Curmudgucation Week
Picking Your Fights
"It's easy for the AFT to tell teachers not to shop at Staples. It would take guts to tell teachers, 'Don't give the tests!' How can you condemn the tests--and continue giving them? Wasn't 'just following orders' soundly discredited long ago? " —Susan Ohanian, Hemlock on the Rocks, July 14, 2014This quote has been bouncing around the eduwebs for almost a week, and it has engendered quite
Going into Gates Territory
Over in Seattle center you'll find fun things like the famous space needle, the EMP (a sort of SF museum housed in a 1950s vision of what 1990 would look like), and across the street from the EMP, an unassuming little building that houses the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Visitors Center. I sometimes tell you that I've read or watched something so you don't have to. Well, this time, I visited
Charter Conversations
Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Andy Smarick dissects and critiques the current state of dialogue regarding charter schools.What's the problem?He starts by observing that there are really two conversations going on.The first "presupposes (or, at minimum, concedes) the legitimacy of chartering and then explores how to make it better." Smarick believes that these nuts-and-bolts, sizzle
AFT Spanks Duncan (Sort Of)
I know this is old news, but I've been out of town. On Sunday, July 13, I was in the air flying toward the very city where the AFT was kind of taking a stand.The NEA had taken similar steps earlier by calling for the ouster of Arne Duncan, though outbound president Dennis Van Roekel immediately chalked it up to members just being, you know, cranky or in a bad mood, so they just took it out on Arne
David Coleman To Fix Inequality in America
David Coleman is here (well, not here here-- he's actually in Aspen) to explain how the College Board is going to recapture market share by synergistically monetizing its products break down the walls of inequality in education.David Coleman (Common Core writer and current president of the College Board) is deeply concerned with fairness. Huffington Post has a report from the Aspen Institute (beca
JUL 17
The Limits of Data
There was a moment during a presentation at last weeks' Professional Learning Communities training (institute? gathering? big thingy?) that really illustrated, I think a bit unintentionally, the nuts-and-bolts problems with using data to "analyze" teacher effectiveness.A chart of data from three classes broken down by three skills was on the screen, presented in student by student format
TNTP Lost on Search for Truth
Any time TNTP writes a blog piece with "truth" in the title, you know we are about to go down the rabbit hole. But not surprisingly, an unnamed contributor over at TNTP has decided to clue us in on "The Truth About Teacher Pay." How can that possibly end badly? Let's see what truths they have uncovered!Fact: Most districts now have multiple high quality options beyond experienc
Joy and Pain in PLC-land
Oh, if only we could easily sort all education ideas into perfectly embraceable and easily rejectable. But it's rarely that simple; we have to use the Power of Actual Thinking to separate the usable from the risible.Last week I spent two and a half days in the arms of PLC with colleagues from my school. Our administration is looking longingly at taking the PLC plunge and had shipped us to Seattle
JUL 13
Tracking
Not a fan of heterogeneous grouping. Never have been. It's a purely personal choice; I experienced it as a high school student and it was miserable.But while I believe that tracking is the way to go, I believe there are a couple of ways we do it wrong.Most commonly we track by the destination. We let students know that Bus A runs to college and Bus B runs to a trade. Each bus runs its own route, a
JUL 12
Teacher Time
Every profession measures time differently. Doctors and lawyers measure time in hours or vague lumps. Teachers measure time in minutes, even seconds.If a doctor (or his office) tell you that something is going to happen "at nine o'clock," that means sometime between 9:30 and Noon. Lawyers, at least in my neck of the woods, can rarely be nailed down to an actual time. Anything that's not
Poverty and the Moral Imperative of Education
We are being bombarded regularly with arguments about poverty and education that are fallaciously constructed, used to support the wrong conclusion, and, ironically, are unnecessary.The Big Scary FactsIt usually begins with a list of assorted research factoids like these:* Students who fail school are three times more likely to be unemployed.* Students who fail school will make far less than what