Is Education A Privilege For The Elite?

How textbooks are sabotaging teaching, learning

Textbooks are an obstacle to learning, says Ben Stern, technology integrationist for a middle school in New York City. In this blog post, he writes that textbooks present an easy way out for teachers and students -- allowing them to avoid questions over what should be taught. Technology, Stern writes, such as Internet…

Smartest People In The World: The 10 Smartest People Alive Today

Douglas Reeves Pushes Back on Educational Folklore

From the Marshall Memo #448

In this iconoclastic American School Board Journal article, author/consultant Douglas Reeves notes that a number of strongly-held opinions are folklore – they’re not backed up by facts. “Critical thinking is not criticism,” he says. “Rather, it is the capacity of a person to distinguish claims from evidence.” Here are…

http://thinkingaboutschools-jhstlny.blogspot.com/

Back2School

(Originally published in Record Review, New York)

(abridged version - still lengthy - hopefully worth your time to read)

Back to School & Public Education OR Why we don't need a "parent trigger."

Every single student, every single day!

No doubt you have seen that…

As districts grapple with the mandated costs associated with the implementation of the Annual Professional Performance Reviews  (APPR), important data points might be missed.  Lost in the tally of exorbitant financial costs that every school district will be forced to provide is the drain on the time and energy of every educator in the state.

That which is measured or tested gets done, or so says the axiom.  This focus will drive attention…

3 Ways To Make Everyone Around You Smarter

As I was driving recently, I heard a commercial on the radio that really grabbed my attention. It was from a real estate organization that was talking about the advantages of owning a home. What grabbed my attention was a statement claiming that children of homeowners score better on standardized tests. I couldn’t believe it. Somebody was using the potential of a child’s success on a standardized test to get people to consider buying houses. Of course, I immediately thought that children of…

A good teacher is hard to keep

Too often, teachers who are consistently successful with students are not given leadership roles that would allow them to reach students beyond their own classrooms.…

What Happens to Student Learning When Teachers Are Absent?

From the Marshall Memo #446

“The mythology surrounding the substitute teacher is not a pretty one,” says reporter Jaclyn Zubrzycki in this Education Week article: “Paper airplanes, lost learning, bullying.” The average teacher is out 10 days a year, and one study found that 37 percent of teachers are absent more than 10 days a year. That’s…