StudentsFirst Cynicism Truly Boundless
An alert reader shared with me an email she received with the subject line "Demand Better Compensation for Teachers." Turns out, it's just further proof of how cynical the reformsters at StudentsFirst are these days.The email was generated by the site Greatergood.com, a website of the kickstarter crowdsourcing variety, aimed specifically at projects for, well, the greater good. Anybody c
The Kindergarten Cell
This little article has stirred up a small tempestita on facebook and the twitter. "Rethinking the Colorful Kindergarten Classroom" by Jan Hoffman, and the argument that has sprung up with it is one more signpost on our road to education hell.Hoffman is simply passing on some research that says all the colors and pictures and decorations etc etc etc are a distraction for tiny minds, and
The Teaching Force Is Largely Newbs
In their article "The Greening of the American Teacher," Mercer Hall and Gina Sipley focus in one finding of a CPRE report on shifts in the American teaching workforce. That report is worth a look all by itself, but we'll save that for another day, because Hall and Sipley have some interesting insights to share.The American teacher is now most probably a newb. There are several possible
6-10-13 Curmudgucation
CURMUDGUCATION: What Do We Do About Bad Teachers?I believe bad teachers exist. I believe that on any given day, in many schools in this country, there's a person standing in a classroom doing a lousy job. I just spent a chunk of bandwidth explaining that I don't believe Find and Fire is the correct policy response to bad teaching. So what do I propose instead?The Heart of the ProblemI'm going to s
