It’s hard to be a teenager. On Thursday, some of my students were trying to process their fears about what happened in Florida while others were dealing with the no less real pain of hearts left just a little battered by Valentine’s Day and the pangs of unrequited love. Whether it’s the fear that their schools might not...
It makes sense that an Orwellian proposal would involve some delightful double speak to accompany it. As Whitefish High School considers a proposal to conduct drug tests on all students involved in extra-curricular activities, the proposal’s defenders don’t want you to get the wrong idea: it’s not a violation of rights...
Roy Brown says he wants to adequately fund Montana schools…sometime. Not, of course, when he served in the Legislature, nor when his Party adopted an extremist agenda about education during the last Legislative session, nor during a time of large surpluses in state budgets. In fact, rather than advocate for more school funding, he...
Not all of my students intend to go to college. Many of them believe that college would be a waste of time and money, hope to work in fields that do not require an advanced degree, or simply don’t enjoy education. These students would (and have) told me that high schools should not be so focused on preparing people for college...
Last week, in a post about education and poverty, I took a pretty critical look at Ruby Payne, a popular, if misguided, advocate for ‘middle class values’–whatever those are. It turns out that I’m not alone in my criticism. Lee Enterprise’s Jodi Rave offered a critical look in the Gazette today: And while...
There’s an interesting piece in the New York Times magazine this morning, discussing a variety of strategies to deal with the difficulty of educating students from the lowest economic brackets. The strategies discussed in the article range from the answer Mississippi has adopted (lowering standards to claim that all students...
In the climate of No Child Left Behind and bitter recriminations about the failure of public schools, Richard Whitmire offers a critical look at one of the largest issues facing school: the gender achievement gap. The statistics he cites from the Department of Education are sobering: Nearly every chart told the same story. Boys are over...
Dan Seligman, who seems to delight in pathologizing the poor, writes in a new piece for Forbes.com that attempting to close the gap in achievement between disadvantaged and middle/upper class kids is is a waste of time, because it’s impossible to achieve. He writes: It is not possible to close the achievement gap. The mission...
“Gifted advocate” Susan Goodkin has an interesting, if flawed, criticism of No Child Left Behind in the Washington Post: that it damages the prospects of “our most capable children.” Essentially, Goodkin argues that NCLB forces districts and schools to become so obsessed with improving the scores of low-achieving...