The Answer Sheet:
All Week @ The Answer Sheet
13-year-old: ‘What if we based education on the study and practice of being happy and healthy?’
A 13-year-old boy named Logan LaPlante gave a talk at a TEDx conference at the University of Nevada that now has more than 4 million views on YouTube. The speech is about his unusual method of becoming educated through a process he calls “hackschooling.” Logan’s parents pulled him out of traditional school at the age of […]
Will this become the new sickening normal at school?
Here’s some news from just the past 11 days: Friday, Jan 24: DENVER (AP) – Five of the state’s largest school districts have investigated more than 400 threats by students this school year and put 40 of them at the highest levels of concern, according to records obtained by The Denver Post. Friday, Jan. 24: […]
Starr to Duncan: ‘I resent implication that we lifelong public educators are liars’
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post on Friday that talked about school reforms and praised both Tennessee and D.C. Public Schools for increased test scores. He wrote: We don’t know all the reasons why students did better in Tennessee and the District in 2013 than in 2011. But it […]
Why there’s no excuse for ‘no-excuse’ schools
The “no excuses” brand of schooling is alive and well in this reform era. In this post Sigal Ben-Porath, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, explains why that is unfortunate. Ben-Porath’s research focuses on the politics of education policy, citizenship education, and political philosophy. By Sigal Ben-Porath As any parent […]
The latest bad fad in higher education
Patricia McGuire is president of Trinity Washington University, a Catholic school of some 2,500 students just a few miles from where President Obama last week held its White House Summit on College Opportunity. She wasn’t invited. Instead the administration invited leaders of colleges and universities who agreed to pledge to take new steps to help students in […]
JAN 23
Let’s stop whining about school snow closures
Some Washington area school districts are suddenly the target of criticism for keeping schools closed after Tuesday’s snowstorm. A Post colleague over at the great Weather Gang blog, in fact, wrote about Fairfax County’s decision to stay closed Thursday after officials decided that some of the roads and walkways were still too dangerous for parents […]
Education stats, state by state
Here’s an infographic with 2013 state-by-state education statistics. Click on the tabs and the individual states to see information in different areas, including high school graduation rates, test scores and more. Produced By Best Education Degrees
The polar vortex explained in two minutes
Here, from John Holdren, who is President Obama’s science and technology adviser, is an explanation — in just two minutes — of the polar vortex and why climate change makes it more likely that we will see more extreme weather in the future.
A challenge: Teach 8th grade Common Core before endorsing it
This post is a response to this piece by Gerald Graff, which was itself a response to this speech about the Common Core State Standards by Diane Ravitch. This was written by educator Mercedes Schneider, who holds degrees in secondary education (English and German), guidance and counseling, and applied statistics and research methods. She is in […]
The coming Common Core meltdown
In the following post, veteran educator Stan Karp explains why the problems surrounding the implementation of the Common Core are less about the substance of the standards and more about the context in which they were introduced. Karp taught English and journalism in Paterson, N.J., for 30 years and is an editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, where […]
JAN 22
Shout-out to great ed reporter
Nick Anderson, a veteran education reporter and editor at The Post, wrote the following about a great young colleague of ours, Jenna Johnson, who spent four years covering American college life while breaking some important news stories. Her coverage was memorable. Here’s what he wrote: By Nick Anderson Before the new year gets any […]
Why do schools open when it feels like 4 below outside?
According to the Weather Channel, it is 12 degrees Fahrenheit in Newark., but it feels like 4 below outside because of the wind chill. According to the Star-Ledger, “treacherous driving conditions” on Wednesday morning “prompted school officials to cancel classes in most of Essex County. So what’s wrong with this picture? Belleville – closed Bloomfield […]
A revealing thought experiment about student achievement and school reform
In the following thought experiment, you are asked to assess data about two states and identify the one in which an average child is likely to achieving more in school. Created by educator and researcher David Berliner, it reveals just how off-base current school reform efforts have been in targeting what the real problems are […]
Gov. Cuomo seeks changes to ‘flawed’ Common Core implementation
New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), who just a few months ago was defending the state Board of Regents’ implementation of the Common Core State Standards, now says it has been “flawed” and that he is creating a panel of education experts and legislators to review the problems and take speedy “corrective action.” He […]
JAN 21
Afghan attack took young American ‘destined for greatness,’ teacher says
Last Friday night in Afghanistan, the Taliban attacked a popular restaurant in Kabul frequented by Westerners, killing two Americans. One was Alexandros Petersen, a brilliant young man who was an expert on grand strategy and energy politics and who had graduated from Georgetown Day School, a private school in the District, in 2003. (His younger […]
Reaction to Ravitch: A different view of Common Core
I published the text of a speech that education historian and activist Diane Ravitch gave this month about the past, present and future of the Common Core State Standards to the Modern Language Association. (You can read it here.) Here’s a response from Professor Gerald Graff, a former president of the Modern Language Association who […]
Why teachers can’t reach every child: a case study
Larry Cuban, a former high school teacher and superintendent who now teaches at Stanford University, posted two pieces on his School Reform and Classroom Practice blog that are unusual because they are about students whom he tried to reach but could not. The posts are poignant and speak broadly to the extraordinary problems that some students […]
Dogs vs. cats: Their oh-so-different teaching styles
For a laugh, watch this to the very end. And for all you cat lovers, it’s just a joke!
JAN 20
The Education Department’s strange new report on teaching
One of the most controversial issues in public education today is the use of “value-added measures” to evaluate teachers and principals. What these measures, known as VAM, purportedly do is to calculate the “value” of a teacher in student achievement through complicated formulas that use student standardized test scores as a base. Assessment experts have […]
MLK: ‘Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education’
I published this last year, and I’m doing it again: Martin Luther King Jr., was prescient on a lot of things, including education. Here are some things he wrote decades ago that sound contemporary. – Here’s an excerpt from “The Purpose of Education,” a piece he wrote in the February 1947 edition of the Morehouse College student newspaper, the […]
Why Christie’s school ‘fix’ is misguided
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recently proposed extending the school year and school day in State of the State speech as reforms intended to improve student achievement, though he didn’t provide details or make any mention of how he would fund it. Here’s a piece questioning the notion that simply adding seat time works. This was written […]
JAN 18
Arne Duncan: Why can’t we be more like South Korea?
For years, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has lamented that the United States isn’t anywhere near as serious about educating its young people as the South Koreans. He did it in 2010, for example, in a speech in which he told the story about how South Korea’s then-president, Lee Myung-bak, once told President Obama that his country’s […]
Everything you need to know about Common Core — Ravitch
Diane Ravitch, the education historian who has become the leader of the movement against corporate-influenced school reform, gave this speech to the Modern Language Association on Jan. 11 about the past, present and future of the Common Core State Standards. Here’s her speech: As an organization of teachers and scholars devoted to the study of […]