The Education Establishment has a funny prejudice. They don't like facts and knowledge, especially not for average kids in public schools. (That's why Charlotte Iserbyt wrote a famous book titled "The deliberate dumbing down of America.")

 Our elite educators are clever at coming up with sophistries to justify teaching less and less. The big new sophistry  goes like this: there are billions and billions of facts on the Internet, so why should children know even…

Let's reclaim the honor and purpose of our profession.  We need teachers and leaders who are dedicated to the reality that children are our business and that we have the ability and the obligation to create an environment that can teach them far more than subjects. We have knowledge, training, responsibility and we have experience.  Many of these teachers and leaders are in schools right now. The daily urgent administrivia eats into their dedication and focus but cannot be allowed to…

A short piece that shows the similarities between Sight-Words and kudzu.

 Virtually all public schools use Sight-Words to some extent, thus guaranteeing that literacy will be slowed down. Frankly, I'm always trying to figure out quick ways to explain this to people who are more or less on the periphery.

Give me five minutes and I'll make you realize why we won't have…

The Need for More Play in School…

One reason schools are so cautious about change is that we aren't sure of our answer to the fundamental question about school and social values. Of course, educators are a reflection of society ourselves and so we don't agree among ourselves, making it even more complex to lead a system into and through one of these debates. No matter whether educated in the 40's and 50's or the 80's and 90's, the large percentage of us who went to public school were taught from a bank of knowledge…

Most of you have been part of a hiring process. You know the conversation about qualifications and attributes. Regardless of position, we search for the person with knowledge, with skills and with a set of personal attributes. Then interviews happen, and often conversations drift from those expressed qualifications to softer ones. We don't mean the reference check input, we mean the conversations about who will "fit" here. We mean the moments when the best answered are dismissed as too…

 As societal values shift, schools absorb or resist those changes. School leaders receive the challenges released on the election stages and find it seeping into classrooms, hallways and high school locker rooms.  Over the years, we have seen an erosion of respect for teachers and school leaders.  And sadly, the capacity to monitor previously private actions has revealed some pretty bad actions. So as educators, we find ourselves attempting to create a value system that runs counter to…

When something is used for more than one purpose, it loses it power. Three examples can be found in lesson plans, observations/evaluations, and PowerPoint presentations. When serving more than one master, value is diminished. Read more...