Education Leadership Have you ever heard a fellow educator share an experience and thought to yourself, “the same thing happened to me?” While the field of education is often rewarding—observing a student, who struggled, start to make gains, witnessing a steady increase in family and community involvement at school events, collaborating with colleagues to plan and problem…
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Education Leadership With 2020 coming to a close, and the New Year just around the corner, many school leaders are starting to think about the ways in which they can better support staff. Numerous principals have asked us: What can I do to build more buy-in, or enthusiasm, around Core Knowledge? How can I support my teachers…
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Curriculum Harriet Tubman will grace the front of our $20 bill—a long overdue tribute to a woman who lived up to the best of American values. But do most Americans know who she was? Anecdotal evidence and test scores indicate that they don’t.
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Accountability Assuming all goes as planned, we should have a new federal education law by the end of the year. Dubbed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), this version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would greatly increase states’ options for evaluating schools and teachers. As this ESSA cheat sheet explains: States would still have…
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Education Leadership Every time I see a toddler with an iPad, I cringe just a little. I try to hide it. I know I’m supposed to be amazed at the little genius. I also know that the device could be useful, especially as the toddler becomes a preschooler and starts learning letters and numbers. Still, beyond a…
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Education Leadership Not all that long ago, college followed a predictable pattern: two years of general education requirements followed by two years of courses in the chosen major. No longer. As this review of course requirements shows, even some of the liberal arts colleges have minimized requirements outside the major. Of all the potential causes for the…
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Education Leadership This post first appeared on The Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog. “Programmatic series of studies”—that’s how one of my psychology professors described research on learning and memory around twenty years ago. Do a study, tweak it, try again. Persist. I was reminded of that while reading Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get…
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Curriculum Mississippi is a little more than half way through a public comment period on the 2014 Mississippi College and Career Readiness Standards for English Language Arts—a document that is co-branded with the Common Core and Mississippi Department of Education logos on every page. The Common Core squabbles in Mississippi became interesting last week when a…
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Education Leadership In my last post, I mentioned a couple of reports showing huge disparities in the courses offered by high schools, with especially serious problems in access to advanced math, chemistry, and physics. I think such inequities are an embarrassment to the very idea of America. But I’ve met people who disagree. They see alternative courses…
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Education Leadership If I could accomplish just one thing in my career, it would be to have all leaders take equalizing opportunity to learn seriously. If knowledge equality were a top priority, much would change from early childhood through college. One thing that would no longer be tolerated is denying access to essential courses. According to a…
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