Guest post by Mark Simon. After over a decade of "corporate reform" strategies in many places, we have a chance to compare the results of two drastically different approaches to improving public schools. In some places, such as Washington, DC, we have seen teacher turnover skyrocket, in line with ... Read Full Post >
Guest post by Rog Lucido. When I came home yesterday my wife told me she received a phone call from one of my former students whom I had in my physics class in 1998-99. My wife said he was excited to connect with me as he has just finished his student teaching and would begin his first full time po... Read Full Post >
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody A week ago I posted an interview with Teach For America's head of research, Heather Harding. Ms. Harding answered some tough questions that have been raised in recent months here on this blog. Today, I am sharing some responses to her answers. By way of contex... Read Full Post >
Guest post by Jack Hassard. Achieve, Inc. stands to make a lot of money for its work creating new science standards. It might not surprise us, therefore, that a survey they commissioned favors the adoption of these standards. But we need to look at these results with skepticism. Does US competitive... Read Full Post >
Guest post by Stephen Krashen Phillip K. Howard tells us that "To fix America's bureaucracy, we need to destroy it." The part most in need of destruction is not yet fully grown: The new national standards and their spawn, the new national tests. Howard points out that NCLB (No Child Left Behind) a... Read Full Post >
Guest post by Educators for Shared Accountability. A new group, Educators for Shared Accountability (ESA), has issued the first-ever Value-Added Measurement (VAM) evaluation of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Secretary Duncan was rated "ineffective," based on four indicators. The United State... Read Full Post >
Some Comments on Paul Farhi's "Flunking the Test" Guest post by Stephen Krashen. In "Flunking the Test," Paul Farhi concludes that the media has seriously under-reported the successes of American education and have taken the pronouncements of self-proclaimed "reformers" at face-value. Farhi backs... Read Full Post >
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody This week I have been looking at the issue of Turnarounds and the Department of Education's School Improvement Grants, drawing from a conference I attended sponsored by the Education Writers Association. One of the speakers there was a former teacher named Ellen ... Read Full Post >
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody At the Education Writers Association conference on School Improvement last Saturday, I was a bit of a contrarian. Many speakers suggested we need to "break the culture" at failing schools. A number suggested that the reason federal policies were not working was ... Read Full Post >
Texas has become a hotspot of rebellion against standardized testing. Earlier this year, state education commissioner Robert Scott compared test publishers to the military industrial complex. More than 100 school districts have passed a resolution saying standardized testing is "strangling" their sc... Read Full Post >
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