A nagging little pamphlet from NIFL appeared in my teacher mailbox the other day. I’d been hopeful that the government’s fetish for experimental reading research design would go into remission with the new administration, but that seems not to be the case. Always curious about government...

The internet is full of important and interesting things to know about, and it’s hard to manage the volume. Abundance easily becomes overload. I’ve been reading about the economy, Obama, Gaza, Arne Duncan, reading theory, Obama, poverty, and the economy. Oh, and every now and then, cats....

I’m not writing a New Year’s Resolution post. This is, however, an effort to get back into a more regular writing habit by taking advantage of some weather-induced down time. I’ve fallen off the blog bandwagon a little bit, and now I’ve got fifty open tabs on the browser that...

Bloggers have been all over the Michelle Rhee story, lately. Mike Klonsky: Know-nothing writers like Amanda Ripley kill perfectly good trees to fill pages with crap like this: “The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research.” Did yo...

I’m reading Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, and I see the standards movement in US education policy now less as an isolated case, that is, isolated to the US and education, in particular, and more connected to events in the larger world of politics and economics. It’s good to have a ...

2K Games has confirmed what games it'll be showing at this year's E3. The tiles include: • BioShock (PS3) • Borderlands (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) • NBA 2K9 (PS2, PS3, Xbox 360) • NHL 2K9 (PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii) • Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization (PC) Late last year I ha...

My sixth-graders this year showed me something about how the “staus quo” is maintained. A counseling intern working in the building did a weekly series of lessons on goal setting with my students. The kids occasionally responded to little surveys she gave them on various topics, and they...

By coincidence, I finished reading Sizer’s The Red Pencil at the same time this new “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” statement was released. Not by mere coincidence, Theodore Sizer is among the dozens of signatories to the statement. Reading his book, and then the proposals ...

Dave Gross …Every time you are confronted with choices and, instead of playing one of society’s designated roles, you choose “none of the aboveâ€� and find yourself alone in a nameless category — you score a point for our team. He says that he looks at social roles the way that hackers l...

Listening to Utah Phillips, I heard the voice of a teacher. From Democracy Now [transcript]: AMY GOODMAN: …Over the span of nearly four decades, Utah Phillips worked in what he referred to as “the Trade,â€� performing tirelessly for audiences in large and small cities throughout the United S...