Monthly Archives: July 2014

Bringing out the best in children

As I was walking down Church Hill today the potential of our nation torpedoed toward and then past me in the form of a vigorous 8 year-old girl. Her feet pounded the pavement, her wide golden eyes locked with mine, and then she was gone. “Who knows?” I thought. “Maybe that girl will do humankind […]

Half-baked Common Core

Some believe the Common Core will help improve education in this country; others do not.  Elizabeth Green, in Why Do Americans Stink at Math? falls into the latter category, and so do I. Even if we could agree that the standards of the Common Core were developmentally appropriate, worthy of implementation, and sensible in every way, it […]

Standardized testing can impoverish children’s education

The testing culture that drives current educational decision-making in our schools impoverishes children in many ways. One of the external forces interfering with student learning is time stolen from teaching.  A middle school colleague in Maine recently told me she literally lost five weeks of instructional time each year to standardized testing. In a system where […]

Spend education money more wisely for better results

Amidst all the fuss about (and money spent on) the Common Core, Mass-Customized Learning, proficiency-based education, and the collection and use of data  we must not forget that the quality of human experiences in a school is what ultimately determines the learning outcomes of the students. If the adults in a school don’t feel satisfied professionally, then the students won’t thrive. We can […]

We start our students learning languages too late

Proficiency in a second language is important and is most easily achieved by those who start young and who have the good luck to be educated in a school system that has a coherent and sequential language program. In this age of globalization, schools should be prioritizing all aspects of global education. While just one element […]