By Mark

This last week, I came across two articles: one was clearly satire, the other not so much.

The first was a faux-article from The Onion about how more parents are choosing to have their children "school-homed," where parenting responsibilities are to be taken on by schools rather than by ill-equipped parents.

The second was an AP wire article about punishing schools when bullying takes place within their walls. 

I have to admit that I laughed at both.

Before I cast myself as a heartless pro-bully part-of-the-problem educator, please know that I was not laughing at the bullying being described in the second article. The heinous psychological and physical abuse at the hands of peers–so intense as to result in suicide–is of course not a laughing matter. I do believe that schools can and should work hard to cultivate safe environments for students. Ultimately, the second article suggested punishment for schools for failing to take the advice of experts about how to curb bullying–this was the part I had mixed feelings about.

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By Tom

Imagine living exactly next door and directly downwind from a combination slaughterhouse and rendering plant. Your days and nights are plagued by the haunting cries of doomed cattle and the fetid stench of rotting roadkill.

And then one day you come home from work to find that the owner and his wife have put the place up for sale and moved to a condo on Lake Chelan.

The air clears. You can have friends over.  But you’re unsettled, wondering what will move in next door. 

A year passes. Then you see the real estate lady, whom you’ve gotten to know fairly well, stapling up a “Sold!” sign. You ask her who bought the place. She smiles and asks what you’re hoping for. You describe a funky, independent bookstore with a wonderful coffee shop that also sells pizza and chicken teriyaki in the evenings. And they have live jazz on the weekends.

She laughs and tells you that your new neighbors include a dry cleaner, a nail salon and a doughnut shop. Although you’re disappointed, you realize it could be, and in fact was, much worse.

This is the best way I can describe how I feel about the pending debate over the reauthorization of ESEA legislation. Now that the health care bill has been passed (or “crammed down your throat,” if that works for you) our country’s domestic agenda will likely focus on education and the president’s Blueprint for Reform.

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By Tracey 

I’ve always been taught that a healthy dose of competition
is a good thing.  It can motivate
you and help you to set and reach goals for yourself.  We value it in the marketplace as it can encourage
innovation and lead to better products and services.  But does it have a role in education?

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By Kristin

You know the saying "If these walls could talk"?  Well, they do.  Our faces talk too, and our bodies, and sometimes our voices say something other than our words.  As Mark has pointed out on other posts, how we treat students matters to them.

This sign was on the door of a good teacher during one of our building's big tardy sweeps where kids have to check in with the office if they're late.  This sign is a good example of how we disrespect kids without knowing it.  For many students, being disrespected by a teacher is reason enough to quit.

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 By Mark

It is a rare day when watching FoxNews inspires me to be a better teacher.

Obama's recent tete-a-tete with Bret Baier on FoxNews certainly wasn't the first nor will it be the last evidence that our country has lost its capacity for reasoned discourse, whether the home court is labeled conservative or liberal. Neither side is free of culpability. Why is it that we cannot speak to one another, civilly disagree, offer substantive evidence to support our own positions–rather than treat a conversation as a battle to be waged, where ad hominem attacks or unsubstantiated accusations rule the rhetoric? It is great for when I teach rhetorical fallacies, but as a citizen I'm sick of it.

So FoxNews has helped me revise instructional goals from here forward: in every unit I plan to include opportunities to teach students how to disagree with civility and reason. Whether it's a discussion about a bona fide controversial topic like healthcare or the Iraq War or stem cell research, which all come up during our unit on research and persuasion…or whether we think Romeo or Juliet was more to blame for their mutual tragedy… I pledge to encourage dissent amongst my ranks; I pledge to challenge every student to defend their position with rational grace (regardless of my personal convictions on the issue); and in the process TEACH my students that it is okay to disagree but for crying out loud it isn't okay to interrupt.

Sheesh. How many of our problems would be solved if we would just listen to each other and use our silence to consider other perspectives rather than to ready our next offense.

By Tom

I read the whole thing. All forty-one pages. Twice. And frankly, I kinda like Obama's "A Blueprint for Reform." It's not as cool as "A Blueprint for the Batmobile" (pictured to the left) but it's a heck of a lot cooler than the mess the last president left in his wake.

