In the midst of the hype about STEM, what happened to science in public schools? Two recent reports in Education Week bemoan the stunning loss of both chemistry and physics in high schools across the country. Three out of five secondary schools don’t offer chemistry! When they do, there’s disparity. Poor African Americans and Hispanic […]
Require Ed. Secretary Betsy DeVos to Teach in a Public School
Betsy DeVos and any corporate reformer who impacts school policy should be required to spend at least a month each year teaching in a public school classroom. DeVos just attended Gov. Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd meeting in Nashville. Let Jeb Bush and his corporate friends and politicians who drive corporate reform also teach for a month. […]
Learning and Happiness: The Problem with Social-Emotional Learning
Happiness is a real factor when it comes to learning. It’s important to a child’s identity formation and how they relate to their environment (see study below). But can you teach happiness? There’s a push for social-emotional learning (SEL) which leads some to think that happiness can be taught. But SEL is not what it […]
Educating Betsy DeVos
Betsy DeVos does not understand what it is like to teach in any school let alone poor public schools. She does not understand what the lives of real teachers and students are like. She does not understand the problems facing many of America’s children. These problems won’t be solved with a voucher. They also won’t […]
Warped Message: Avoid the Classroom
US News and World Report just printed an article that will do absolutely nothing to motivate anyone to go into teaching. Why? The title is “Pursue an Education Career but Stay Out of the Classroom.” Listen, US News and World Report: The most important job in schooling is classroom teaching. Everything else is periphery. Ask […]
Gambling on Fast-Track Teachers in Nevada and Beyond and Personalized Learning
Nevada school officials claim they can’t find 1,000 teachers to fill their classrooms. Education Week is claiming this isn’t much different than what’s found in the rest of the country. In the middle of it all you will think about Personalized Learning. Education Week won’t let you forget it. If you don’t have a need […]
Joyful or Punishing Teachers: Which is it American Media?
What do Americans want their teachers to be like? What do they really want out of their schools? Within a space of a week I saw the media send out very mixed messages. We know Americans are meant to see these reports as examples of what teachers should be like. But which is it—A or […]
My Dream About EDUCATION and the Democratic (or Republican) Debate
I fell asleep last night during the democratic debate and I dreamt this is how it all unfolded. The scary part was there were no answers to the questions about education when I woke up. In my dream Anderson Cooper said: America’s democratic public schools, how we treat and instruct the next generation, our children, […]
Should School Leaders have Professional Teaching Experience?
Leading means inspiring, not commanding. Leading means loving the people you lead so they will give you their hearts as well as their minds. It means communicating a vision of where you can go together and inviting them to join. Major General John Stanford, Superintendent of Seattle Schools, 1995–1998 A school leader who has never […]
Students and Bears, Oh My! How Common Core Discards the Importance of Reasoning and Intuition
This post is about reasoning and intuition with students and bears, and what we have lost by focusing on Common Core State Standards and not the students themselves. There are interesting similarities. Let me start with bears. I just returned from visiting Glacier National Park. Glacier is full of bears—both grizzlies and black bears. So, […]