Best and worst education news of 2015 — a teacher’s list
Larry Ferlazzo is a veteran teacher of English and social studies at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. Every year he writes a list of the best/worst education news of the year — and here’s what he has come up with for 2015. Ferlazzo has written eight books on education, writes a teacher advice blog for Education Week Teacher and has his own popular resource-sharing blog. See if his list resembles your own. What did he miss?
By Larry Ferlazzo
It’s time again for an annual recap of education news. As usual, I don’t presume to say it’s all-encompassing, so I hope you’ll take time to share your own choices. I’ll list the ones I think are the best first, followed by the worst. It’s too hard to rank them within those categories, so I’m not listing them in any order.
The Best Education News Of 2015
* Seattle teachers went out on strike and won an exceptional list of changes, including guaranteed recess for elementary school students and an in-depth examination of equity issues such as the disproportionate number of suspensions handed out to students of color.
* Momentum continues to build for increasing use of restorative practices in school over punish-and-suspend. Similar momentum continued for increasing the use of Social-Emotional Learning (two new excellent reports on SEL were issued over the past year), but there’s a negative to that found in the “bad” section of this post, too.
* The Washington State Supreme Court decided that taxpayer-funded charter schools are unconstitutional. The case might provide a blueprint to opponentsin other areas. I, and many others, are supportive of charters the way they were originally intended to operate — as laboratories for, and not “creamers” from, public schools. Perhaps this case and others might force charter advocates to reflect on that original purpose.
* States have begun concluding that high school exit exams are destructive to the education and to the lives of students, and have eliminated them. In my own state of California, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law that could allow 40,000 students who had denied diplomas to receive them retroactively.
* U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the architect of many policies thatnegatively impacted students, families and teachers, resigned. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, though everybody should be given a chance to Best and worst education news of 2015 — a teacher’s list - The Washington Post:
