I didn't realize it back then, but going to public school in New York City set the direction for what I am doing now. The music I listened to and heard all around me dictated my world.
How did my 8-year-old daughter start thinking along gender lines? By girl and boy categories? That there's worth in being the best girl, even if you're not better than two boys?
Although many Americans believe their universities are places where administrators and faculty members coexist on a fairly equal basis, the reality is that this is far from the case.
Americans handed their communities a grade earlier this year and the results were mixed. Most communities are earning a passing grade, but no one will be putting their report cards on the fridge.
Schools remain our greatest hope -- the central function of any community. When working effectively, schools enable and empower the branches, mechanisms and policies of social networks to extend opportunity, simple justice and basic fairness.
Affordable housing and school busing can do little to counter a disruptive family life or a dangerous neighborhood. We need an alternative: public boarding schools.
The Educational Achievement Authority is an experiment that has failed. Legislators are considering a bill to expand it from its current 15-school version in Detroit to a statewide district that takes over the "bottom 5 percent" of schools. This system must be abolished completely, certainly not expanded statewide.
We analyzed the growth of the top ten percent of students within their respective schools over three years in a large sample of 1,000 schools across the country. Our researchers hoped to see if the high achievers in high-poverty schools had the same growth as students in more affluent settings.
We are ignoring the wisdom of our own community, and the chance to imagine D.C.'s future education policy as a city-wide, regenerative civic event.
Rather than a debate about whether child rearing should be focused on either parents, the community, or government, the most important questions we need to be answering are how we can improve the lives and outcomes of our nation's children -- at the family, community, and political levels.
Cutting tax rates won't restore jobs and prosperity. We should be talking about the investments that will work, starting with preschool.
Instead of pitting public schools against charters and vouchers, we've all got to take an unvarnished look at the gorilla in the room: poverty.
An arbitrary number is not going to support student achievement and teacher practice; focus on a best practice is. Instead of focusing on quantity of assessments, let's focus on quality of assessment practices.
If we get this right, by the 2014-2015 school year the standards that kids are held accountable to in 46 states will finally align with what they actually need to know in college and in the real world.
There is a shift across all levels of bilingual education -- state-wide, district-wide and school-wide -- to view the home language as vital for the academic development of bilingual students.
Tennessee starves what little government it has. It ranks dead last in per capita tax revenue. To fund its minimalist public sector, it makes sure that low income residents pay as much as possible through heavily regressive sales taxes.
Nowhere is the movement against high-stakes testing as strong as it is in Texas where all this started. Now, 86 percent of the state's school boards have adopted resolutions opposing the over-reliance on high-stakes testing.
I am all for meaningful change that will benefit our students, but I continue to scratch my head as I watch what is happening in the state I live in (NY) and the one where I work (NJ). I am still trying to figure out how SGP's will work.
What is real school reform? When educators and policymakers see a school district in crisis, I wonder what they think about. When the "big-shot" stake...
How did Pearson, which claims to have checkpoints "built into the process to ensure consistent progress in achieving school improvement goals," attempt to establish the validity of the Atlanta school district's claims for off-the-charts improvement on test scores before taking credit for the results?
If you want more kids to grow up into responsible, successful adults who contribute to our society, and if you want lower crime rates and prison populations, investing in good public education makes sense.
I'm convinced that the outpouring of political activity on social networks -- especially around hot-button social issues like marriage equality -- is a frustrated attempt to engage by a generation of people unsure of how else to make change.
We've all seen teachers assign texts and say, 'There will be a test to follow.' This is how the system is set up -- but it's not the kind of learning that kids need. What are they going to do when they get out in the real world?
Free markets have sometimes led to excess -- reality TV and supersized soft drinks come to mind -- but have also given us incredible innovation, a remarkable degree of choice and the world's strongest economy. And yet free markets are absent from K-12 education.
Parents, students, teachers, and principals are right to seek policy decisions based on evidence, not the popularity of current reforms, and to put a stop to those that harm students, schools, and their communities.
