Tag: students

  • A New Type of Hiring

    The traditional school system has convinced itself that all they need to do to fix their problems is to identify, recruit, hire, and retain qualified school leaders and classroom teachers. Districts spend a lot of money trying to get the right people on the bus if you will. But what if all that effort and…

  • Friday News Roundup

    TGIF! Here’s your Friday News Roundup. Black Parent Open to New Forms of Schooling, Polling Suggests (The 74) One positive that came from the COVID pandemic seems to be empowering black parents of school-aged kids. According to a recent article in The 74 online, “Black parents say they play a much more active role in…

  • What Are We Afraid Of?

    I have a lot of friends suspicious of vouchers, or education savings accounts. One of my friends wrote the following for a publication printed by the public school district he lives in. This is what my friend had to say: “School Vouchers or Education Savings Accounts—Not a Simple Yes or No With our State running…

  • Confronting the Unknown

    When Matt Barnes and I launched The Education Game a few years ago, we quickly noticed most parents we worked with were fearful of the unknown when they considered withdrawing their children from the traditional public school system. These parents knew their public school was not the right place for their children, but still they…

  • Bruno Manno is Misguided and Wrong

    I was disappointed last week after reading Bruno Manno’s opinion piece in The 74 online titled “Education is One Area Where ‘Domestic Realists’ Agree. Let’s Build on That”. Manno served in several senior positions in the U.S. Department of Education from 1986 to 1993. He is now senior advisor for the Walton Family Foundation’s K-12…

  • If Houston Can’t Figure Out The Dome, Why Do We Think They Can Figure Out Learning?

    Have you ever been to the Astrodome? When it opened in 1965, it was applauded as “The Eighth Wonder of the World”. Now it sits idle and decaying. According to a Texas Monthly story this past February, “Five years ago, a nonprofit called the Astrodome Conservancy announced that Houston’s most iconic building, shuttered for more…

  • A Special Friday News Roundup

    Lately, I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend from the educational news feeds I follow daily. Most of the K-12 educational news reported isn’t related to how we get kids smarter and stronger at all. I was ready to report on the following news this week: “Vermont Parents Upset Over Lack of Access to Standardized Test…

  • More on Grading

    One reason our public schools are so damned inequitable to the kids who attend them is because of our inconsistent methods of evaluating learning – or grading. I’ve written about this before, but just this morning I read a posting about a teacher who was fired because she refused to give a 50 instead of…

  • I Love Public Schooling – Just Not Public School

    Recently I’ve been accused of being anti-public school. On one hand it’s surprising since I worked 35 years in the public school system, 25 years in a Texas urban school district and 10 more as the leader of an influential educational non-profit committed to improving public schools by working on leadership development and classroom practice.…

  • One Year Down

    Here’s the first article posted when A Better Path to Learning launched one year ago today. I’ve made a few revisions, but the goal remains – The goal of this work is to explain how a new learning system can be created for our kids, with or without schools! 58 years ago, President Lyndon B.…