Introducing Bill Honig’s Challenge to “Test and Punish”: buildingbetterschools.com
Bill Honig
This post features the education website, www.buildingbetterschools.com, which is the creation of California teacher/administrator, Bill Honig.
Bill Honig has been a practicing educator for more than 45 years. Originally trained as an attorney, he discovered his true passion was in elementary education. Honig has taught in the inner-city schools of San Francisco, served as a local superintendent in Marin County, and was appointed to the State Board of Education by California governor Jerry Brown during his first term.
In 1983, Honig was elected California state superintendent of public instruction, a position he held for 10 years. In 1995, he jointly founded the Consortium on Reaching Excellence (CORE), which has worked with teachers and coaches in reading and math nationwide for the past 20 years.
Currently, Honig serves as Vice-Chair of the California Instructional Quality Commission, which develops curricular frameworks and reviews educational resources for the State Board of Education. He continues to collaborate with researchers, thought leaders, and practitioners to implement evidence-based approaches that offer an alternative to conventional educational reform.
I asked Honig to introduce his website to my readers. Here is his response:
A great debate has been raging in this country about the best way to improve our schools. As each state and district grapples with the polemics of school reform, this is the opportune time to engage in a thoughtful discussion focused on successful practices and empirical evidence.I recently created a website, www.buildingbetterschools.com, designed to present the research and experience supporting the “build and support” approach, gathered from our best researchers, bloggers, and practitioners, and show why the more extreme measures of the “test and punish” strategies haven’t worked. It has 16 short articles (for a list see below) about the major issues in the debate including a piece about our experience in California and is designed for educational and political policy makers and members of the media.My goal is to help educators and parents understand how a build-and-support approach enables schools, districts, states, and nations to achieve extraordinary results. I especially want to assist governors, mayors, legislators, and their staffs who wish to resist or reverse the disappointingIntroducing Bill Honig’s Challenge to “Test and Punish”: buildingbetterschools.com | deutsch29:
