We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf I just finished reading A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School , by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider . Berkshire and Schneider are co-hosts of the podcast Have You Heard , which is the best $2 I spend every month—and, as journalist and historian, both bring interesting perspectives to the ongoing di
Does Your School Suffer From Advanced Testivitis In some quarters we seem to have cycled back around to the old argument that the Big Standardized Test provides an assortment of necessary data with no actual downside, so
Ex-teacher’s union boss makes play to be Biden’s Education chief Lily Eskelsen GarcÃa is courting key Hispanic groups and even GOP senators. The former president of the nation's largest teachers union is working to lock up support from Republican senators and Hispanic leaders in her bid to be picked as Education secretary, according to officials familiar with the talks. Lily Eskelsen GarcÃa is e
"Bye-bye, Betsy DeVos. You won't be missed," says Sanders to billionaire education secretary Sanders calls DeVos "the worst education secretary in the history of America" as she attacks tuition-free college Sen. Bernie Sanders late Tuesday called Betsy DeVos "the worst education secretary in the history of America" and made abundantly clear that he's not mourning her imminent departure after the
False Beliefs It's not just possible, but likely, that for most of us, most of the time, we possess the necessary intelligence, but are hindered by a false belief. For instance, most physicists have given up on the reality of the existence of space and time, yet we've lived our entire lives convinced that spacetime exists. Indeed, we can't even conceive of it, any more than we can envision a col
Bob Shepherd: The Standardized Testing Hoax Bob Shepherd, a frequent commenter here, has been a curriculum writer, as assessment developer, a publisher, and a classroom tea her. As frequent readers of this log know, he is also a polymath, with a broad, nearly encyclopedic range of knowledge. In this essential post , he explains why standardized testing is invalid and useless for accountability p
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007 Big Education Ape: THIS WEEK IN EDUCATION Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... The latest news and resources in education since 2007 - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/11/this-week-in-education-larry-ferlazzos_28.html Friday’s Must-Read Articles & Must-Watch Videos On School Closures by Lar
Will the State Senate Punish Ohio’s 1.6 Million Public School Students by Letting School Funding Reform Die? The Ohio House Finance Committee voted unanimously (32-0) on Wednesday to refer Substitute House Bill 305, the proposal for a new Fair School Funding Formula, to the full Ohio House for approval. And late yesterday afternoon, t he Ohio House of Representatives passed the bill by huge marg
5 Things We've Learned About Virtual School In 2020 Deborah Rosenthal starts her virtual kindergarten class on Zoom every morning with a song — today, it's the Spanish version of, "If You're Happy and You Know It." Her students clap along. There's a greeting from the class mascot (a dragon), yoga, meditation and then some practice with letter sounds: "Oso, oso, O, O, O". Rosenthal teaches Spanis
New Jersey's School COVID-19 Operating Plans: Still Racially Biased, Still Inadequately Funded For Many Students Earlier this year , I posted about the racial inequities in New Jersey's school reopening plans, which were all affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Following that blog post, I used some updated data, refined my analysis a bit, and wrote about it over at the NJPP website . In both of th
Beware of Fake Colleges. Learn to Recognize Them. My seniors are in the process of considering postsecondary education, and given the proliferation of fraudulent sites purporting to offer postsecondary degrees (and the reality that online education is increasingly attractive during a pandemic), it is important for graduates and their parents to know identifiers of potentially fraudulent or other
Register for the California STEAM Symposium - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education) #CASTEAM20 Keynote Speakers and Early Registration Prizes Announced! New Off-Site Monitoring Best Practices Fact Sheets - Nutrition (CA Dept of Education) - https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/newoffsitemonfactsheet.asp REDWOOD CITY—Give yourself the gifts of community, inspiration, and revitalization by joining us at this ye
What Parents Need Now Are Threats, Says Mayor Given that students can't fail, don't have to hand in work, and are given an extra year to catch up on classes, it's odd to see Mayor de Blasio out there making demands of parents. The mayor is eager to get some of his woefully overcrowded schools open five days a week for the 35% of city students who've opted into live education. So he's saying if y
Big Education Ape THE TOP BANANA TODAY'S EDUCATION HEADLINES Continuous improvement: Rethink how we measure student progress - https://hechingerreport.org/?p=75771 via @hechingerreport Betsy DeVos
