"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...

In 2007, as the Head of an independent school for girls, I traveled around the country with Marcus Buckingham on his Go Put Your Strengths to Work book tour. I had implemented a strengths-base approach in my school for girls with tremendous positive success. In every stop on our 26-city...

How We Teach

If (as was the contention in Part I of this series) the content of the high school curriculum is becoming obsolete, the methods we use to teach it are near fossils.

What was high school like when you were there? How were your classes taught? Thirty-two...

Part One of a 3-part series on why our schools are expiring and how we can reinvent them. Your thoughts on this topic matter.

What's Wrong with our schools? There are many things, but one of the most obvious is:

WHAT WE TEACH

We teach...

Strengths are the activities, relationships and ways of learning that energize people. They are the inner qualities that make us feel most alive and because of that, they are the places where we have the potential to make our most meaningful contributions to life. Strengths are different than interests because...

In February 2001, the New York Times published a memorable article about a scientific study by a group of psychologists. The group claimed to have done an "exhaustive" review of Winnie-the-Pooh literature and then catalogued and diagnosed a range of clinical, personality, and psychological disorders among the major characters...

President Obama implored school children to take responsibility for their own educations. He said, "I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself. Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to...

Every week I speak with parents who call me looking for answers to their sons and daughter's troubles in school. Halfway into these conversations many parents stop and say, "It is amazing how much you seem to understand our situation. It's like you already know us." In many respects, I...

As school ends for children all around the country, I can hear the collective sighs of relief. For many kids, getting to the end is now simply a matter of making it through one more excruciating ceremony that honors one type of learning over all others: the academic awards ceremony.

Matt's dad was an all-star soccer player in college. There is nothing he wants more than for his son to follow in his footsteps, so naturally he is thrilled when Matt is assigned to the first string of the Tiger's soccer team.

"A chip off the old block!...

Ferris Buhlers Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The high school movies of my generation resonate with our own experiences in school and one core belief about what school inevitably is. It is boring. We believe that being bored in the classroom is part of...

Here's the good news: this recession will pass by and many children will forget about it by early adulthood even though right now it may hammering your family. You can use the current economic climate to prepare your children for success in times of future financial strife by introducing them...

Over the past two weeks I learned that three teens in three different leading independent schools on the East Coast took their own lives. Two of them committed suicide on campus. While we can never fully know the reasons young people make such tragic choices, the evidence is clear that...