By Tom

As you may have noticed, the education reform debate has recently been dominated by economists, not educators. Guys like Dan Goldhaber, Eric Hanuschek and William Sanders have been making a pretty good living using economic theory and statistics to affect the course of education reform in this country. Now, I’m in no position to second-guess any of these people. Frankly, all three of them were probably smarter than I’ll ever be before they finished fifth grade.  

No, my concern is whether education in general should follow economic principles at all. As I understand it, basic economics tells us to “minimize cost with regard to a given goal or maximize utility for a given level of cost or input.” If that’s the case, then I recently orchestrated a colossal waste of resources. Behold:

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The final presentation of the 2012 National Title I conference was a screening of Waiting for Superman by director Davis Guggenheim. This movie has been sitting in my Netflix queue for months but I never got around to watching it. I hate to admit this but I hadn’t seen the movie because I disagreed with the message of the film. After all, who wants their opinions challenged?

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By Tamara

One of Mark’s recent posts discussed the struggle to balance the time and energy we invest in students-especially failing students versus average or high performing students. It left me asking, “And why is tracking such a bad thing?”

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By Tamara

Travis and Mark have recently touched upon two issues that I am working to get my head around: addressing an institutional culture of sameness and how to equitably budget my time and energy for students all over the needs spectrum. I’m not sure they are even related issues-so I will address them in separate posts-but right now they are the ones with the greatest impact on my life in the classroom.

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By Mark

A few posts ago, I unknowingly issued myself a challenge. I've written here at SfS for a few years, I've been a leader and advocate in my own district, and I've contacted my legislators via email and phone… but I'd yet to move to the next level.

I'll be heading to Olympia on February 20th.

I'm nervous, I won't lie. I'm not always the most confident in my ability to be coherent and articulate when I don't have time to go back to revise (and even then, sometimes…). 

It started when an email from the CSTP-Listserv arrived in my in-box: opportunity knocking, time for me to answer.

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By Tamara

WELPA, MSP, MAP…. What I used to think of as second semester (or even spring) has now become in my mind “Alphabet Soup Season”. It is also when my instructional year is put on hold for seven weeks. For the next four weeks my “teaching” day will consist of nothing but proctoring the annual language proficiency test. It takes four weeks because I have sixty-eight students in seven grade levels to test in four sub-sets: Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking (which is one-on-one with each student). Then in late April (as we all know) instruction crashes to a halt again for MSP. I don’t think losing seven weeks of instruction (more, really, when you factor in MAP) was what the feds had in mind when they crafted the assessment requirements for NCLB.

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By Tom

Well, now that National School Choice Week is behind us, maybe we can use this week to discuss a related topic; one that hasn’t come up yet on this blog: teacher choice. It’s one thing to choose a school, but once there, most parents have relatively little say in regards to who actually teaches their child.

It’s as if you and your honey spent an hour deciding on a Valentine’s Day restaurant. Then, when you get there, it’s “Welcome to Beth’s Café. You’ll have the patty melt. We hope you’ll enjoy it.”

Let me just say from the get-go that I’m ambiguous on this topic. I’m ambiguous because I'm both a parent and a teacher.

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