John Merrow

Remember pot-luck suppers, when everyone brought a dish or two? What follows is the the equivalent -- although substituting ideas for food. Because t...

For many public school students and perhaps for teachers as well, April is the cruelest month of the school calendar. April days that are not devoted to 'test prep' are spent on testing itself. And some of what is going on in this crazy month defies the imagination.

Stressing the basics is no way to make sure that we will produce people to create the future. We need schools that encourage the imagination, that allow and support deep learning, and that fan the sparks of creativity -- not stomp out the fires.

In the face of this disheartening news, one has to ask, "who benefits?" I'm stumped. Certainly not children, parents and teachers.

We need to make it more difficult to become a teacher, which we could do by raising standards for admission into training programs and then providing one-year apprenticeships before teachers are given their own classrooms.

"My son can't sleep at night." Why? "Because his teacher told him that he had to do well on the tests this week or she would be fired.." Scaring the sleep out of a child is surely an example of distortion and corruption. So too is firing people based on the snapshot of one day's bubble test score.

Schools today must provide opportunities for young people to create knowledge out of the swirling clouds of information that surround them 24/7. You went to school because that's where the knowledge was stored. That was yesterday.

The real problem is not the Constitution's limits on the federal role in education. For all its talk of public education as 'the civil rights issue of our time," this Administration, like the one before it, simply does not have a powerful vision of what genuine education might be.

Why is the notion of trying to give poor kids the opportunities that rich kids take for granted anti-American?

I am still searching for the one right word to describe teachers today. Reviewing the candidates: competitors, policemen, social workers, surrogate parents, counselors, health care providers, nutritionists and ringmasters.

When California Governor Jerry Brown recently called for fewer standardized tests and less time on test preparation, he probably expected to be praised. Instead, his proposal has been greeted with cries of outrage from teachers, administrators, and students.

With 2012 off to a strong start, we wanted to quickly look back on 2011 and showcase some of the production work that my organization, Learning Matters, did last year.

Lately I have been lying awake at night thinking about basic skills. To be precise, I am wondering what you -- or I -- would do if we were in charge of getting America "back to basics" in education.

Because this is an election year, the politics of public education are even crazier than usual, meaning that serious debate over the federal role in education won't occur in 2012.

One of the best ways to see what is happening in education is with documentaries and videos and one of the best creators of these documentaries is outstanding education reporter John Merrow on Learning Matters.

Federal legislation punishes entire schools for not making 'adequate yearly progress.' So why not create some carrots to go along with the stick? How about 'OYP' for 'Outstanding Yearly Progress?'

To kick-start American Education Week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will host a Twitter town hall today at 5 p.m. EST. John Merrow, educati...

A truly brilliant idea for fixing America's inner city schools has come out of Washington. Kwame Brown seeks to recruit top teachers to low performing schools by freeing them for two or three years from the district's oppressive IMPACT evaluation system.

Imagine it's early morning, 20 minutes after the school bus was expected. You are waiting with your children when an old yellow clunker, its rear emergency door hanging open, weaves toward you. The driver has a pint of whiskey in one hand.

This isn't a fully-formed blog post per se, but I would like to draw your attention to an editorial I co-authored in last Sunday's Sacramento Bee; t...

I think it's fair to say that Education Nation is close to achieving that lofty 'must attend' status, no small feat for an enterprise that stumbled so badly out of the gate and is only two years old.

'Virtual classes' qualify as blended learning, because most of those kids are enrolled in traditional high schools. That's a growth industry: Just a few years ago only eight states allowed virtual courses or schools; today, nearly 40 states allow it.

Schools will never realize the power of technology until they get out from under our current way of holding them accountable. We need accountability, but what we are now doing is stifling learning and teaching. It's making public education worse, not better.

Time was, this country had about 130,000 school districts; today we have somewhere around 14,000. The pendulum has swung toward centralization.