Maria Trucios - a repeat winner!  Congratulations Maria (but we will now put in place the Maria Rule - no previous winners can qualify!)

Maria correctly guessed the school above was Little Rock Central High School, scene of early Civil Rights…

Over the last several weeks, in light of all the standardized testing taking place in the state of New York, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the ideas of assessment and testing and how important they are in the world of public education. In New York State we have reached a point where our children are sitting for at least 6 days of standardized testing in grades 3, 4 and 5 in the areas of English Language Arts and Mathematics. As if that weren't enough, the results from these tests…

Value added – why its use makes me angry (OR: a good idea gone bad, again, in education)

06SundayMay 2012

The Left Wing of the Possible

I was fortunate and honored to be asked to speak at a recent conference for The Software Information Industry Association (SIIA). They are all wonderful people in a group that represents a major portion of education software developers and manufacturers. I had some great discussions with some very smart and driven education-minded, business people. As I stated in my last post, many of these people have come from the ranks of educators. My big take away from this conference however, was not…

Grade the Work, Not the Behavior

"You can't give a student a zero for cheating. You have to…

Sowing Failure, Reaping Success: What Failure Can Teach

Maria Trucios

Maria correctly identified the photo below as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo - June 15, 1991 in the Phillipines.

Congratulations Maria!

Elizabeth Phillips: Teachers Need to Be Supported

Ángel Franco/The New York Times-- Elizabeth Phillips at P.S. 321.

The Arts Education Partnership is pleased to announce the release of ArtsEdSearch.org—the nation's first online research and policy clearinghouse that documents the educational outcomes of arts learning for students and teachers.



A first-of-its kind, ArtsEdSearch™  grew out of a need…

Teacher Evaluation That Improves Classroom Performance

From the Marshall Memo #434

In this Harvard Educational Review article, Brown University professor John Papay notes three points of agreement among researchers and practitioners:

• Teachers are the most important school-level factor in student learning.
• There is wide variation in different…

Thanks to Paul Graham for suggesting this article.

What All Teachers Should Learn from Jazz-band Teachers