The Best of School: Lawrence & Zolynas
M. Scott Peck defines love as, “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” When I read that sentence on a beach after my first year as superintendent, I scribbled ‘teaching’ in the margin. What could better describe the work of teaching.
Best of 2009: 10 blogs you may have missed
Still think Investing in Innovation is important for the economy, 2/23; follow up on 3/3 quoting Reid Hoffman Thought a Brooks column on Fryer’s study of HCZ, 5/10, would be the most important of the year given definitive evidence of the power of good schools to…
Fix or Replace Federal Education Policy?
The Department of Education has an assignment that’s about five years late: reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, called No Child Left Behind by 43). It’s a difficult assignment that requires collaboration of the contentious—to have good chance of passing Summer 2010, it would require the unions…
10 US education reformers that will impact 2010
Arne Duncan is taking advantage of an unbelievably large budget and pushing a tough reform agenda targeting low-income kids and struggling schools. While he’ll have his hands full with reauthorization, he has assembled a top notch team. Joanne Weiss leads the mother of all grant program—Race to…
Augmented Reality will improve field trips
eSchool News posted a update on Augmented Reality. Here’s a couple snippets: This computer-enhanced view of the world is not just available to cyborgs in science-fiction movies. Increasingly, it can be found on cell phones, for free or on the cheap, through programs that provide “augmented reality.”…
How Students Show What They Know
My wife appreciates psychodrama (today we’ll see another triumphant women in a Nancy Meyer movie). I, on the other hand, enjoy a juicy psychometric-drama. And we have a thriller in the making. A couple agreements in the next few weeks will set the stage for the next decade of testing…
The Edu-Entrepreneurs bargain
The sun set at 4:22pm at latitude 47.3. It will set about a minute later tomorrow. The days are finally getting longer again. We also turned the corner on the Great Recession; at least the leading indicators look that way. That is little reassurance to the 20% of the…
How teacher pay should work
Kim Marshall’s December 16 EdWeek commentary attempts to “demolish the argument for individual merit pay.” He makes good points that suggest that individual bonuses based solely on value-added test scores are not a good idea. He suggests, instead, team-based bonuses and more pay for master teachers. There’s an…
Why all students have access to online learning
Rereading iNACOL policy report that suggests six reasons to close the online learning deal in the handful of states still prohibiting the internet (at least for learning): Public and available Academically and demographically blind: flexible and accessible for all students Engaging: often more engaging than traditional courses (and it…
Fix or replace Dropout Factories
EdWeek ran a useful commentary by friends from JFF and Johns Hopkins that outlined the range of challenges faced by states in fixing the roughly 2,000 high schools with graduation rates below 60%. Like the authors, I appreciate Secretary Duncan’s laser focus on attacking chronic failure–something NCLB…