Teaching is fundamentally a political process. At least in my world, the principle of "pick your battles" is not just a good idea - it is a fundamental law. Even for a disciplinarian Especially for a disciplinarian like me, power derives from the "consent of the governed." [...]
Society invests plenty in policing after alleged gang-related murders, but the emotional effects on fellow students can be lost to adults.
This week as I rushed past some hall-walkers to address one of my student’s situation, a kid’s perplexing smirk/smile - the type that can make 13 years olds so annoying - caught [...]
Last week’s must-read blog was "A Teacher Walks Into the Principal’s Office," by Deirdra Grode. On her first day as principal Ms. Grode dealt with a student who "came to me in tears because his teacher had sent him to my office for behaving inappropriately." [...]
I can’t deny that I enjoying writing a spoof of the Center for American Progress'’ latest paper on Value Added Models, and parts were awfully easy to lampoon. It was a serious paper, however, and balance is necessary. For instance I have long argued that growth' [...]
The forty fire alarms that have disrupted instruction this year at the District of Columbia’s Ballou High School (where students have a Reading proficiency rate of 24%) illustrates the problem with Value Added Models for evaluation purposes. While not prejudging that principal’s policies, the Ballou [...]
The reasons given for the District of Columbia’s continued improvement in NAEP Math scores are persuasive, "an increased focus on the use of games, calculators and written responses -- to help students demonstrate their reasoning in solving a problem ... The emphasis dates to Janey's'" [...]
Imagine an anthropologist from the Trobriand Islands landing in urban America, discovering Black students, despite less access to pre-school, enter kindergarten with higher reading scores than Whites but instantly fall behind. After 12 years with teachers and union members, only 20% of those Black [...]
Just after Secretary Duncan described for the Center for American Progress the harm done by "adult dysfunction" and a "gotcha" mentality, Mayor Bloomberg personified those traits by blindsiding teachers with the announcement "as it turned out, our lawyers now tell us, after a very close" [...]
The best thing about Education Secretary Duncan’s interview with Education Week was his endorsement of a fundamental value of public education - "creative insubordination." When dealing with some of his best principals in Chicago, Duncan learned that the best thing he could do was to [...]
Given the latest discussion of the coverage of education and the press, Linda Perlstein’s hyperlink to Nick Lemann’s account of the passage of NCLB couldn’t be timelier. But first we should recall Lemann’s greatest scoop, an interview with Karl Rove on "the death of" [...]
The best practice for a high school teacher being evaluated is to instruct students beforehand who know the answers to raise their right hands, and those who do not know the answers to raise their left hands. Even if I taught my students to silently raise [...]
DHHS Secretary Mike Bloomberg announced his resignation in the wake of last week’s ill-timed statement, at the height of the battle for health insurance reform, that heart surgeons would be evaluated based on their patients’ survival rates. Though gracious in praising the outgoing Secretary, President Obama [...]
Dean is a hard act to follow. After reading Tom Toch's original document, as opposed to his Education Week article, I still see the same pattern. The Education Sector and the Eduwonk have long battled with themselves over facts and their meanings. Now,' [...]
After Newt Gingrich misstated the facts regarding Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia, the media could have checked into the true story of the schools’ outstanding accomplishments without distorting the challenges faced by the toughest neighborhood schools.
So it was doubly dismaying when Secretary Duncan was [...]
The first 13 contributors to the National Journal’s discussion on innovation largely echoed the heroic infatuation of theorists with "disruptive innovation," arguing that education needs "radically new approaches," "federal leverage" to destroy local policies and "antiquated" contracts, and the adoption of Frederick Hayek’s The Road to [...]
Stephen Sawchuck remembers when Dianne Piche' "likened permitting teachers' scoring of their students' tests to allowing 16-year-olds to score their own driver's-license exams." Being a former adult, I see such arrogance as the only way to reconcile the values of the Citizens Commission on Civil [...]
