If educating the "whole child" is becoming a central theme in the work of schools, we must know the whole child: the whole child includes their family life circumstances, their needs, feelings, and experiences. Poverty and incarceration exist in the lives of some of our children. Hour Children...in Long Island City is an organization worth considering as a model. The organization's name reflects the belief that the lives of these children are formed around three hours: the hour…

Standardized testing (now dubbed 'high stakes testing') has something in common with Carnegie Units. They are boundaries educators face, push against, and climb over. They are also barriers that in some cases are perceived rather than real. But they do go hand in hand with each other. At this point we are all keenly aware of the negative views of the use of standardized testing and some are becoming aware of the clash between the need for flexibility in 21st century schools and…

Evidence-based programs, not teachers, should be held accountable 

for test scores

 …

What is “good” teaching? What is “great” teaching?

We read and hear about “good” and “great” teachers. However, what are the defining characteristics of this caliber of teaching? Is it engagement of students, content knowledge, the ability to connect relevancy to students, the constant exploration of new and exciting teaching strategies that expand learning opportunities for students while promoting professional growth? Is it collegiality, whereby the human capital that…

Grades are part of schooling and of how teachers communicate progress and development to parents.  How can this idea ever take hold especially in a public school?  Or, for that matter, how can the use of standardized tests used as high stakes measures ever be diminished?  We wonder. As the power of social media grows and the engagement of those who are advocating to abolish grades catches fire, is living in the "can't happen world" becoming a dangerous place?…

Another country

Since its birth, the U.S. has defined itself as egalitarian, fundamentally distinct from the class-ridden societies of Europe, writes Matt Phillips in Quartz. This has sometimes been true: On the eve of the American Revolution, income distribution for American colonists was much better than in England, slavery aside (if you can put it aside). Yet the U.S. has become increasingly unequal since the Civil War. For an interval in the 20th century, parity…

A triumph in redesign

In a profile of Guilmette Elementary School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Jennifer Davis writes in The Hechinger Report that Principal Lori Butterfield didn't want to boost literacy and math scores at the cost of everything else. Lawrence Receiver Jeff Riley gave district principals "charter-like" autonomies, including control over budgets, curricula, schedule, professional development, and how much time (200 or 300 hours) to add to a full school…

Mission impossible

What burned teacher Ellie Herman out after five years, she relates on the Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post, was a photocopier dubbed "La Bestia" in her low-income high school in Los Angeles. Herman, decades-long TV writer/producer for shows like "Desperate Housewives," "Chicago Hope," and "Newhart," switched in 2007 to teaching Drama, Creative Writing, English 11, and 9th-grade Composition at a South Los Angeles charter that was 97 percent…

Schools need to be re-designed now but across the nation bond issues to refurbish existing facilities continue. Change is demanded by the times we live in, by those who are at the edge of the new economy and, most importantly, by the children who are arriving at school. Once the world starts spinning, it is natural to hold to what has worked in the past. Public schools have served well for a century or two. They are also one of the few remaining relics of communities that used to be…

The wide availability of information online and the presence of services like makemyessay.com that allow students to fraudulently appropriate essays and term papers they didn't write are just two of the elements that have led to a dramatic rise in the frequency of college plagiarism. While technology and professors have become more adept at sniffing out this type of dubious content, plagiarism is still a legitimate concern on campuses across the country.…