Kevin Welner

An early episode of The Simpsons had Lisa carrying out a science fair experiment called "Is my brother dumber than a hamster?" She rigged up parallel enticements for each. The hamster reaches for a pellet, gets a shock, and learns to avoid the pellet. Bart grabs at a cupcake, is...

It's not fun to be repeatedly punched in the gut. And we can now quantify how not-fun it is, at least when teachers are the punchees.

Over the past two years of gut-punching, teacher job satisfaction has fallen from 59 percent to 44 percent. That's according to the annual

On October 13, 2011, Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, published a list on his blog of "about two dozen Republican and/or conservative (and/or libertarian) edu-thinkers that enterprising reporters might tap for expertise when writing about GOP policy proposals or the...

Principal Skinner may cower in the face of authority, but his counterparts on Long Island have not hesitated to take a stand against policymakers pushing a wrongheaded agenda.

Head over to www.longislandprincipals.org and see what I mean. And read the front-page article in Newsday. When confronted...

A few days ago, Carol Burris and I sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The letter was invited by Secretary Duncan during a phone conversation with Dr. Burris.

Our letter is summarized briefly below, with the full text of the letter available on...

Prior to my career in academia, I practiced law. I took my first job back in 1988 during a boom in so-called mergers and acquisitions. There were lots or reasons bandied about for why one corporation would benefit from acquiring another, but one frequent reason for "M&A" was the coveting...

When people become so convinced their perspective is unimpeachable, they do and say some pretty funny things. A recent example was Rep. Denny Rehberg, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the open U.S. Senate seat in Montana. He recently tried to convince a town hall audience in Missoula that...

The newspaper business can't be much fun these days. Editors and reporters are desperate to find ways to hold on to readers. Such desperation, however, can never justify misleading readers, publishing factual errors, and then doubling-down on those mistakes when confronted with the truth. Yet that's where the Los Angeles...

I teach at a public university, which pretty much guarantees that I'll never be a major philanthropist. But the main beneficiary of my largess -- such as it is -- is my local homeless shelter. It's well-run, and it really does excellent work. But it does almost nothing to help...

According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the PISA scores released this past Tuesday were "a massive wake-up call." The scores show American students holding relatively steady in the middle of the pack of the developed nations taking the international exam.

I can't figure out what to make of Duncan's response....

Over the past couple months, I've been asked to participate in a few panel discussions about Waiting for "Superman". The film presents a stark, moving portrayal of the denial of educational opportunities in low-income communities of color. But while the movie includes statements such as 'we know what's wrong' and...

Have you heard of "performance-based" education policy? That a catch-all term that includes things like firing teachers when they don't improve student test scores. The underlying belief is that what separates good and bad teachers is their ability to do "whatever it takes."

But our courts seem to have not...

School accountability runs in only one direction. When we weren't looking, those at the top were apparently given "get out of accountability free" cards. Perhaps we should be happy for them and their good fortune. It must be nice to have the little people around to take the blame --...