Tag: students
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Necessity is the Mother of Invention or 5 Ways Traditional Schools Can Try to Improve
Somewhere along the way I saw a sign stating: “Necessity is the Mother of Invention.” Few schools follow this type of advice. Instead, most campuses double down on tried and not so true strategies like improved teaching, better principals, stronger curriculum, high stakes testing, and the list goes on and on. The traditional school system…
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Friday News Roundup…
It’s Friday! Time for the news roundup. Oakland’s New Opportunity Ticket Gives Students in Failing Schools a Shot at Attending Its Most Sought-After Ones (The 74) I mentioned this lottery program in yesterday’s column. This past March, the Oakland (CA) Unified School District board approved a plan to offer spots to some of their most…
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Schools Are Inequitable and That Can’t Be Fixed
Lately I’ve heard a lot from traditional school districts that this coming year they are really going to work on the equity issue inside most, if not all, schools. School leaders realize black, brown, and poor kids are getting the short end of the stick and now they have decided they are going to do…
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Kids Can’t Be in Places Called School Any Longer
I’m back from Spain, and I wish I was coming back to a better America. This morning I listened to a mother describe how her daughter survived the horrible Uvalde, Texas school shooting this week. According to the mom, her daughter curled up in a ball and felt like she was having a heart attack.…
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Friday News Roundup…
It’s Friday the 13th. Time for the news roundup. Fuller: Biden’s New Charter School Rules Are an Assault on the Right of Families of Color to Choose the Best Education for Their Children (The 74) I don’t know Howard Fuller well, but I’ve always respected his opinions when it comes to public education and why…
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Talent, Space, and Time
Today’s public education system doesn’t understand the importance of talent, space, and time when it comes to producing smarter and stronger learners. Schools depend on a finite set of teachers, hired to insure student learning. In my old district, our human resources department had to fill 10,000 teaching positions for 200,000 students enrolled in our…
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Best of the Best – School’s Out: Liberated Parents
In September of 2018, I was asked to write an article for Education Reimagined, focusing on the liberated role of parents if schools suddenly didn’t exist, or didn’t exist as a near monopoly like today. The article was part of a series title “School’s Out.” Today, as part of ABPTL’s Best of the Best series,…
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You Can Lead a Horse to Water…
Compulsory education laws have been around since 1852, when Massachusetts became the first state to pass a bill that required public school attendance. These laws were originally put in place to improve literacy rates but also to discourage widespread child labor practices of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I think it’s time to get…
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Friday News Roundup…
I promised to give an update on the listening session I attended this past week at my neighborhood high school. The Des Moines Public Schools (DMPS) offered these sessions after a high school student was shot outside a school a few months ago. The evening reminded me how smart young people are when it comes…
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Let’s Try a New Type of Learning Cohort
The school year is coming to an end. Research tells us more black, brown, and poor kids will end this year more under-performing schools than white, middle-class youngsters – a lot more. Most of the black, brown, and poor kids, attending these low-achieving campuses are, destined for summer school, a place traditionally reserved for kids…
A Better Path to Learning 