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Showing posts from March, 2019

Misrepresenting Urban Education

Jejak Panda Selamat Datang Dan Selamat Membaca play bandarq I am not one for bumper sticker politics, but I saw a t-shirt on a teacher recently that said, “Those who can, teach; those who can’t teach, pass legislation about teaching.”   This made me think about the fact that the vast majority of our critics have never stepped into a classroom since they walked across their high school auditorium stage to take their diploma.   A couple examples slapped me in the face recently. I shouldn’t give this guy the publicity that comes with a response, but the other day I read an editorial by Chris Powell, the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, that really got under my skin.   Powell routinely offends me because he hates teachers so profoundly and bashes them so regularly on the editorial pages of the JI .   I know this not because I subscribe to the JI but because someone at the Willimantic Chronicle loves to run Powell’s editorials on an all-to

The Bill That Funds Everything We Do

Jejak Panda Senantiasa Menyambut Kedatang Anda Untuk Membaca bandarqq Do you remember Schoolhouse Rock?   I can still sing along with “I’m Just a Bill.”   Remember the poor bill who had to sit there in committee waiting to become a law?   I loved those old commercials, but one thing I learned years ago was that prior to sitting in committee something that is “just an idea” can’t move along the legislative chain unless a bunch of senators and representatives endorse it by signing what’s called a Dear Colleague letter.   And that’s what I have been doing all day today.   I and well over a hundred other teachers from writing project sites from all over the country have been visiting our legislators, asking them to sign Dear Colleague letters that will allow the National Writing Project to continue to compete for funding from Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (otherwise currently known as the No Child Left Behind Act), which has not been reauthoriz

The Social Promotion Straw Man

Jejak Panda Selamat Membaca Di Blog Kesayangan Anda bandarq Once again, the Journal Inquirer ’s Chris Powell is way off the mark in his excoriation of teachers—and of the state of education in Connecticut in general.   Now, there’s a lot to address in Powell’s recent editorial—attacks on the CEA, a defense of standardized testing, and the use of decontextualized NAEP data, just to name a few.   But for now, I want to address the issue of social promotion because it is such a frequent straw man of Powell’s. According to Powell, social promotion is Connecticut’s unacknowledged “system,” the result of which is that a high school diploma in Connecticut “sets students on a path only to remedial English … at the state’s public universities.” Social promotion sounds like such a simple issue.   Students should not be allowed to enter the next grade unless they have mastered the material presented in their current grade.   Certainly, when I was a

The Interesting Case Of Charter Schools

Jejak Panda Jumpa Lagi Kita Diblog Kesayangan Anda ceme 99 online   Two interesting bits of information were reported on March 27.   The Hartford Courant reported that the legislature’s education committee had removed a moratorium on charter school expansion.   And The New Haven Register reported that New Haven’s Board of Education president Carlos Torre had accepted a position on Achievement First’s Board of Directors only days after Torre had helped squash a new partnership between Achievement First and the New Haven Public Schools. Quite a banner day for charter supporters, I’d say. I know a lot of teachers who work in charter schools, and I have done observations of teachers in charter schools.   There are good, hard-working teachers in charters just like there are everywhere. My concerns and objections are not with teachers or even individual charter schools.   Teachers are teachers and several studies have demonstrated that across the nation charter school

The Romantic Myth Of The Solitary Writer

Jejak Panda Hallo Jumpa Lagi Kita Di Blog Ini judi ceme terpercaya             What’s been on my mind all week to write about is a sort of sad and sort of funny interaction I had with a high school student this past Saturday at Open House, which I’ve worked for the last three years because I really like meeting the incoming freshmen and talking to them about majoring in English.             Despite all the talk of declining interest in the English major, we got good foot traffic at our table, and only one student who said her dad would kill her if he saw her talking to us.             Students expressed interest in many things, but many wanted to talk about careers, the teaching profession, and creative writing.             The young man who made such an odd impression upon me was one who wanted to talk about creative writing.   The conversation took place toward the end of the morning, when most students and their parents had cleared out and headed to find lunch.