Let's take a closer look at some of the highlights:

In the (autographed!) introduction, Obama states "My Administration’s blueprint for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is not only a plan to renovate a flawed law, but also an outline for a re-envisioned federal role in education."And he's not just saying that. This is by far the boldest move since 1965, when the federal government first stepped into the education arena. Obama knows that that he can't directly affect schools, but what he can do is use money, lots of it, as leverage to get school systems to do what he wants.

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by Brian

Our students just finished taking the renamed high stakes state tests.  The High School Proficiency Exam (HSPE) has replaced the WASL.  Not quite what the kids were hoping when Randy Dorn said he was getting rid of the WASL.  This week it was Reading and Writing; next month will be Math and Science.  It looks increasingly likely that the scores our students achieve on these tests will be used in our yearly evaluation.  In Florida it's possible that teachers' salaries will also be tied to test results.  Half of their salaries may be tied to their state comprehensive and end-of-course exams.  Which sounds not so much like merit pay, but de-merit pay.  Instead of paying good teachers more, they'll pay teachers whose students underachieve less.  And the drum beat to fire bad teachers goes on.  (See Tom's post.)The cover of the March 15 Newsweek is a blackboard covered with the sentence: We must fire bad teachers.

So I was reading an article by George Packer on President Obama's first year in office in the March 15 edition of The New Yorker and I came upon an amazing anecdote.  Packer was writing about Obama's frustration at being unable to hold the banks fully to account for the financial collapse.  Apparently Obama would have been happy if Timothy Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, had recommended the top bank officials be held accountable by forcing entire management teams out of their jobs.  Packer writes: Geithner felt that firing the leadership of the bailed-out banks would ultimately cost taxpayers money, owing to the loss of expertise, and would inevitably punish executives who were not to blame.  The President reluctantly agreed.  "You always admire someone willing to do the responsible thing, even when it is terrible politics," Sperling (a counsellor to Geithner) said.  "But you could see how frustrated he was."

Too bad Arne Duncan and Geithner can't trade jobs.  Duncan likes firing people, and he doesn't mind losing expertise or punishing teachers who are not to blame.

It's starting to get to me.  Fire the teachers, but give the bankers another bonus.

By Kristin

Well, as we might have guessed, things have started to fall apart at Central Falls High School.  

While I'm not one to shy away from taking a side, today I'm not going to write about whether the teachers should be fired or not.  Instead, I'm going to write about the fact that when Superintendent Frances Gallo searched Central Falls High School one night in response to a rumor that there was an effigy of Obama hanging somewhere, she found it, hanging upside down on a white board and holding a sign that read, "Fire Central Falls Teachers."

It made me think of how we sometimes overstep that line between protecting our students and trying to rally them.  The students sitting in our rooms are not our colleagues or friends.  They are not our troops.  There's a line that teachers shouldn't cross, even though it can be tempting.

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  By Kristin

Taking a bold stance in favor of equality, The Texas Board of Education has voted to include different cultures and political viewpoints in their history textbooks.  Just kidding!  Actually, they voted to revise the texts in order to erase the separation between church and state, emphasize the Christian origins of the United States, and put the "free enterprise system" in a more positive light.  A final vote will happen in May, and then textbook companies will work furiously to fulfill the revised-history textbook orders of this important customer.

In a strongly worded condemnation of this moment in Texas history, the editors of The New York Times point out that curriculum should be "chosen for its educational value, not politics or ideology."  But who can trust The New York Times?

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By Tom

Let's take another look at Race to the Top, (RT3) but this time from a student's perspective.

RT3, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's educational policy, is a federal initiative in which states compete for grant money by showing that they have put into place certain school reform measures that the administration values. Among these measures are liberal provisions for charter schools, merit pay for teachers based in part on student test scores and state-level authority to take over so-called "failing schools."

For the sake of argument, let's pretend that these provisions actually add value to a state's school system. And for the sake of comparison, let's consider two different states, who've taken two different approaches to the administration's challenge: Illinois and Washington. 

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