“Employers are increasingly saying that they don’t just need people with basic job skills, but people who are creative (and) who can generate new ideas and new ways of solving problems,” ~Sen. Stanley C. Rosenberg – Massachusetts We want all students to be college and career ready...
Innovation, autonomy, and flexibility are just some of the buzz words resonating through our nation’s education reform efforts to provide more local control to schools and teachers. Because the contexts of school communities and students’ lives matter, it is critical to offer avenues through which teachers and school...
Teachers: What can we learn from an evaluation? It has been truly exciting this year to be able to spend some time taking a hard look at the topic of teacher evaluation with Hope Street Group. I have learned a lot, participated in innumerable conversations, read...
Dru Davison and I were invited to represent Hope Street Group to interview Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan about teacher evaluation. What an honor it was! It was a whirlwind tour and in a matter of hours, we had met with Secretary Duncan, his chief of...
The most powerful words from the State of the Union? “Teachers Matter” and “teach with creativity and passion.” The creativity and passion in teaching has been leached out over the years by increasing emphasis on high-stakes testing. Everything seems to hinge on a single assessment....
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Outliers,” he takes a close look at the many details behind successful people. In looking at highly successful people he defines as “outliers,” Gladwell cleverly reverse engineers three secret ingredients necessary to becoming a highly successful person on top of just...
Standardized testing has become a hot topic of conversation everywhere from the teachers lounge to local P.T.A. meetings. The news is filled with articles about teachers “teaching to the test” (see a few examples here, here and here). But are standardized assessments the best and...
How does budget transparency, or the lack thereof, impact school and classroom level programming for students? Across states in our nation, property owners pay taxes to provide the youth in their community with an education. While there are many current debates about how much those taxes...
Being a Reading Specialist who has worked with inner city early care providers, I was very excited to hear U.S. Department of Education's announcement concerning the RTTT - Early Learning Challenge. A grant giving each state an opportunity to submit a request for funding a...
Is Alternative Certification Enough? A generation ago, teachers became teachers by the same path that nurses became nurses - they attended colleges, majored in their subject area, received teacher training, and entered the classroom. Within the past 15 years or so, this landscape changed, largely with the...