Catherine Gewertz speculates that the "Graduation For All Act" will be a warmup for the renewal of the discredited NCLB ESEA. If so, the Act's school turnaround grants present a perfect opportunity to act on the President’s wisdom of building on the 70% of issues where we' [...]
The last Bracey Report should be read and reread in its balanced, jewel-like entirety.  Federal accountability schemes, despite their avowed purpose of helping the poor, make no sense unless you also believe that American education as a whole is dangerously in decline. Bracey's last report again debunked that myth along [...]
The Flypaper worries that "New Haven’s contract [calling for peer review] will derail DC bargaining." Can’t "reformers" compete in the free market of ideas? And the TNTP’s Tim Daly complains that peer review is an incomplete approach ... of doing what districts have been trying [...]
It would be so easy to revel in the extreme reactions of "reformers" condemning the newly released RttT regulations, such as Rick Hess’ statement that "states will promise a lot of half-hearted reforms that will then fail, giving ammunition to the unions." Andy Smarick [...]
Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich, along with Arne Duncan were impressive on Meet the Press. Yes, they flubbed some lines indicating confusion about charter schools, curriculum, and international test scores and they spoke in phrases like "I was told ..., students are told" [...]
"I just got flipped off by a gray-haired old lady, who has a ‘Honk If You Love Jesus’ bumper sticker on her car." As I laughed at the song I heard with the network of fellow NPR’s Car Talk fans, I grinned in anticipation of singing the tune [...]
In American education, as with our economy and law, a system of checks and balances has grown organically over the generations. These institutions of due process and traditions of academic freedom have helped create true excellence and dynamism in education and culture, but they have not had enough relevance [...]
RttT architects, who are gullible enough to believe that charters face the same challenges as neighborhood schools and can thus lead systemic turnaround efforts, should ask what the California Charter School Association knows about this issue that they do not.  The Association. which should be the biggest booster of the effort [...]
When Alexander teases me about blaming everything on NCLB, I need to think seriously about his opinion. Yes, I believe that NCLB has done at least some harm to nearly all aspects of schooling. By introducing a toxic "culture of accountability"into our children’s environment, NCLB has [...]
After fretting over the most troubled students who undercut the opportunities of his lower-performing kids in his Study Skills classes, "Coach" may have stumbled across the solution, "why not send the knuckleheads to the rich schools? Instead of sending the troublemakers to alternative schools with" [...]
Back in the day when teachers took roll by scan sheets and we quickly received printouts of the reasons for absences (cutting, medical, bereavement, legal, etc.) that data was far more valuable than all of the test score and benchmark statistics of today. Not wanting to [...]
I can’t believe I’m saying nice things about the districts that beat us out for the American Federation of Teachers Innovation Grants. Seriously, each proposal is excellent, and when seen as a diverse whole, and also in the context of comparable innovations by our brothers and sisters [...]
Responding to the question of why Michelle Rhee disregarded the instructions of the D.C. Council to cut $9 million from summer school, Jay Mathews wrote "Anyone who has looked at the data on summer learning loss would have to say Rhee was right, and the" [...]
It is no surprise that the concept that gained the largest support in the Public Agenda poll of teachers was alternative schools for disruptive students. Overall, 68% of teachers predicted the proposal would be "very effective" while 27% thought it would be somewhat effective. A [...]
Mrs. Krabappel is a lousy teacher but it was the toxic culture of Springfield that was responsible for the scissor-leg takedown that Bart Simpson threw on Nelson when the schoolyard became another Ultimate Fighting ring. Mr. Garrison is not an effective teacher, but he didn’t turn [...]
In one of his last posts, Gerald Bracey wrote: "I do think that US schools which, far more than schools in other nations, encourage students to ask questions (one of the best ways of learning), give us an edge up. In most nations, as neither a" [...]
"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?" I am less direct in asking such a sensitive question because I know what the answer will be. And sure enough the enquiring teacher at T.C. Williams High School was told "It's because they have'" [...]
