NCLB crashed and burned. When will we ever learn?
It’s the year that all U.S. public schools were supposed to reach 100% student proficiency. It didn’t happen, of course. The law under which that was mandated, No Child Left Behind, has crashed and burned, but, unfortunately, its worst ideas haven’t. Writing about this is Lisa Guisbond of The National Center for Fair & Open […]
#evaluatethat
Teachers and parents are taking to Twitter, at #evaluatethat, to point out the countless ways in which teachers help their students that cannot be assessed by student standardized test scores or other traditional methods of evaluation. The effort was inspired by Stephanie Lavender Weber, a teacher in Georgia who spent the night with her students […]
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s high school district honors him
Here’s a young Philip Seymour Hoffman, who graduated from Fairport High School in upstate NY. #RIP pic.twitter.com/9spwLgUxKr — The Film Stage (@TheFilmStage) February 2, 2014 The death of the great actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has prompted a mountain of remembrances and condolences to his family, including this from the superintendent of Fairport Central School District […]
Superintendent on school reform: ‘It is not working’
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy has just asked for a “pause” in implementation of a controversial new teacher evaluation system that uses student standardized test scores to assess teachers as well creation of a task force to study the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. Is “a pause” the answer? You might think Malloy did […]
Public education failing? Not in this school
The “public schools are failing” narrative is pervasive, even though the facts aren’t there to support the systemic failure that many school reformers insist there are. Here a parent paints a different story. Lynn Michie is a chaplain at the Swannanoa Correctional Center for Women in Black Mountain, North Carolina. She and her husband, David […]
All Week @ The Answer Sheet 2-2-14
The Answer Sheet: How we teach kids to cheat on testsHere is a piece about a cheating scandal in Wisconsin that speaks to a much larger problem about how and why kids cheat on tests. It was written by Vicki Abeles, a filmmaker, attorney and advocate for students and education. She is the co-director and producer of the education documentary “Race to Nowhere” and founder of […] by Valerie Straus