Category: Learnings

When I was a high school principal, we had a list of all our students and the school activities they were involved in. Whenever we had kids whose activity space was blank, we knew we had a potential problem. We knew “busy minds were happy minds” when it came to kids being involved in school…

I’ve told this story before. When I was a new high school principal, I sat on a panel discussing the importance of establishing a seamless pipeline when it came to providing a strong learning plan for every public school student. Of course, with me representing the upper secondary piece of the pipeline, I was eager…

Our traditional K-12 school system’s inability to be more flexible when it comes to when and where learning happens is becoming a major concern. As EducationWeek reported last week (3/17/26), more and more school districts are shortening their school calendars, primarily due to financial reasons, while many of our K-12 districts are still suffering from…

Texas pays $10,474 to parents who choose an accredited private school through the state’s education savings account (ESA) program. If you are a parent of a child with a disability, then that amount can increase to a maximum of $30,000. But if you are a parent of a homeschooler, the Lone Star State pays only…

I’ve told this story before. When I was a region superintendent in Houston, we had to decide where boundary lines would be drawn for a new elementary school. My staff spent months studying the data, making sure the new elementary school and the established elementary school close by would share an equal amount of middle…

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! I’m back from a brief hiatus. It’s good to be back. There are certain indicators that our current K-12 system is broken and might not be able to be fixed. Primary amongst those indicators is the fact that our traditional school system has not done a good job at educating…

Like most strategies, personalized learning works, if done well. But when it’s not implemented the right way, personalized learning can become nothing more than self-paced software or digital content playlists that lead the learner to a convoluted end, lacking rigor and creating mushiness. This week Robin Lake, executive director of the Center on Reinventing Public…

Limited vision has always been a problem for our traditional K-12 school system. The system is mired in 20th century, and sometimes 19th century, practices like an August to May school calendar, a curriculum that goes a mile wide and an inch deep, and student assessments based in rote memorization. So when education savings accounts…

Homework? Anytime, anywhere learning? Which one will win out moving forward? EdWeek posted an article recently that suggests homework might be a thing of the past: “A new survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center suggests that the amount of out-of-school coursework assigned to students ahs fallen, in many cases because students refuse to do…

George Will has written over 8,000 articles as a columnist for The Washington Post. It was a story about Will’s prolific opinion writing streak that led me to start A Better Path to Learning. Will was interviewed, after his 8,000th article appeared in The Post, about how he found so many topics to write about…