Ecology of Education

There are a number of things we could arguably learn from the on-going Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico: These things are NOT fail safe. We should get off oil. MMS’s regulators are too lax. BP took too many chances. Corporations are to blame. Lobbyists are to blame. Politicians are to blame. We are […]

Questions being ignored or inadequately addressed by the current business and industry-driven education reform effort: 1. Market forces in general, and merit pay in particular, are being promoted by leaders of business and industry as keys to improved school performance. In highly effective schools and school systems, educators see themselves as members of a team […]

Corporate America has given us Big Banks (banks too big to fail) & Big Pharma (a pharmaceutical industry too big to fight). Coming soon to a school near you, courtesy of corporate America: Big Ed

In his book The Dip, Seth Godin writes, “the problem with infinity is that there’s too much of it.” He ends up talking mostly about business and markets, but his point is not lost on education. The trouble with focusing on content as the primary role of education is that there is an infinite amount […]

Yong Zhao’s recently released book Catching Up or Leading the Way is a must read for educators and policy makers who want to see where our current high stakes testing regimes will take us. Zhao does a masterful job of showing how China has long had an obsession with standardized testing.

My heart has been racing for educators over the last month. Even though I no longer take up residence in Florida, I literally experienced palpitations watching debate over Senate Bill 6 take place on the House floor. When considering the potential impact of what could result from passage of said legislation, my thoughts went immediately […]

The numerous connections between businesses, political players, and the current brand of education reform makes for a conspiracy theorist’s candy shop. Unfortunately, its hard to chalk the such theories up to an overactive imagination once the relationships are exposed. I received the below response and link resources from a Florida parent/teacher/SB6 opponent concerning the myriad […]

Legislative proponents of SB6 and HB7189 are listening to one main demographic: The Chamber of Commerce. The voices of teachers, parents, and administrators are falling on deaf ears. Why?

It came as quite a surprise for some when Florida was not listed among the winners of Race to the Top. What went wrong? A look at Senate Bill 6 & House Bill 7189, reveals Florida’s failure to collaborate.

Dear legislators, since you’re now running the education show, and the consequences of coming in second in the education-vs.-catastrophe race are pretty grim, perhaps you’d be open to a few observations from someone who’s spent a half-century in Florida’s schools actually doing the work.

In the 500 years since Columbus’s Big Misunderstanding in the “West Indies”, our education system has come a long way.  After manhandling the country away from the natives (who’s “schools” probably consisted of ridiculously worthless lessons like feeding your family, shelters that last, and building fires without zippos, anyway) we’ve managed to construct an institution that has […]

I’m not afraid to admit it. Standardization — it scares me. It’s the monster under the bed, lurking in the closet, rumbling around in the attic of my mind.  Its the haunting moans in the walls of the profession, a harbinger of doom. In fact at times, in states of sleep deprived overly-dramatic hyperbolization, it […]