The quality of the education students receive in a school rests largely on the teachers in it. The achievement of the students in schools, however, depends on a vast array of factors that all in education know and can easily list.  Poverty, disability, language, health, mental health, life situation, parents, the leaders, all play a role in how far teachers can bring their students forward. So to look at one factor is both misleading and most importantly, potentially destructive, even…

Sustaining Outdated Practices Will Not Transform Schools…

Thompson: Why Reformers Are Being Beaten Up by Teachers…

In education we often talk about the importance of fostering creativity and problem solving, but creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum.  It requires recognizing, nurturing, and promoting certain elements of personality that are free, experimental, experiential, and questioning.  It also requires an environment that accepts and encourages differences in people, perspectives, attitudes, and ideas     …

Toward national funding reform

Almost every education policy debate is in part a proxy for something else, writes Conor Williams on the New America Ed Central website. Regardless of surface appearance, school funding arguments are often implicitly about deeper theories of justice and core elements of our social contract (both articulated and unarticulated). If we believe that all students should be treated equally in a public education system, presumably we…

What price fundraising drives?

From bake sales to gala auctions, private groups are raising increasing amounts of money for public schools in wealthier communities, spurring inequities, writes Motoko Rich in The New York Times. A new study in Education Finance and Policy finds that nonprofits of parents and community leaders tripled in number and quadrupled dollars generated between 1995 and 2010 -- $880 million in 2010, up from $197 million in 1995. Their…

Free, accessible, unsegregated, and unequal

Free, accessible, and unsegregated public education in the United States has only existed since 1965 and been predicated on the ESEA's three precedents: the promise to educate all children; the fluctuating nature of school funding; and the mandating of standardized tests, writes Lawrence Baines in Teachers College Record. Yet the federal government has never fully funded public education: It has always paid for only…