In April 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King and several other Civil Rights activists, including the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, were arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, in the midst of a massive non-violent protest campaign against that city’s segregation practices. Dr. King ultimately spent 10 days in jail that April, and while he was there, he penned one […]
Social Justice
Posted inSchool Improvement
TEDTalk: Help for Kids the Education System Forgets
One of the best TED Talks I’ve seen in a while was by Victor Rios, a sociology professor at the University of California. The segment, titled “Help for kids the education system ignores” was poignant, direct, and necessary. His speech highlighted how some of our neediest students are falling through the cracks, and what our mandate – as […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Teaching Skills for Survival in Dystopia
Skill #1: Radical Imagination Welcome to Dystopia Last week I presented an argument. We should teach kids to value diversity and to speak up against bias, hate, and bullying. I thought it was a pretty innocuous idea. But by leading my post with a list of factual statements and actions taken by President-elect Donald Trump […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education
I Think I Failed You – A Civics Teacher’s Letter to her Former Students
Dear Former Students, I have started this letter a thousand times in my head in the last week. It’s hard to get past the first line: I fear I may have failed you as your Civics teacher. You have probably known me for many years as the one person in your life with unfailing trust […]
Posted inCommon Core
We Need our Educators Now More than Ever
We desperately need dedicated educators willing to build a career around serving today’s learners and today’s communities-our tomorrow depends on it. Under the guise of “reform”, public education and teaching have been under a years-long attack driven by private interests in collusion with policymakers looking to profit from and gain control of a private education […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Social Justice
Implicit Bias: The Missed Post-Debate Discussion
Estimates are that over 100 million people (broadcast television and streaming combined) tuned into the Presidential Debate on September 26, 2016 – the largest viewership ever of a debate, and one of the largest television audiences ever. In the week following the debate between candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, several parts of the debate […]
Posted inHow to Fix Education
Teaching Class (With Class)
In the past, we’ve explored the “10 Ways to Fix Education” mini-series. We’re resurrecting this topic, and one way I’d like to fix education is teaching class (with class). This homophone highlights two items that should be at the forefront of our working memory and, well, our work. The first association – class, a noun […]
Posted inThe State of Education
Accountability in Education-Part I
Accountability in Education Student outcomes involve far more than proficient standardized test scores, and accountability for outcomes is a shared burden that extends outside the school. Families, communities, businesses and policymakers- these parties and more are all stakeholders in student outcomes and need to meet the challenge of empowering learners in a collaborative way, with […]