: The plan, or “blueprint,” was written by a business strategy organization called Boston Consulting; it recommends the closing of 40 of the city’s 249 schools in the coming year, with additional school closings in the years to come. The goal is to have a school district where the central district is phased out …
This is changing the landscape of education, you need to think again: My 11 year old son just took a course at Stanford. That has a nice ring to it but it is actually meaningless because these days anyone can take a course at Stanford. You don’t even have to pay. All you need is …
More about charter schools from the Obama administration: The document also gives charters flexibility to develop their own teacher and principal evaluation systems, as long as they adhere to a number of standards. The Obama administration announced last year that it would offer states waivers from the most onerous provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. …
Good thoughts: One of the oldest problems with the left or progressive movement is our tendency to drag ourselves down through internal struggle over who has the most correct political line. We are seeing some of this dynamic emerge in the movement against high stakes testing. Perhaps it is a coming of age – a …
As summer arrives (maybe not soon enough for us teachers), we long to wear flip flops and non teacher clothes, but also maybe to flip flop some things around for the coming year. As your thinking about flipping your classroom, remember what it truly means: “Flipping the classroom” means using class time differently than you …
A couple of jewel’s from A Show: No matter how life is now, it will change. Be comfortable with the not knowing. The more we deny the way this is happening all around us and the way that we are secretly feeling these things are true, the harder the pavement will be when we hit …
