Tag Archives: improve schools

Bringing out the best in children

As I was walking down Church Hill today the potential of our nation torpedoed toward and then past me in the form of a vigorous 8 year-old girl. Her feet pounded the pavement, her wide golden eyes locked with mine, and then she was gone. “Who knows?” I thought. “Maybe that girl will do humankind […]

Standardized testing can impoverish children’s education

The testing culture that drives current educational decision-making in our schools impoverishes children in many ways. One of the external forces interfering with student learning is time stolen from teaching.  A middle school colleague in Maine recently told me she literally lost five weeks of instructional time each year to standardized testing. In a system where […]

“School is boring!” Does it have to be?

I absolutely love thinking and learning about schools and students and I assume a lot of other teachers do too. Yet in my experience as a teacher I rarely have an opportunity to sit down in the context of my job with other equally charged teachers and talk and plan new programs and new curriculum and new approaches to […]

My school system is abuzz with the Common Core: is this a good thing?

I decided to see what the elite are saying about the Common Core. After all, when it comes to education, the wealthy usually manage to get the best for their children. Do they like the Common Core? Are they choosing schools that reflect an embrace of the standards-based movement? I looked at the mission statements […]

When the principal’s load is too heavy …

Dysfunction on a school board or in a superintendent’s office or at the state level impacts what goes on in the classroom, but the quality of teachers is what matters most, and the principal of a school is charged with ensuring that quality. Sometimes it seems that a principal’s load is simply too great to […]

Ask the Teachers

We think of public schools in rural areas and those in our nation’s inner cities as being two completely different animals, but in several crucial ways they are in fact remarkably similar. Both are generally staffed and funded in ways that favor the haves over the have-nots, and both share the considerable challenge of needing […]