A Better Path to Learning

Author: svb802

  • Public Schooling Over Public Schools

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    I’m a big Willie Nelson fan. So when I saw this group in Des Moines was going to celebrate Willie’s 90th birthday, I was there. The group was the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI). They earned national media attention back in the 1980’s, when they, along with Willie Nelson, focused on the number…

  • I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together

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    A long time ago, when I was a kid, there was something known as a variety/sketch comedy show. One of the more popular variety show was The Carol Burnett Show. It came on CBS on Saturday nights, and my family rarely missed it. While on the air for 11 seasons, the show won 25 prime…

  • Undercover Readers

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    This might be a reason kids have stopped reading books – at least in Houston, Texas. It seems Houston Independent School District elementary teachers have been forced to sneak chapter reading into their instructional day, since the district’s curriculum department is requiring learning time to be focused on other types of reading designed to prepare…

  • Friday News Roundup

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    Here’s your Friday News Roundup. $200 Rent, District Supe as Landlord: Affordable Teacher Housing Is on the Rise (The 74) There are school districts that expect their teachers to live inside the school district’s boundaries. The districts pay the teachers $60,000 a year while housing costs run that teacher 1/3 to ½ of that annual…

  • How to Create Good Readers

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    Kids have stopped reading. Adults have stopped reading. According to some experts, we are living in a reading crisis. Unless we’re not. Some believe young people and older people might be reading more today than ever. They’re just not reading the way we’ve read over the past 1,000 years. But one thing we know for…

  • Proof of Practice

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    I’m not a big fan of startups that, well, remain startups. We have too many examples of small learning organizations within the public space that do well in terms of getting kids to become smarter and stronger but never scale beyond what might be called a “boutique” enterprise. Recently, Education Reimagined published a report titled…

  • Friday News Roundup

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    It’s Friday. Time for the News Roundup. Harrison vs. High Ed: How One Lawmaker is Weaponizing Social Media to Eradicate LGBTQ+ Curriculum (The Texas Tribune) Representative Brian Harrison from Midlothian, Texas. Although he did not pass one of his own bills in the last Texas legislative session, Harrison has taken it upon himself to shut…

  • Urgent Optimism

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    I’ve posted nearly 650 articles on the ABPTL website (along with Facebook and LinkedIn postings). Most of those articles have been critical of our present K-12 teaching and learning system. And, admittedly, I haven’t gained the readership I expected when I started writing the column over three years ago. But, believe it or not, I’m…

  • Dumbing Down or A Different System

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    A long-time friend (he was best man in our wedding) is a conservative. One night I was opining that Donald Trump would go down in history as our worst president. My friend came back that America was going down the drain because of Nancy Pelosi and her fellow liberal Democrats. We stopped talking about politics…

  • Good Schools vs. Bad Schools

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    I started teaching in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) in 1984. I left the district to lead a Houston-based educational non-profit in 2008 and retired from that organization in 2018. I was either part of HISD or a partner to the district for 35 years. And during those 35 years, there were 15-20 schools…