Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. It involves family and friends and is rather unassuming, tucked between the shenanigans of Halloween and the solemn, yet frenetic, Christmas rush. We especially remember those suffering loss today. The tables that aren’t whole due to empty chairs. Loss is a burden on a day to give thanks. […]
“Disruption” Using Technology is Dangerous to Child Development and Public Education
Public schools continuously change to keep up with progress. Technology has much to offer. But the idea that instruction should be disrupted using technology is putting students and the country at risk. It destroys the public school curriculum that has managed to educate the masses for decades. Disruption is a troubling word when referring to […]
How Funding Cuts to Public Schools Hurt Private and Parochial Students with Special Needs
Should public school districts be responsible for special education services of students in private and parochial schools? How do they manage this when they have financial problems serving the students who need special education services in public schools? I am not referring to special education vouchers which some states provide students when the special education […]
Betsy DeVos’s Tour Questions Are About Tech Transformation
Betsy DeVos is gearing up for another tour, this time in the South. Chalkbeat shared the questions she is asking about schools. Here I try to interpret her questions with answers to what she is really getting at. I believe her questions are related to technology and “disruption” in education. The drive is to transform […]
What’s Behind TIME Magazine’s Teacher Hate Turnaround?
The recent TIME Magazine article about teachers describes beaten-down, courageous individuals, struggling to remain in a profession where they are not honored like they deserve. TIME seems to suddenly love teachers. It had those of us who support public schools and teachers scratching our heads. TIME hasn’t been kind to teachers in the past. Remember […]
A Student’s Mental Health Could Depend on Putting the Arts Back into the Public School Curriculum
Safety commissions, school districts, PTAs, and other groups and individuals have discussed school safety. One smart move would be to ensure that every school has a legitimate arts program including visual arts, music, drama, and dance. Students who struggle with mental health problems might benefit from the arts. Every child should have access. Students should […]
Does this Summer Reading Program Bypass Librarians, Teachers, and Fun, While Tracking Students?
READS is a summer program for disadvantaged children promoted by the i3 (Investing in Innovation) Fund and The Wallace Foundation. It uses computer algorithms to figure out a student’s interests. Next, it matches them to books. It gives students in kindergarten through fifth grade 10 free books, but there are strings attached. Both the i3 […]
The School Safety Commission’s Troubling Ties to the Border Crisis
School safety is simmering in everyone’s minds during summer vacation. But looking at the individuals on the Federal Commission on School Safety should give us pause. How do they view children? There’s cognitive dissonance when they say they want safe schools, yet they thought it fine to separate babies and children from their parents in the […]
The Ridiculous Ways Adults Ruin Recess
Recess for children is such a simple concept that some adults don’t know how to deal with it. Edutopia is talking about a “right way” to do recess in order to “optimize” it. This stems from a report that is supposed to “help” with recess. They want to manipulate how children play and how we […]
Schools, and a Country’s Children: Remembering a Gentler (Not Perfect) Past
This is our land. These are our children. We’re all in it together. ~Brochure for the Van Buren Intermediate School District, Project NOMAD (Needs and Objectives for Migrant Advancement and Development), 1972 and 1973. In the early seventies, as a young college student, I became an aide for two summers, in the Michigan Migrant Education […]