A Better Path to Learning

Tag: teachers

  • Kids Can’t Be in Places Called School Any Longer

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    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.…

  • Friday News Roundup…

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    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…

  • Talent, Space, and Time

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    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…

  • Best of the Best – School’s Out: Liberated Parents

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    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,…

  • You Can Lead a Horse to Water…

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    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…

  • Friday News Roundup…

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    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…

  • Let’s Try a New Type of Learning Cohort

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    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…

  • What’s a Learning Coach?

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    A learning coach is not a teacher. Most public-school teachers utilize lesson planning, which includes instructional strategies, to present a state-approved curriculum to their students. Most of those strategies are judged successful or not by a state-approved standardized test at the end of a teaching cycle, usually 36 weeks. A learning coach creates a learning…

  • Why School Districts Don’t Play Well with Their Communities

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    I’m heading over to our local high school tonight for a listening session. A student was shot and killed recently at another high school here in Des Moines and the school district is hosting a series of listening sessions to receive feedback from the community on school safety. I’m interested in hearing what the conversation…

  • Friday News Roundup…

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    It’s a rainy morning in Iowa this morning. Time to review this week’s news so I can make like a duck and head over to the Drake Relays today. The Education Culture War is Raging. But for Most Parents, It’s Background Noise (NPR) This one is a head scratcher. In a new national poll conducted…