I’ve been working on teacher evaluation for most of my career as a teacher, administrator, and teacher educator; first being evaluated, then doing the evaluation as an assistant principal and subject area coordinator, then helping design a state-wide beginning teacher evaluation initiative. After nearly 40 years in education, all I can say is that the current system is the worst […]

Just when you think the masters of the universe who run the corporate reform movement can’t be even more clueless, you catch wind of the newest effort to turn education into a profit-generating endeavor–this time, a hare-brained scheme to evaluate student teachers, by…and I swear I’m not making this up…observing them as they pretend to teach…wait for it…a fake “classroom” […]

The Hartford Courant recently published a stunningly uninformed editorial on the Connecticut State Board of Education’s decision to eliminate the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations–a move widely praised by most of the education community. The Courant’s position was clear–and a blend of equal parts ignorance and arrogance: The state Board of Education recently agreed not to include […]

A recent blog post by Morna McDermott at Educationalchemy.com connects the dots between the recent surge in popularity of the new “Gig Economy” and unsavory influences from the usual suspects in the corporate education reform agenda, ALEC and Pearson. McDermott points out the K12 aspects of this connection (i.e., Competency Based Education (CBE) as an “alternative” to actual classroom learning, […]

What happens when the evidence showing that vouchers do not improve student learning, or “fix failing schools”, becomes too obvious to ignore? Well, if you’re Betsy DeVos, you just flip the rhetoric (i.e., lie). Just as Ms. DeVos and President Donald Trump are poised to dump $20 billion into a federal voucher program, a new study shows that students receiving […]

We have a saying in Michigan: There’s really only 3 seasons in our state: Winter, summer, and Road Construction season! To that I would sadly add a fourth: Testing season. And we are now firmly entrenched in the middle of this, the worst season of all in our neck of the woods. I’ve been seeing high levels of anxiety, stress, […]

In the past couple of days I’ve seen a number of troubling statements about education and policy-related issues, like standardized testing, from a variety of political leaders. And I keep coming back to the same word to describe how I feel after reading their ideas about the state of public education. Disappointed. One of these statements was from a hopeful […]

The suggestion that the solution to poorly performing students is simply closing schools is merely following what has become a common trope in the corporate education reform community–the notion that “the problems” in education can be solved simply by, variously, “getting rid of the bad teachers“, converting public schools to charter schools, continuously raising standards, or increasing the amount of […]

Since publishing my post on teacher silencing yesterday, my mailbox has been inundated with stories from teachers about being harassed, threatened, and intimidated by school district administrators for posting their opinions about standardized tests, opting out, and other issues of education policy and practice. One teacher wrote: I was having a discussion this morning with a colleague and we weren’t […]

I received the note below from a former student who is now a teacher. For obvious reasons, I won’t identify her or where she teaches, but–shockingly–her story is becoming all too common… We had a union meeting yesterday where they warned us that the governor is going after the certificates of teachers that opted out their kids (of the state […]

Recently, I spent the day observing two student teachers. Both were teaching instrumental music in middle and high schools, and each was assigned to an experienced, master teacher. But that’s where the similarities end… One of the student teachers was placed in an urban school and the other in a rural school. The differences between these two schools were stark, […]