On October 27th, a joint collaboration of The Rockefeller Foundation, The Gilder Lehrman Foundation, producer Jeffrey Seller, creator (and star) Lin-Manuel Miranda, and New York City public schools announced that they will provide a means for more than 20,000 eleventh graders to not just watch Hamilton, the hottest, most ground-breaking musical in decades – but to actually go […]
Current Events in Education
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, From the Front Lines, High School, Literacy
Different Teachers, Different Pressures
There is a certain about of pressure that comes with being a high stakes teacher, okay, it is a ton of pressure. A high stakes teacher is a teacher whose class performance on a standardized test is directly tied to the School Performance Score. At a small school, this means there are only four or […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, From the Front Lines, Uncategorized
5 Ways to Flip the Parent-Teacher Conference Script
With a total of five hours to meet 20-something families, elementary school teachers in New York City have between 10 and 15 minutes for each conference. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to cover a child’s academic progress, social-emotional progress, areas for growth in these areas, and provide suggestions for supporting learning at home. […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Opinion, Principals' Corner, School Improvement, Uncategorized
Zero Tolerance For Zero Tolerance
As Russell J. Skiba points out in his research on zero-tolerance policies, it’s quite difficult to find the “moment” when our schools implemented zero-tolerance policies in our school, but we can trace the impact of them to the 1994 Free Schools Act as a time when districts were quick to suspend students for fear of […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Opinion, Social Justice
Police, Black Students, and Teachers
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched the video clip of Ben Fields, Richland County (SC) school resource officer, where he picked up a young lady (who was black) and pulled her from her chair. I’ve done so because it astounds me that this situation occurred in our schools, but what also stuns […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, From the Front Lines
Rebels with a Clue: How Teenagers Give Respect to those that Earn it
By now most of us have seen the video(s) of Officer Ben Fields aggressively removing a student from a classroom at Spring Valley High School. Most likely, if you are like me, you’ve read 100 articles on the incident and perhaps even voiced your opinion through various social media outlets. As I read people’s responses […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Social Justice
Empathy: The Missing Link in the Classroom
Empathy, for me, was always one of the best ways to handle classroom management and even more serious incidents. Empathy was what allowed me to never take anything a student did or said personally. Recently it seems that lack of empathy is causing actions by students that are either disruptive or perceived as disruptive to […]
Posted inCommon Core, Current Events in Education, Opinion, Uncategorized
What President Obama Didn’t Say About Standardized Testing
On Saturday, October 24th, President Obama came out with a wholehearted message about his concern about how much schools, teachers, and students were focusing on standardized testing. He began his speech with a pop quiz, asking parents what school options they would like to provide students who had more time to learn and what they could […]