Russ Whitehurst convincingly argues that "curriculum reformers" would provide a much bigger bang for the buck than the "governance reformers" of the Obama administration. People who are trying to create more charter schools, or pressure unions to allow more flexibility ..." writes, Whitehurst "do not sort [...]
Eduwonk thought he was praising Michelle Rhee when he wrote that without her combativeness "I’m not sure a bunch of niceties would have attracted the notice of the Nick Kristofs and Steven Brills of the world." Rhee had just claimed to be concerned solely with the welfare of [...]
Claus von Zastrow, recoiling from educational know-nothingism of recent opinion pieces in the Washington Post and the New York Times, suggested "pay newspaper pundits for their performance. Pay them only for what they get right, or for judgments based on strong evidence"
What would such [...]
I wish the Tim Daly who was interviewed by NPR could meet my mentor, Hal Olinger, and together they could talk some sense into the Tim Daly who is the president of the New Teacher Project.
Following a report on career-changing teachers, Daly said "the professions" [...]
Today’s self-segregation is moving beyond "the Big Sort" and charters, magnets, and selectivity in schools to "radical choice--not just school choice but choice to the lesson level." Students who chose their parents well are already assembling "multiple provider transcripts" being able to virtually tour the British [...]
I was reading The Grand Bargain, wishing I could be more enthusiastically supportive of it, when the This American Life special that NPR had been promoting on health care grabbed my attention. Excessive testing is one of the reasons why NPR estimates that 30% [...]
If my school had $5000,000 to fight violence, I would recruit a cadre of twenty-something mentors. I'd survey churches and community centers for young adults in the neighborhood who would join this civil rights struggle for the souls of our youth. If potential community leaders had college' [...]
I can not judge Deborah Lynch’s argument that the turnaround effort at Chicago's Fenger High School has shown the replacement of staff as "the deadliest reform," and I can not dump on the school’s new teachers who have not "known their kids for more than" [...]
The Chicago Teachers Union says that as a step in a comprehensive effort alternative school slots should be provided for nonviolent students with chronic behavioral problems. The normative approach is to blame disorder on teachers’ "low expectations" and poor classroom management, but that is as [...]
When I was a high school delegate to the Senate Youth Program at a fancy luncheon with Henry Bellmon, the senator barely looked up as he shoveled his food and asked "You boys got much of a hippie problem at your schools?" I made a cocky reply, not having a [...]
The online Washington Post Magazine that featured Michelle Rhee also includes a video where she is asked whether there should be a limit to her candor and whether she had reached it. Rhee laughed as she replied "no."
Rhee's "standard line" denying any political benefit in her relationship [...]
"The Principals," is another incredible production by PBS. The directors sought out great leaders who had turned around elementary schools. Principal Kerry Purcell, of Springfield, Illinois, was shown holding a child during emotional and physical spasms requiring a call to 911; a counseling session after a student’s [...]
The Washington Post Magazine’s profile of Michelle Rhee doesn’t exactly prove the Washington Teachers Union president’s statement that Rhee has recruited hundreds of people "who don't know how to manage student behavior, who lack basic people skills." But Marc Fisher's excellent article does the next' [...]
A doctoral student in psychology has discovered the following horrific mis-statements of fact:
The film Amistad "depicts Cinque is sitting in shackles before the Supreme Court ... In fact, Cinque was imprisoned in Connecticut during the trial." The film Glory [...]
"I fear the worst for my beautiful curriculum map. Its days are numbered.... I believe I am going to be forced into an unholy three-way marriage with the new 'Core Curriculum.' writes Miss Eyre. "I would buy into a Core Knowledge curriculum so fast it [...]
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan celebrated the opening of the nation's 6th Educare early education center in Oklahoma City. He noted the contribution of Warren Buffet's wife, Susan, in inspiring this public private partnership.  Duncan also praised the House of Representatives for passing a $10 [...]
How should we respond to the news that only 2.8% of Oklahomans could have passed the basic 10 question citizenship examination? Of course, the poll was authorized by an extreme Rightwing thinktank so the results should be taken in context.Â
But a teacher who is surprised by such [...]
