We listen to the research, the thought leaders, community members, boards of education, business, mental health and health care providers. But, someday, we need to remember that the children also have something to say. There is value to listening to the children.  Here, we are thinking about four.  Read more...

 Please read this scary article by Laurie Rogers, a well-known education reformer you can trust.

The Network (her word)  is all the people and forces trying to subdue education. Common Core represents the fulfillment of their control over everything K-12. They have to be stopped if you want to save genuine education.

  You know what the only hope is? That all the people in the middle start to take sides.

Presumably some people…

Technology Improves And The Internet Expands But School Acceptable Use Policies Still Lock Students Out Of The Benefits

from the an-internet-with-18-years-worth-of-training-wheels dept

Tech Dirt

Tim Cushing

The last week of September is celebrated as Banned Books Week.  Click here for info on how you can celebrate literary freedom, and learn the effects of censorship on schools, libraries and communities.

Here's the short version: you're doing a lousy job. You're betraying your own future and letting the country down. You're abandoning the parents in your community to the scams of the Education Establishment. You're making real educational reform almost impossible because you don't explain any of the issues to the community. You and the NEA seem to be engaged in some sort of treacherous deal to make sure that the deliberate dumbing down of the country…

What a 'balanced' tenure system might look like

A new brief from The New Teacher Project envisions what it is casting as a "balanced" teacher-tenure system. Under this system, teachers would be eligible for tenure after five years. Tenure would be awarded for sustained strong performance, and could be revoked for ineffective performance. Appeals could contest process and bad faith, but not judgments about performance. Hearings would be limited to a single day,…

Traditional PD: 'totally useless'?

In a guest post on the Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post, Alvin Crawford of Knowledge Delivery Systems, which offers online professional development, writes that few can argue teachers today are getting the support and training they need to be effective and efficient, whether they stay in the classroom or not. In a 2009 report from the Center for Public Education, for instance, asked about experiences with professional…