Ecology of Education

If you fly, thank Myron Tribus for helping make your flight safer. He played a major role in the development of the equipment that keeps airliner wings free of ice. Myron was a captain in the Army Air Force during World War II. Later, he was a gas turbine design engineer for General Electric, dean of […]

Standardized tests are enhancing and destroying reputations, opening and closing doors of opportunity, raising and lowering property values, starting and ending professional careers, determining the life chances of the young, and shaping the intellectual resources upon which America’s future largely hinges. You might think that with so much riding on the tests, every civic-minded person […]

Standards Express

I submitted 5 open-ended questions I thought lawmakers should ask teachers before crafting bills aimed at reforming education. The policymakers on the Education Policy Committee thought it was a great idea (especially after the stink teachers made about not being included in reform efforts in Florida).  However, in order to more easily quantify the responses, […]

Once upon a time teachers assigned grades, and that was pretty much that. Oh, occasionally a kid would argue that a particular grade was unfair, or complain so loudly that parents or an administrator would get involved, but that was relatively rare. About a generation ago, acceptance of teacher judgment about the quality of student […]

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 our present day over-dependence on all things testing, teachers, parents and policy makers have developed many misconceptions about what test scores actually tell us. There are perhaps too many to name, and they are certainly too numerous to name here all at once; however, if you go through my blog’s archives, you might find […]

Building and understanding community, a microcosm of society, is (or should be) a pillar of our education system. However, dwindling attention to civics and the social studies pushes such learning to the periphery, if taught at all. Like parents who sneak veggies into their kids’ food, teachers can find ways to slip it in, especially […]

With the increased focus on standardized testing as the keystone and sole arbiter of student, teacher, school, and district accountability, discussions about practical and relevant assessment practices has become something of a fringe topic, at best. This video from Edutopia lays out not only the core concepts of meaningful assessment practices, it speaks to the […]