I just watched the new PBS Special, TED Talks Education, and it's made me wonder if the TED phenomenon has, perhaps, gone as far as it can go.

The decision by D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman David Catania to hire an outside law firm to craft school reform legislation is an awful one, worthy of serious public rebuke -- and for two interrelated reasons.

The first is that hiring a small team of lawyers is the...

It's suddenly in vogue to gather and tell stories as part of an organization's larger strategy to build an audience and effect change. On one level, I love this development -- indeed, I've been gathering people's stories about their most powerful learning experiences for years, which has resulted in

There are two seemingly unrelated columns in the Saturday Opinion page of the New York Times that provide a crisp summary of where we stand in our current thinking about school reform -- and where we need to go.

The first is a piece about charter schools in...

It's that time of year again, when parents across the country -- but particularly parents in major American cities -- prepare to schedule a flurry of open houses in a frantic search for the best school for their child.

It happened to me a year ago; between January and March,...

As policymakers prepare to find the best way to respond to the tragedy in Newtown, educators and parents across the country are left to wonder -- what can we do to make our schools safe?

The lessons of Sandy Hook Elementary School can help us answer that question in two...

There's a fascinating new story out there, courtesy of NPR, in which a team of researchers pored over 25 years of murder data in Newark, N.J., and reached a surprising conclusion: murdering someone is not as individualized a decision as we might think. In fact, the study suggests...

Watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

Six years ago, a funny Englishman gave a stirring speech about how schools were stifling the creativity of their students. Today, Sir Ken Robinson is a worldwide celebrity, and his TEDTalk has been seen by as many as...

Just because.

Ask them, answer them, share them. If you have a favorite, tweet it along with the hashtag #bestquestions. If you have one that isn't here, add it. And if you want to see what happened when a whole community asked these questions of themselves and each other --...

For over a year now, I've been working with a remarkable group of people at Ashoka who believe empathy is the foundational skill we need in order to become effective changemakers in modern society -- and who are bold/quixotic enough to envision a world in which...

There's an important new consensus developing around how people learn -- and a missed opportunity about how to start applying that knowledge in schools. We'd be wise to pay closer attention to both trends.

The consensus is that man cannot live by intellect alone -- that our physical, social and...

It's official. Barack Hussein Obama has been re-elected.

Now what?

When it comes to public education, let's start by recognizing that Race to the Top was well-intentioned -- and ultimately out of step with a truly transformational vision of where American schooling needs to go. Yes, we need...

If you're one of the folks that stopped watching Treme after its first season ("Too boring! Too slow!"), or if you just never bothered to check it out, you might want to check back in. Now in its third season, Treme is proving itself adept at mirroring what creator David...

Recently, I gave a TED talk outlining why I think we're in the midst of the most exciting and difficult time to be a teacher in American history. These sorts of talks are always imperfect (and timed) efforts to inject new ideas into the stratosphere, but I received lots of...

As a former teacher with a MBA, I read a lot of "business books." And of the titles I've read over the past few years, none have characterized the future of public education more presciently than Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I...

I got two very different e-mails this morning that underscore just how far our thinking has to move if we're ever going to truly reimagine American public education in ways that are aligned with the individual needs of each child.

The first was framed around a provocative question -- "Imagine...

Now that the teacher strike in Chicago has ended -- and the city's school children have returned to school -- one thing seems unavoidably clear: even after this supposed agreement, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his city's public school teachers will remain deeply divided, deeply mistrustful of one another, and deeply...

In the airy, sun-filled space that will house my son's foray into formal education, I watched as a tow-headed classmate named Thomas patrolled the edges of the room, choking back tears.
It was the first day of school -- and my wife and I were already doing our best...

It's a presidential election season, which means we can all be sure of two things: conversations about education will take a backseat to more "pressing" issues like the economy and foreign policy, and Congress will once again do nothing to address our desperate need for a new federal education policy.

Tom Friedman has a new column about education in which he almost makes an important point about the state of K-12 schooling in America, and what we can do to improve it.

The thing Friedman gets right is the easy part -- the fact that despite the willingness...