State Department of Education spokesman Steve Weitzman was quoted as saying, “The presumption of steady, unbroken revenue increases year after year no longer is feasible. The day of reckoning has come.” What exactly does he mean by the day of reckoning? Well it has nothing to do with actually spending less on education. Yes, the… Read more »

Bashing of teachers is the favorite subject for politicians these days. Their rhetoric follows the same theme: The country is falling behind in education because of bad teachers. I have read statistics stating that Asian students are more advanced in math, science and reading than students in the USA. If this is true, we must… Read more »

What does international economic competitiveness have to do with kids’ test scores? Not much. If we look at it from a jobs perspective, 70 percent of United States jobs require only on-the-job training, 10 percent require technical training, and 20 percent require a college education. Although the Obama administration claims that the jobs of the… Read more »

Over the past couple months, I’ve been asked to participate in a few panel discussions about Waiting for Superman. The film presents a stark, moving portrayal of the denial of educational opportunities in low-income communities of color. But while the movie includes statements such as “we know what’s wrong” and “we know how to fix… Read more »

Communism, terrorism, bad teachers — the new enemy of freedom, finally getting the recognition they deserve. Ineffective. Disorganized. Boring. Lazy. No class control — or too much control. Bad things go down in those classrooms. Fights break out. Things get vandalized. Minds get wasted. So do millions of dollars of public funding. Of course, you’re… Read more »

In my last post about how testing ruins elementary education, a lively debate with readers ensued. One commenter in particular wondered about solutions for the so-called “ruinous” culture I noted in the title. I thought about it over the last couple of weeks and there was one idea that sort of took over the rest…. Read more »

Albert Einstein once famously said “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is proving that in spades. In his recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Duncan acknowledges widespread dissatisfaction with standardized tests, and the way they have narrowed the curriculum. He then… Read more »

Americans don’t really think very much of their children. Not really. Yes, we love our own children, and sometimes the kid next door. But a look at the education world as we enter 2011 reveals how little we really care about childhood and the importance of creating the conditions in which young people can grow… Read more »

Amid the very contentious debate about reforming public education, some of us have to enter classrooms every day and deliver instruction to students who cannot wait for systemic change–and while I greatly admire the passion and knowledge and intelligence sometimes represented in this ongoing debate I have little faith that any of this will be… Read more »

I was, generally speaking, a fairly well-behaved kid. I’ve no reasonable explanation, then, for burning a hole in the wall of the one-room school I attended in the late 1930s. It wasn’t an original idea. A precedent had been set by somebody who’d come and gone before I arrived at Union School the previous year… Read more »