My last post was about the sneaky way the University of Memphis education school was being side-swiped by the Relay Graduate School, a faux education group of pretend-educators who will end professional teacher preparation as we know it. Now, Eastern Michigan University (EMU) has a similar, but slightly different, situation brewing. Moveon.org has a petition […]
Happy Thanksgiving: The Role of Public Schools
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It doesn’t have the hyperactivity of other holidays. And it isn’t dominated by one religion or another, although it certainly, for many, is religious. While there are certainly attempts to drag commercialism into the day, people, in general, seem to recognize it is a quiet time–simply to enjoy […]
University Teacher Education Takeover in Memphis
What Relay is doing largely breaks the mold. Its students are full-time elementary and middle-school teachers, almost all of them fresh out of college, almost none of them with a traditional teaching degree. June Kronholz, Education Next At the University of Memphis there are professors disturbed about a rather secret plan, one that college officials […]
Teacher Preparation: Which Way is the Best?
Here are some questions I would like to explore today with the help of teachers and parents and anyone with a vested interest in public education. Should teachers be prepared professionally in accredited colleges and universities? Or, does a fast-track training program that places graduate students and career changers, from various majors and possibly for-profit […]
Language that Frightens Parents and Teachers of Students with Disabilities
The recent report about special education from Washington State is not alone in its use of frightening language about what is happening to programs for students with disabilities. Many states are using the get tough talk, following Arne Duncan’s lead. And there are many parents who no longer accept the idea of special education. They […]
Seattle’s Demolition of Special Education: Making Way for Common Core
The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped. —Hubert H. Humphrey Every student achieving, everyone accountable. —The Seattle […]
Who is Your Child’s Teacher?
Who is your child’s teacher? Are they a fully prepared, appropriately credentialed teacher, or a fast-tracker, a person who didn’t learn much about students, who maybe knows a subject, but essentially nothing about how children learn? Public schools should provide every child with a real teacher prepared in the area they’re teaching, and they should […]
Tricky Business in New York Special Ed. and Maybe Where You Live
By Monica Kennedy Kounter I am a parent of a special needs child, a certified lay advocate, and I have a Master’s of Science in Early Childhood Education. I have been fighting Common Core on the behalf of students with disabilities in New York State for a year now. I am a relative newcomer to […]
Courses We Once Knew: Civics Digitized, What’s Lost and the Common Core
You are not just training our nation’s future workers. You are bringing up the future citizens of the United States of America. Your students will, someday soon, collectively decide the fate of this great nation of ours. Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor (Supreme Civics, 2011) I thought today would be a good day to […]
Isn’t It Time to Pay Attention to Our Gifted Students?
By Gina Kennedy According to the National Association for Gifted Children, there are three to five million gifted students in our public schools today, however rarely will you find two school districts in the United States that service these students in a similar way. Best practices and strategies to teach the gifted are likely based […]