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Strauss: Thousands hold vigil as UC Santa Barbara reacts to shootings
Several thousand students staged a candlelight vigil Saturday night in the seaside community near the University of California at Santa Barbara where a 22-year-old gunman killed six people — including three students — and injured 13 others. Flags on the campus were lowered to half-staff and school officials moved quickly to set up counseling services for students, faculty and staff. Read full ar
‘Let’s stop measuring fish by how well they climb trees’
Joshua Katz is a high school math teacher in Orange County, Florida. He gave the following speech about what he calls “the toxic culture of education” today in a TEDx talk this month at the University of Akron. TEDx Talks is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share an experience […]
YESTERDAY
Firestorm erupts over teacher’s angry e-mail to legislators about low pay
An angry e-mail written by a teacher to North Carolina legislators with a subject line that said, “I am embarrassed to confess: I am a teacher,” might have been seen only by recipients if it were not for state Sen. David Curtis. The Republican legislator fired back an inflammatory e-mail, giving her advice on what […]
Egyptian teen attending science fair in U.S. defects, seeks asylum
A 17-year-old Egyptian science prodigy attending the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles this month decided to use the opportunity to defect and seek asylum in the United States out of fear that he would be arrested by authorities back home. The Los Angeles Times reported that Abdullah Assem was supposed to […]
Texas superintendent tells parents: Your children’s standardized test scores don’t mean much
Paul Jones, superintendent of the Paris Independent School District in Texas, posted a rather unusual letter to parents on the district’s website. Jones informed parents that they would soon receive their children’s scores on state-mandated standardized tests and that they shouldn’t put very much stock into them. In fact, he told them they were part […]
What ‘trigger warning’ would the Bible get?
A ”trigger warning” is a short statement on a written piece of work or even a television show ( think Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) noting that the material may be sexually graphic, violent or in some other way upsetting. This month The New York Times ran a story by Jennifer Medina about the warnings that has sparked a […]
MAY 22
Two Nigerian girls tell a different story
It isn’t easy for a girl to get an education in Nigeria. The world’s attention has been focused for over a month on the kidnappings of a schoolful of girls in Nigeria by an Islamic extremist group called Boko Haram that doesn’t believe in Western education and or in education for girls. The fate […]
Guess how many memos USDA sent to schools about healthy school lunches?
Federally funded school lunches have been in the news because Republicans in the U.S. House just voted to allow some schools to get a waiver from a law that requires lunches served to students to meet new health standards. Why? Apparently some schools can’t make enough money serving healthy foods because kids don’t want to […]
MAY 21
Mayor says ‘most people’ should ‘grow a pair’ to stop bullying
Cameron Hamilton, the mayor of Porterville, California, has stirred up a ruckus by saying at a City Council meeting that the word “bullying” has become a “mantra” for “the ills of the world” and that “all most people just have to grow a pair.” The issue of bullying came up last week during a discussion […]
Portrait of an underfunded school district
What does it really mean to kids when school districts are underfunded? Here is a portrait of one such district, from the Education Law Center in New Jersey, which advocates for equal educational opportunity and education justice in the United States. Profiled is the Freehold Borough School District in Monmouth County, a preschool-8th grade district with a […]
Chicago principal publicly slams Mayor Emanuel and says he is ‘insulting’ educators
A scathing letter (see below) by a Chicago school principal charging Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his administration with ignoring and disrespecting teachers and principals has sparked a discussion in the city about school reform and how it is being implemented. The principal is Troy A. LaRaviere of Blaine Elementary School in Chicago, whose letter published in the […]
MAY 20
A dozen problems with charter schools
School reformers keep talking about charter schools as if they were the answer to public education’s problems, when there is a great deal of evidence that shows big problems with the charter sector. For example, a report on Pennsylvania’s charter schools recently released by a state legislator found that only one in six of the […]
A different way to implement Common Core
Critics of the critics of high-stakes standardized testing and the Common Core State Standards often say that the attackers don’t provide alternatives but just complain. That has never been true of many of the critics of these school reforms, and it still isn’t. Here is a piece about what a different accountability system could look […]
Florida legislator: Common Core advocates are trying to make ‘your children’ gay
Whether you support the Common Core State Standards or don’t, it’s important to recognize when critics are going off the rails in their dissent. Here’s a newly publicized example: A Republican Florida state legislator, Charles Van Zant, told an audience at a conference in Orlando that the organization that has won a $220 million contract […]
MAY 19
Text of Jill Abramson’s commencement speech: ‘get on with your knitting’
Here is the text of the commencement speech that Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times, delivered on Monday at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, from the Wake Forest website. I think the only real news here today is your graduation from this great university. First of all, congratulations. […]
Jeb Bush bashes traditional public schools (again)
You can say this about Jeb Bush: When it comes to promoting charter schools and vouchers at the expense of traditional public schools, the former Florida governor and possible 2016 presidential candidate has long been consistent. He just did it again. Let’s look at what he said — and didn’t say. As governor from 1999-2007, Bush […]
Jill Abramson tells graduates: ‘I’m in exactly the same boat as many of you’
Of all the commencement speeches being given this year at high schools, colleges and universities across the country, this was the one that got all the attention. Jill Abramson, the ousted executive editor of the New York Times, delivered the commencement speech today at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., her first public appearance since […]
MAY 18
Haverford commencement speaker calls some students ‘immature’ and arrogant’
The commencement address at Haverford College in Pennsylvania on Sunday wasn’t your typical commencement address. One of the speeches at the event was delivered by William G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton University, who was chosen after the first choice for speaker, Robert J. Birgeneau, became the target of protesters and withdrew. Bowen, speaking before […]
Peyton Manning tosses footballs to U-Va. graduates at commencement
Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning gave the commencement speech at the University of Virginia this weekend, and not only did he dispense advice to the graduating seniors, but he also threw a few footballs to them. You can see him throw passes starting at 2:54 into the video. Manning’s wife, Ashley, graduated from the university’s McIntire […]
Arne Duncan’s reaction to new research slamming teacher evaluation method he favors
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been a proponent of using students’ scores on standardized tests to evaluate teachers, even as a growing mountain of evidence has shown that the method now used in most states, known as “value-added measures,” is not reliable. With two recent reports released on VAM adding to warnings long given by […]
The famous Steve Jobs commencement speech: ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’
During commencement season, it’s fun to look back at some of the great speeches. If you are interested in reading what I have declared to be the greatest commencement speech ever, click here. And below is one of the most famous, the address delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford University on June 12, 2005. […]
MAY 17
Eric Holder to graduates on race: ‘This struggle is far from over’
On the 60th anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the “separate but equal doctrine” in public education to be unconstitutional, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the first African-American to hold that position, delivered the following speech at commencement on the campus of Morgan […]
The greatest commencement speech ever
I know that the headline of this post is open to debate. What I like in a commencement speech may not be what you like in a commencement speech. But for the sake of non-school reform argument, I’m going to declare for the moment that the greatest commencement speech ever was not the famous Steve […]
How to help students of color, 60 years after historic Brown v. Board ruling
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws establishing separate schools for black and white students were unconstitutional in the historic case Brown vs. Board of Education. I’ve published a few pieces on the legacy of the decision, here and here. Following is a new piece on where the United States […]
Protest at Harvard over commencement speaker at education school
Dozens of student and alumni at the Harvard Graduate School of Education issued a statement (see below) protesting the selection of Colorado state Sen. Michael Johnston (D) as the school’s 2014 commencement speaker because, they say, he “embraces a vision of education reform that relies heavily on test-based accountability while weakening the due process protections […]