Recent Comments
Tag Archives: school reform
School Reform: Why One Success Does Not Beget Another
Summary: Looks as though the difficulty of replicating the success of one school in another may come down to clever access or lack thereof to extra resources. The first school has been innovative in program, but often by leveraging additional … Continue reading
School Reform: The Dance of Competencies and Traditional Grading
Summary: Though the focus on narrow reading, writing, and mathematics competencies serves employers and highlights the need to improve skills, it may also reflect the mirage that traditional grading has become. Sometimes one has to step outside of a familiar … Continue reading
African American Kids and School Based Reparations
Summary: Ta-Nehisi Coates calls in the recent Atlantic for reparative dialogue, and even financial recompense for the long American history of slavery and Jim Crow. An educational superfund that supports the educational turnaround of poor and at risk kids of … Continue reading
School Reform: Build In Support and They Will Come
Summary: Presidential directives and court cases are useful, but good teachers know schools of poverty will burn out their energies without well designed support for their efforts. The drumbeat of reform has a new cause. Since quality teachers are the … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy: Lessons from the VA and GM
Summary: The current debacles at the Veterans’ Administration and General Motors, and the parallel inability of upper management to solicit data from grass roots workers, may well mirror the deaf ear of too many senior school administrators to teacher point … Continue reading
At-Risk Students: Follow the Money
Summary: Incentive systems for school districts to retrieve and hold dropouts are themselves dysfunctional. Yet, in committed communities dropout retrieval efforts are succeeding. “Follow the money.” Normally a line uttered on a TV crime show, a recent Education Week article … Continue reading
Schools and Culture: Boys in Disarray
Summary: The struggles of boys in today’s American schools reflect historical assaults on their self-image and the erosion of legitimate authority in the culture. It was an impressive group of kids, these seniors at my high school outside of Seattle. … Continue reading
School Reform: Once Again A Tale of Teacher Power
Summary: Amid the relative merits of “direct instruction” and “inquiry” approaches to curriculum, a narrative emerges that suggests teacher empowerment may be the more important variable. In the ongoing assault on school dysfunction, debate rages between those who advocate “direct … Continue reading
At Risk Kids and the College Game
Summary: Low income kids often are first in their family to contemplate college, and so lack the fund of family college information taken for granted by middle and upper class students. Their back up option, the guidance of their high … Continue reading
schooldog 