Last night's speech sent me racing back to the 1980s where the rhetoric around education was much the same as we heard this week in the State of the Union. I remember the 1980s. I had a Cabbage Patch Kid. Remember Cabbage Patch Kids? In 1983, there was such a...

In December of 2006, The New Commission on the Skills of the American Work Force issued a challenge to the United States educational system in their publication "Tough Choices or Tough Times (TCTT)." Among other things, this report calls for a radical change in our educational system in order to...

Urban Academy, located in Midtown Manhattan is a public school. As their tag line says, it's a small school with big ideas.

The building is old, but feels like home with comfy albeit old couches and cozy student gathering places. The teachers skip teaching to the test...

All aboard... next stop, midterm elections!

I've just boarded the education train. I heard that immediately after the stop at the midterms, we're headed away from the confusing, angry land of partisan debate to the wide-open territory of bipartisan dialog! How promising -- the two things I've waited years...

I can appreciate Michelle Rhee's desire to make waves in the teaching arena. Good teachers deserve better than we give them and the bad ones... err... off with their heads!? -- Umm --
really??

The tactics, the cult of personality, and the metaphorical loaded assault rifle got in...

Teaching isn't rocket science -- it's harder.

What does it take to be an excellent teacher? It takes a wide variety of skills, emotional maturity and higher order thinking skills to be an effective teacher. It takes patience, lots of it.

How many people do you know who...

Imagine waking up one day and having everyone you encounter understand the ways in which you are unique and extraordinary. What if everyone viewed the things you did as needed contributions, and rather than looking for what is wrong with you, people pointed out what is right with you? If...

Education Nation.

Wow, suddenly that tag is everywhere. Hallelujah. It seems as though educators have been waiting forever to have our day in the news. Our time has finally come. So why do I feel so anxious?

It's because the neglected topic of education is at its center...

Many people today are unaware that most schools do not operate with a standardized curriculum that is tied to a particular educational philosophy. Most schools' teaching and learning methods are in fact a hodge-podge of educational theories, with teachers recreating the teaching methods used by their teachers. Of course, there...

Although most of the country is still sweltering in the throes of summer heat, young people across the nation are thinking about new school supplies and what to wear on that anticipated first day of classes.

A new year means a new start and here are some strengths tips that...

Learning has arguably slowed across the United States as teachers and students have taken up number 3 pencils to take standardized tests. Standardized test scores have the power to make or break a child. Most parents and almost every teacher knows the process of standardized testing in our schools is...

What do schools need to teach high school students? We are on the cusp of a great global educational change and the question we need to keep asking is not what do high school students need to learn, (they need to learn a lot of things) but what...

"I'm in a board meeting having a miscarriage..." That's the opening statement of the tweet that took only a few hours to move from the so-called "private" sphere of Ms. Penelope Trunk's 20,000 followers on Twitter to CNN News. In addition to the shocking content, one reason the infamous miscarriage...

In the October 28th, 2009 Opinion column in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof advocated that building schools in Afghanistan would be a better use of U.S. resources than spending money on the deployment of more troops. He wrote,

"Dispatching more troops to Afghanistan would be a monumental bet and...

Education will continue to be a topic of concern as we try and assess what went wrong with our economy. We can focus on all kinds of ways to measure achievement in a misguided attempt to "catch up with" other countries around the world who test better than we do,...

I almost missed in the news that Ted Sizer, one of America's most influential progressive educators, former Dean of the Harvard Graduate School Education and the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, died. I almost missed this important news because to most people in this country, neither his...

As the former head of two high schools for girls, I know that this is the time of year when many parents begin wondering what is going on with their teenage daughters. I used to get a lot of calls from parents asking, "What is that school doing to my...

It's parent-teacher conference time and you arranged your schedule three weeks in advance to attend. If you are like most parents, you feel a certain amount of anxiety around this event. You attend hoping there won't be any surprises and that you won't discover that your child is experiencing any...

Applying to college and getting into a "good school" has become an intensely competitive process during which many children are so fixated on getting in, they don't fully consider why it is they are even going to college. Anxiety around college admission seems to be the driving force trapping parents...

The issue is education. According to Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, essential elements of our educational system can be labeled toxic. For too long education has played second and third tier to the more newsworthy and greater special interest causes. This has been the disease...