Being a first grade teacher is the kind of like playing defensive tackle. Everybody says you're important, but there's no glamour in it. The entire defense rests on your limited but crucial role: if you mess up, it starts a...
Part of the problem in any discussion about standards is that we don't know what we're talking about. Are standards guidelines for good content organization, or important things for kids to know? Are standards a way to acquire "scientifically-based" data...
A recap of my previous blog: Some education writers think there is now a window of opportunity to finance an expensive national standards project. Mandated state content standards with correlated tests were once considered the solution to hodge-podge curriculum and...
Of all the great reform waves that have swept School Nation since I began teaching in 1975, probably the most useful and productive was the standards movement which bubbled up in the 1980s and was locked into place under NCLB....
At the moment, I am sitting in a room with 50-some Teachers of the Year, the 2009 state, territorial and Department of Defense winners. There are also a half-dozen National Teachers of the Year, lending some brilliance and gravitas to...
I am still wiping my eyes after the Inaugural speech, and really need to get my act together for the Virtual Inaugural Ball edition of the Carnival of Education which will be held here, in a Strange Land--tomorrow! I should...
Congratulations, astute reader, for picking up on the wry reference to Reading First in the blog title. If you didn’t notice it, you’re probably an actual K-12 teacher, who is too busy trying to get kids to read—somehow, something, anywhere—to...
If pressed to name my ultimate professional passion and goal—the thing I was put on earth to do—it might be something like “elevate the ideas and voices of excellent teachers.” Like many people in America, I think we can do...
A few days before Barack Obama formally chose Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, I was forwarded a long message string clipped from a Teach for America listserv. The original forwarder was a TFA “corps” veteran, now working in education...
It’s going to be very hard for President-elect Obama to choose a Secretary of Education who is not seen as symbolic—a beacon, or perhaps more aptly, a divining rod, highlighting the One True Path to fixing schools. No matter whom...
