Public Education. America's Best Idea.
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I am a National Board Certified Teacher. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) influenced a big chunk of my professional life and practice, and I remain—pretty much—a fan. The founding ideas around the creation of an assessment that identified accomplished teaching drew me in, back in the mid-90s. I wasn’t sure, back then, […]
And now he wants to be my senator. Again. Meet Mike Rogers. I spent most of my life and nearly all of my teaching career in Livingston County, Michigan—a ruby-red, rural-turning-suburban area in the ring outside Detroit. My first principal used to refer to our school district as the far edge of white flight—folks with […]
I’ve been writing about education policy and practice for more than 25 years, in my local newspaper (gratis), for an education nonprofit (paid), for Education Week (the journal of record for ed policy, also paid) and in my own personal blog, Teacher in a Strange Land, where I am definitely Not Paid. When I started, […]
I was a middle and high school band teacher for more than 30 years. In my school, band was an elective; students were mostly in my class because they wanted to be there, year after year. More than once, clinicians and adjudicators remarked about the large numbers of boys in my middle and high school […]
One of the most enduring truisms about public education is the existence of The Pendulum—the belief that trends in curriculum and instruction tend to repeat themselves, swinging back and forth over time between two distinct, even opposing models. The most obvious example is the Reading Wars—both the binary presentation (there are two ways to teach […]
Full disclosure first: I am a Democrat. I sit on my county party’s executive board. I ran for county office as a Democrat in a ruby-red district (and lost but learned a lot). I have been a Democrat since my first presidential election (George McGovern, 1972), so I have seen the ups and downs of […]
I was going to title this blog American Cesspool but then Public Notice beat me to it. And when all the good titles are taken, you know you’re talking about a national obsession. Like all other left-leaning Americans, it seems, I feel a sense of outrage over the Reflecting Pool. Which, upon some deep reflection (get […]
There’s been a robust edu-discourse bubbling up over an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled My Students Can’t Read. The (ahem) tl;dr: college students can no longer sustain attention to and comprehension of 20-page articles, so the professor-author of the article has to break such articles into pieces and spoon-feed comprehension strategies to […]
I am a volunteer in a homegrown program to support middle and high school students in my (small, rural) county. Entitled LIFT—Leelanau Investing for Teens—it’s a program designed to give middle school and HS kids something valuable: a safe (free) place to hang out, stuff to do and friends to talk to, in the long […]
Please? Here’s the actual headline: Teacher-Parent Meetings Can Be Tense. Can AI Simulations Help? If you’ve waded around in mainstream edu-media lately, you don’t really need to read the article. Its bottom line is predictable, first chastising teacher preparation institutes for not teaching novice teachers how to handle ‘challenging’ P-T conferences, then suggesting that a […]
