I'm a little late to this party. I was clued into this 2012 video of a Kennedy Center Honor's performance of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." I'm not normally sentimental about videos that get passed around. Perhaps the stakes were higher because the late John Bonham's son made...

The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), in its list of Myths versus Facts about the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS), addresses the curriculum issue thusly:

Myth: These Standards amount to a national curriculum for our schools.

Fact: The Standards are not a curriculum. They are...

Almost two years ago to this very day, I wrote a couple of largely hypothetical pieces that toyed with the idea of performance pay for physicians, similar to what's being forced on educators. The first hammered out some specific proposals for doctors, such as the use of a few fundamental...

Swimming midstream between holiday reflections and New Year's resolutions, there will be a lot more time, attention, and line space devoted to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

A mild kerfuffle erupted in the last couple of weeks over who in the education community could claim ownership of...

Much has and will be written about the strike in Chicago. The battle in the Windy City is essentially about one thing: education for the best of us and then for the rest of us. This isn't just a clever phrase, however. There are drastic inequalities between the best and...

A new fantasy film is on the horizon pushing "legitimate" education reform: Won't Back Down. Activist Leonie Haimson recently published a helpful list of FAQs on this film to get the reader started. But I'm going to take a closer look at the troubling connections between the film...

I taught summer school for four weeks without any technology. Not willingly, per se. But the charter school in which I've taught the last three summers simply didn't have any available in this particular classroom. I didn't make a big deal out of it. I checked out a ton of...

This is my third summer in a row as a higher education faculty member returning for a brief stint in a charter school elementary classroom. This time it's second grade. I have written and will continue to develop my written thoughts about this experience because it has been exceedingly valuable,...

This will likely be one of the many hundreds of reflections written after the dust-up in Wisconsin. I'm also certain that what can be said has been already, with much of the wisdom coming in bits and pieces 140 characters or fewer. As an educator, I want to...

I read a lot about education. As I do my cursory checks of what's happening in the education blogosphere, there is so much ado about technology in the classroom and today's buzz-acronym STEM, which in case you haven't heard, stands for an integrated curriculum of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics....

Between March 30 and April 2 of 2012, public school advocates will arrive in Washington, D.C. at the U.S. Department of Education on Maryland Avenue to make a clarion call in opposition to test-driven and data-mad education reforms. The event will include four days worth of teach-ins, marches,...

When I've studied the issue of who chooses to teach and why, its status as a profession always comes up. In case you haven't noticed, teachers as a whole are not taken very seriously these days. Teaching as a respected profession has been on life support for quite some time....

I've made a few comparisons between other occupations and teaching to highlight some of the ridiculous rules and regulations imposed on educators as a result of both No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and now Race to the Top (RT3). I wondered what would happen if physicians suffered the...

The Wall Street Journal recently published the editorial "No Need to Panic About Global Warming" claiming that the scientific hysteria surrounding climate change is exaggerated and perhaps misguided. A few days later, a second editorial was published in reply, written by actual climate scientists, who argued that...

Over the holiday break, I had a pretty heated conversation with a conservative friend of mine about politics and other assorted topical sundries. The discussion turned towards the obligatory public versus private meme trotted out by most Republican and Tea Party sympathizers. That is, the public sector needs to shrink...

The left-leaning political blog Think Progress recently reported on a comment from a top-executive with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that some children eating rat poison is "an acceptable risk." Thus, there is no justification for the government to regulate these kinds of products. For ALEC, the...

A recent study from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) argues that public school teachers are actually overpaid, which seems contrary to the conventional wisdom regarding educators' salaries. These "fat cat" elementary teachers with second jobs must have been doing it for fun all this time. I guess mixing...

Although a bold statement, I'm starting to wonder: can Americans actually care less about education? I don't think so, and here's why.

On a broader scale, there is an overwhelming attitude in this country that embraces and champions ignorance. It seems all right to publicly admit a misunderstanding of science...

There are moments that leave you shaking your head in demoralized confusion, just as you feel like you're making a difference.

Over the last few weeks, I've been mired in a debate against standardized testing. A recent correspondence-turned-column with education columnist Jay Mathews at the Washington Post was...

The question titling this post comes from a genuine and sincere place. And by "privileged" I mean in this context "an immunity from critique" in the conversation on education.

I've participated in a lot of furious debate on- and offline about education, particularly on testing and the role of...