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Category Archives: education

school, in general

On Getting Back to Normal

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

I’m on vacation, busy with summer for a month already, spending time outside biking, hiking, and hacking away at the woods with a chainsaw. I got a pin for 25 years of service at our last day’s assembly, which made me stop and think just a bit. How could it be that I’ve stayed with [...]

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Standing Up for Common Sense

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Every once in a while, there is good news: Alaska opts out of Race to the Top school grants TOO MUCH CHANGE: State leery after failures of the No Child Left Behind Act. By Jeremy Hsieh The Associated Press While many states have accepted an educational reform challenge in the federal Race to the Top [...]

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Unfinished Business – A Pedagogy for the Planet

Thursday, April 22, 2010

It’s still Earth Day here along the the northern rim of the planet, near the eastern edge of the international date line. Spring is here at last; it is brown and muddy and beautiful without any snow. This was my 30th winter in Alaska, and I still look forward to the regular changes, no matter [...]

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Capitalism : Bottled Water : : Democrats : Education Reform

Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Obama administration’s education reform policy is a scam, just like bottled water – a capitalist scheme to manufacture markets through the privatization of public wealth. Race to the Top and the ESEA Blueprint are education “reform” mechanisms that use test scores to label schools as failing, thereby creating incentives for states to relax charter [...]

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We Are In Deep Doo Doo

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Lois Weiner, who has been documenting the global neoliberal assault on teachers, posted a critique of Diane Ravitch’s new book on her blog today that is worth every public school teacher’s attention. Weiner: The publicity for Ravitch’s book has certainly put her incisive critique of the reforms (privatizing education; using standardized tests to measure everything; [...]

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Notes from Alaska’s Common Core Comparison

Saturday, March 27, 2010

As everyone has heard, “Alaska and Texas are the only states that declined to participate in the [national] standards-writing effort.” Unreported, though (except here) has been the fact that the State of Alaska was planning a comparative review of the new standards with what we have in place already. And now, Megan Holland has picked [...]

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The Right Kind of Education

Sunday, February 28, 2010

The title of this post is taken from Chapter 2 of Krishnamurti’s Education and the Significance of Life, which I was reminded of while reading Larry Cuban’s blog about Great Teachers: For the past quarter-century, however, policymakers and politicians have chopped, grated, and mixed together the goals of schooling into a concoction seeking to make [...]

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Central Falls – could be ANYWHERE

Friday, February 26, 2010

“Teaching really is not a job. I don’t teach; I’m a teacher. I’m a teacher. That’s who I am.” … but, obviously, it’s a hell of a long way from Wall Street: Mr. Dimon said he did not know whether he would have taken the $25 billion that the government lent to JPMorgan during the [...]

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Millot: Sound Decision or Censorship at TWIE (V)

Thursday, February 25, 2010

-Marc Dean Millot: This last post is not about This Week in Education editor Alexander Russo’s decision to pull “Three Data Points. Unconnected Dots or a Warning” because Andrew Rotherham suggested a colleague at Scholastic should make it so. It’s simply a list of my reflections on reactions to this series. Thank You. I must [...]

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Night Visions: Celebrations in Failing Light

Monday, December 21, 2009

There’s not much sunlight in the interior of Alaska these days. Today is the winter solstice, and we have just about three and a half hours of daylight to work with. At this latitude the sun barely climbs above the horizon at mid-day, and it has virtually no warmth. Bit still, it’s reassuring to see [...]

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