Mr/Ms Teacher: As you are no doubt aware, each of your students has 5 other classes. Each of these classes has their own supply requirements, although some things like “pencils” and “notebook paper” are universal. There is only a 5 minute or so passing period between your class and the previous or next class. While [...]
Today I bring you two inexpensive and obvious ways to improve student performance. Part One: Sleep in Yet another study shows that starting the school day a little later — 8:30 instead of 8:00 — increased the number of students that got adequate sleep, improved the mood of students during the school day, and slightly [...]
It took University of Nevada researchers 20 years to figure out that kids who live in homes where they own books — as few as 20 books — have higher academic achievement. The shocking realization was apparently that it had little to do with the parents’ educational level: “Books in the homes of even the [...]
This week’s Time Magazine arrived in the mail a little while ago. Here’s what the cover looks like. Accompanied by a big picture of a deflated football, the cover stories are “The Most Dangerous Game. How to Fix Football” and “The Crisis in High Schools.” My immediate thought was that somehow football is more important [...]
No, this isn’t a post about zero tolerance policies or reform or even the fact that walking to school is safer than the alternatives. This post is for everyone who thinks public schools are somebody else’s problem. Every now and then I run into people who don’t bother to vote on the school board election [...]
There is a movement afoot to have a multi-state K-12 set of educational standards. The good news, 47 of the 50 states have agreed that it’s a good idea. The bad news, none of them have signed on to adopt such standards yet. I have supported such an idea in the past, and I cautiously [...]
I must not be very imaginative. I say that because I can’t think of a single thing that is so important that it’s worth strip searching a child in a public school, but so unimportant that it’s not worth calling that child’s parents first, and not worth calling the police first. And the thing is [...]
Or: A Series of Ineffective but Obvious Quick Fixes for Complex Problems Let me begin, if I may, with two items on that oft-quoted report from 1983, A Nation At Risk: the first from Carrie’s Nation basically calls out the fact that several of the key assertions actually had very little data to support them; [...]
In Texas, maybe it’s better if they don’t learn too much from the textbooks. The math texts included 109,263 errors, 79% of which came from books published Houghton Mifflin Co.. Students may wish some of the errors had not been uncovered – particularly the inclusion in some books of the answers to math quizzes at [...]
Those who have been reading my thoughts on education for a while know that I measure anything that happens in a school by whether it is safe and educates children. And I interpret this broadly: the physical maintenance of a school building might not directly impact student safety or education, but the lack of it [...]
