By John Thompson. Valerie Strauss does a great service for students and schools by showcasing the “small but growing number of teachers who are refusing to administer standardized tests that they think are harmful to their students and publicly explaining why they are doing so, sometimes at the risk of being …
By John Thompson It was with trepidation that I approached A Path Appears, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. I would never try to match my narrow expertise in my field, inner city education, with Kristof’s and WuDunn’s comprehensive expertise on global problems. My students and I shared many wonderful …
By Anthony Cody. It is a strange commentary on the news media that the best portrait of what is happening in America comes to us from a former chef by the name of Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain’s show last week took him back to Massachusetts, where he first started working as a dishwasher and cook. He found much has …
By M. Shannon Hernandez. Teachers, parents, and administrators are raising their voices louder, and in solidarity, as unrealistic demands for students are being handed down from education policy makers and corporate reformers. It is becoming apparent that we’ve had enough of the testing, enough of the scripted, …
By Sarah Lahm. Wham, VAM, here comes a public airing of teacher evaluation data for all Minneapolis Public Schools teachers, just in time for the 2014 election. Sources tell me that Minneapolis’ largest newspaper, the StarTribune, will publish teacher evaluation information, based on SOEI (Standards of Effective …
By Anthony Cody. When I visited the Gates Foundation a few years ago, one phrase stuck with me. “You can only manage what you can measure,” I was told. This is the underlying framework of our 21st century accountability paradigm. On the 2008 presidential primary campaign trail, candidates Obama and …
By Anthony Cody. Returning from protesting the Gates Foundation’s funding of corporate education reform, I have been wrestling with some questions about the goals for their project. The Gates Foundation’s Vicki Phillips was interviewed the day of the protest, and had this to say about it: At the …
By Francesca Blueher. Six years ago, I administered a 12 hour, 100-page test that could not be read by a single student who was mandated to take it. This test, the New Mexico Standards Based Assessment (NMSBA), was composed of multiple choice questions; reading passages to be answered with short responses; …
By Tony Monfiletto. I am a former school principal and I currently lead an incubator for new schools in my home town, Albuquerque New Mexico. The schools are focused on Project-Based Learning as a way to provide a thrilling and relevant education to young people who are off track to graduation or who have dropped …
By Michelle Gunderson with Katie Osgood. Who in the world believes there is justice in telling a six year old that they are average – are a C? The whole definition of being six is to be someone who is extraordinary. When you ask first graders if they can dance – they say yes. If you ask first graders if they …
