Tag Archives: teacher overwork

School Reform and the Demise of the Bureaucrat

Summary: The transformation of Foster High School into a functioning academy for a largely immigrant multicultural population, with improved graduation rates, strong math scores, and a peaceful campus is a study in how communication and respect can melt away the … Continue reading

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At Risk Kids: A Road Map to Intervention

Summary: Children of poverty often need more intensive services to succeed in school; a blueprint for doing so out of the University of Oregon School of Education merits a review.

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School Reform, Politics, and Culture: Can We Performance Base Ourselves to the Promised Land?

Summary: Enshrining performance and research based thinking deeply into school reform, and investing accordingly, will invite best practices, promote better life success for students, and in the long run restrict the body of poor outcomes – incarceration, chronic poverty, etc. … Continue reading

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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

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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

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Charter Schools and the Selling of Short Term Teachers

  Summary:  How is it that young charter teachers achieve results comparable to their more experienced traditional public school brethren, and why do so many in both camps leave teaching so prematurely? Whether or not any charter iteration creates a … Continue reading

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School Reform and the Confusion of Labels

Summary: Who are the school reformers, and how do we tell them apart? And what do traditional labels such as “liberal” and “conservative” mean in this context? Who are the reformers in American education? Honestly, in my time in schools, … Continue reading

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Schools: A Changed Perspective

Summary: On the cusp of the end of a career in schools and the onset of a blog infested retirement, some meditations on the changed perspective the shift in life imposes. And a plea for stories, please. This summer I … Continue reading

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Schools and Politics: Charters Schools and Teachers’ Unions

Summary: Last week, as part of a discussion of charter schools, I cited the Harlem’s Children Zone as an umbrella project that has changed the “context” of associated schools, and thereby the expectations of students and the realities from which … Continue reading

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Charter Schools: The Emerging Lessons

Summary: A review of lessons from charter schools so far unfortunately boils down to more money for staffing to reach at risk kids, and creative changes in the context through which kids approach school, also likely to require more funding. … Continue reading

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