Education vs. Business (7/17)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Why For-Profit Schools Must Stink

Dividing up the pie is problematic.

Free Market Is Bad for Students with Disabilities

And that's not just me saying it-- there's research to back it up.

The Market Hates Losers

But then, the market has only one measure for winning, and that is the production of money. The heart of a business plan is not "Can I build a really excellent mousetrap?" The heart of a business plan is "Can I sell this mousetrap and make money doing it?"

There is nothing about that question that is compatible with pursuing excellence in public education.

Choice & Cable

What cable tv tells us about market forces and excellence

Teacher Voice (7/16)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Speaking mostly to my fellow professionals here.

Trust Yourself

Teachers, we need to remember that we are the experts.

The Hard Part

Nobody ever tells you in teacher school that you will never have, never be, enough.

Should I be a Teacher?

The reasons we enter the profession

Should I Quit?

When is it time to go?

Reformster Nonsense (7/15)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Here's a few examples of the ridiculous things reformsters sometimes like to say.

The Wrongest Sentence Ever in the CCSS Debate

As a semi-professional hack writer and fake journalist, I can tell you that it's a challenge to fit a lot of wrong in just one sentence, but Mr. Golston has created a masterpiece of wrong, a monument of wrong, a mighty two-clause clown car of wrong. Let's just look under the hood.

#AskArne and Spleen Theater

In which Arne Duncan says so much baloney that my internal organs are at risk.

Gates Needs a Hamburger

Bill Gates does a tv interview about education and charters and I get spit all over my screen.

Rhee Scores a Perfect 0%

Back before I stopped ever writing her name...

Brookings Wins Gold in Most Clueless Comment Competition

"Common Core will succeed where past standards based reform efforts have failed," they boldly declare. Why, you ask? Sadly for this "fresh defense," you already know all the answers.

Fixing the Profession (7/14)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Reformsters love to think of ways to fix teaching, except that "fix" always seems to mean "get less pay and job security."

Why Teacher Merit Pay Is Stupid

Teacher merit pay is a misnomer, a delusion, a lie. Here's why.

Without Tenure...

It's not the firing-- it's the threatening.

Tenure: Private vs. Public

Why it makes sense to give teachers the job security that other professions do not have

Dead Wood and Tenure

So you want to get rid of the dead wood in your organization. Was it dead when you hired it, or did you kill it?

Standardization (7/13)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

One of the keystones of the ed reform movement is standardizing things. I'd rather not.

Same

If I had to put my finger on the one most troubling aspect of the wave of reformy stuff that is currently battering us, it would be this. The standardization. The premise that education is a big machine with interchangeable cogs. The one size fits all. The sameness.

In Praise of Non-Standardization

Standardization is safe. It's predictable. We can walk into any McDonald's in the country and it will be just like any other and we will know exactly what we will get. I am not excited about that prospect. Let me plop you into the center of any mall in the country and defy you to guess where you are. That's not a good thing.

Good versus Uniform

“It doesn’t matter to us whether our customers are hundreds of thousands of individual students and their parents in China, or thousands of school districts in America,” says Fallon. “What we’re trying to do is the same thing—to help improve learning outcomes.”

There's your problem. If you're trying to do "the same thing," for a student in the US and a student in China, and if "it doesn't matter" to you which is which, then something is wrong.

What We Don't Know about Normal

Some very cool research shows that what we think of as normal for all humans isn't at all.

Bon Voyage (7/12)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Some very old favorites from 2013

Why American Public Education Is Worth the Fight

The US is a big gloriously polyglot mess of a country, stitched together out of pieces-parts from every other people on the planet. As such, we can only claim a handful of native art forms. Jazz, comics, maybe baseball. And true public education.

Arne Duncan vs. Moms

That time that the Secretary of Education stuck his foot square in his mouth by blaming white moms for Common Core's problems.

Raise the Bar (or Not)

About that frequently used image for higher standards

The World's Worst Boyfriend

In the age of reform, is the teaching profession in the worst relationship ever?

Some Blog News

Tomorrow morning m wife and I are going to hope in the car and start the drive from here in western PA over to Seattle, WA (where my daughter, her husband, and my grandson live). Driving across the country is one of those bucket list things, and I'm pretty excited about the whole business. We are fortunate to have teh resources and the opportunity to pull this off. The dog is staying at the kennel where he was born, the in-laws are watching the house, and the car is ready to go. And we get to celebrate our wedding anniversary in Glacier National Park.

That means I'll be Away From Keyboard for a bit. I'm not sure how that's going to work for me-- it's been a while since I went a whole 24 hours without writing anything at all. But I know it's a pain to have your routine interrupted, so I've set up automatic posts with a daily dose of dipping into the archives here (there are now over 1900 posts on this blog, and a couple of them are actually pretty good, so feel free to poke around). So there will be something newish here every day for those of you who are creatures of habit.

I also cannot recommend enough that you make use of the blogroll in the righthand column. There are so many people doing really good work out there, and they deserve your time and attention. So stay alert, keep informed, and catch your breath long enough to remember why any of it matters. Meanwhile, I'm going to go look at a bunch of the country. See you soon.