Blogs

Let's start with another simple truth:  As Jerry Sternin proved in the rice paddies of Vietnam and as Joan Richardson demonstrated in school after school, the best solutions for local challenges rest in the hearts and minds of local experts. 

That should be great news if you're a parent, a teacher or a local policymaker, right?

Essentially what Sternin and Richardson PROVE is that at least some of the teachers in your schools have the answers to any #educhallenge that all y'all are facing. 

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A few days ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a shout-out to the University of Michigan for serving as a national model for “reinventing” education schools. Indeed, the UM education school, led by Dean Deborah Ball, has done much to recalibrate university-based preparation programs by focusing on the practical how-tos of teaching specific curricular content and drawing on new research about how students learn. And though Secretary Duncan...

The American Teacher is a new, long-awaited film directed by Vanessa Roth. Told through the eyes and lives of real school teachers, Roth's documentary examines the working conditions that face public school teachers across the country—conditions that drive many of them out of the profession within the first five years, and often limits their success beyond the fifth year.

Based on the book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers (The New Press: 2005). The book's authors, Dave Eggers and Ninive Calegari, are also producers of...

Perhaps one of the most vitriolic divides in the educational reform debates of 2010/2011 is about teacher evaluations.  On one hand, some point to evidence of most teachers being evaluated as “excellent” and “good” and think that the focus on education reform should not be focused on teachers, but rather on the many broader social issues, like poverty and violence, that become road-blocks in the way of many children’s education.  On the other hand, others look at the same data and decry that the teacher evaluation system, itself, is broken, precisely because there are so many teachers being rated as “good” and “excellent” while student test scores remain low.  Too often, the two sides in this debate fail to engage the other, looking for a...