When children face pressure to learn to read early in kindergarten and run into trouble, will they be diagnosed with learning disabilities when they only need more time? Creating one-size-fits-all, high-stakes standardized tests demanding children read by first grade creates pressure on the child, parent, and teacher. Higher-than-usual expectations have existed since 2001, and NCLB […]
Pushing the Privatized “Maker Movement” Into Public Schools
The 3D printing market is projected to be worth $8 billion by 2020. —Paul Hill, “Ten statistics that reveal the size and scope of the Maker Movement.” November 3, 2015 Why be skeptical of the Maker Movement and its effect on public schools? The speed to which the Maker Movement is being pushed into schools […]
What’s Individualized about the IEP and ESSA?
I am reviving an old post that raises questions about the relevancy of the Individualized Educational Plan when it is written according to the general grade level content standards. If everyone is expected to be alike, how important is the IEP? Under the Every Student Succeeds Act almost all students with disabilities must follow the […]
CBE Online is Neither Personalized Nor Higher-Order Thinking!
The issue of Competency-Based Education is very much in the news, so I thought I would revive this post. Competency-Based Education (CBE) is being promoted as the way to “personalize” education, but it is a cold impersonal method of teaching on the computer. It fails to teach to the whole child and merely provides fragmented […]
Susan Ohanian Champion of Children
One of the nice things about having a blog is you can write about people who you respect and admire. I have not written for a while about anyone, because there are so many people who grab my attention every day for all the positive things they do for children. And also because there are […]
How Children Learn—Listening, Jeb Bush Et Al?
How do children learn? Why do they even bother with it? The best way to answer this question is to think back to how you learned when you were young. As a child what inspired you? When you were in school, what subjects did you like? Dislike? To borrow a term from the cooking diva […]
Before Common Core—IDEA and Aligning IEPs to Regular Standards
While Common Core’s focus on math and English language arts does nothing to address the needs of students with disabilities, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) re-authorizations weren’t great either. Much of IDEA (the changing of PL-94-142) was to make students with disabilities over into normalized regular ed. students. Individual Educational Plans were to […]
Common Core State Standards Don’t Rhyme With Individual Educational Plans
Think about it. Common Core State Standards do not rhyme with Individual Educational Plans. Say it slowly. Listen to the words. They don’t go together. The whole point of CCSS is for everyone to get to the same standard. It is the same goal. You can argue that students with disabilities might get to the […]