By Monty Neill. I came to FairTest in October 1987 as a movement activist and an educator. Over the years I’d worked in anti-war and black liberation support campaigns, wrote for underground newspapers, engaged in community organizing, edited the newspaper of the New England Prisoners Association, and for …
By Daun Kauffman. Trauma during development, or childhood trauma, changes brain architecture and ability to learn and social behavior. It impacts two out of three children at some level, but I didn’t even know what it was… Childhood Trauma, or adverse childhood experiences(ACEs)can be defined as a response …
By John Thompson. Paul Tough’s Helping Children Succeed is a great corrective to the hubris that undermined the contemporary school reform movement. Tough volunteers a modest statement about his methodology, and in doing so he offers an alternative to corporate reform and its grand vision of “disruptive …
By Wayne Ross, David Gabbard, Kathleen Kesson, Sandra Mathison, and Kevin D. Vinson. If public schools are to realize their democratizing potential, progressive activists must organize and act on an agenda that counters the neo-liberal view of education that currently dominates. We want to believe that public …
By Michelle Gunderson. The children in my first grade classroom play. There are no academic centers where a teacher rings a bell and children move from activity to activity. That might look like play, but it is not. We have body breaks where we sing and dance, but we do not call it play because it is not. We play …
This is the seventh in a series of blog posts focused on the value of art in our lives, and the role art can play in resisting the test and punish model of education. See the intro and links to other posts in the series here. By Susan Harris MacKay. In these times, when the demolition of a place as historic …
By Anthony Cody. Hillary Clinton gave some idea of where she would take education policy last night at a South Carolina town hall, where she spoke of extended learning time as a key education strategy. She said this: There’s a lot of research which shows that, for most middle-class or well-off kids, they …
By Anthony Cody. In San Francisco a recently implemented Ethnic Studies course has been startlingly successful in boosting student attendance, GPA, and earned credits. That is the conclusion of a Stanford University study, done by Emily Penner and Thomas Dee. I wrote about these courses back in 2014, when the San …
By Susan DuFresne. Last year around this time of year, I wrote Beyond the Edge: Climbing Mt. Edreform. This time of year is always a time of reflection for me, because not only is it the end of the year, but you see, New Year’s Eve is my birthday and it always brings back memories of childhood trauma. I …
By John Thompson. As explained previously, here in part 1 of this three part series, and here in part 2, since my book, A Teacher’s Tale has been released, I’ve been rereading the manuscript’s my first draft and some of its original sources. My National Board (NBPTS) teacher certification entries are a …
