These turbulent times offer invitation.  Leaders can seize the moment and lead. Many others want someone to do that. Within the pubic there is a growing sentiment that educators are overpaid workers whose ranks are filled with incompetents who enjoy unprecedented job security, over-test children and fail to educate our youth successfully. Within education, there are those who believe teachers are underpaid, under inordinate pressure, challenged to do more with less, and facing…

How we educate students must change.  Is there anyone among us who still believes that the paradigm in which we operate provides adequate preparation for the adult lives our students will live?  Teachers and leaders, along with communities of parents and those in business and health care, politicians and news reporters all know that change is needed. But why has change been so slow to happen? …

Robert Slavin on Teacher Evaluation

Exercise and the Brain

By Jonathan Jefferson

“SPARK: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain” by John J. Ratey, MD is the one book that all educators must read to fully understand the inseparable connection between exercise and the brain’s ability to acquire knowledge.  Long before this well structured, research-based book was released in 2008, I had admonished my colleagues that it was…

One of the things I notice – and it seems to be getting worse – is almost a complete disconnect between the ideas discussed as possible cures in education, and the problems In the public schools that are actually fatal to learning.

In other words, if somebody’s got cancer, it’s fatuous to focus on whether they need new shoes.

Schools have almost stopped trying to…