For many students, the last month of school is a time of new understanding: the poor choices of the last eight months really do add up. This is the time many students come looking for “extra credit” or some other way to change their grades.
Recently, in West Virginia, a student sued for a grade [...]

Marc Fisher’s article is appropriately biting, and as far as I’m concerned, he nails it.
He’s reporting Jack Dale’s refusal to administer standardized reading tests to recent immigrants. The standoff between Fairfax County and the federal government is creating a stir in the waters of the Potomac, and the stirring gives me hope that we [...]

Here in Virginia, Fairfax county has rejected the state’s standardized test (and hence NCLB) for immigrant children.
The Fairfax County School Board passed a resolution last month to defy the mandate, saying it is unfair to give such an exam to students just beginning to grasp the nuances of English. Fairfax Schools Could Lose Millions for [...]

From the CNN article “Commission urges tracking of teacher progress,” notes about a “special commission” involved in the revision of NCLB:
Teachers should be evaluated annually based on progress in the test scores of their students, the panel said. Reviews by colleagues or school principals also would be part of the equation for determining teacher quality.
My [...]

I’ve just started reading Roger Scruton’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, so this isn’t a review. However, I was struck by this passage from the preface:
Philosophy is not the only subject that has been ’scientized’ by the modern university: literature has been shrunk to ‘literary theory,’ music has been colonized by set theory, [...]

I’m saying: we should teach to the test, as long as it’s an appropriate test, and to discover what an appropriate test is for each discipline and each course, we have to work carefully backwards.
I’ve thought this for a while, but the last two posts over at Friends of Dave gave me a way to [...]

This is exactly what’s great about blogging. Until a few days ago, I’d never heard of Dan Meyer. Now, thanks to my aggregator and the “edublogosphere” community, we’re in a pretty intense conversation about NCLB.
I hope others will join the conversation. It’s always easy to think you’re right when you’re the only [...]

I found Dan Meyer’s blog post “In Defense of NCLB” through Chris Lehmann’s post “A Smarter Mind than Mine Takes on NCLB.” I wasn’t planning on writing a blog post today (I have a pile of essays, stories, and scripts to read), but I just couldn’t not respond. Originally, I had planned on [...]

Lots of people seem to be blogging about the latest education article in Time magazine, titled “How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century.” (You can’t get to the full article without a subscription, but your public library has access to tons of online databases … it’s worth the few minutes of [...]

The Brooklyn Free School is an “institutional” example of “unschooling”that I wrote about a few days ago. My same agreements and concernsapply to both, and some of my concerns are apparently shared by parents andorganizers of the free school, evidenced by a few requirements that are startingto creep in:
Students will soon have to meet [...]