In this blog post, I’d like to talk about what they call ‘’value added’’ measures in school reform.  Basically, this means judging teachers according to the standardized test results that their students get over the course of the year.  First, let me say something about the term ‘’value added’’ because at first glance an unassuming...Read More

The New York Times published an article today about a teacher at The Success Academy, a ”high achieving” school in New York City, who was observed abusing a young child verbally for getting confused on a math problem.  The article includes an accompanying video filmed surreptitiously by an assistant teacher. In the video, we see the teacher...Read More

There’s a compelling article online at The Atlantic, on David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core State Standards, the “national curriculum” that most of the states in the country will be following in 2014-15.  Coleman has impeccable credentials:  Yale, Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford, a man of letters whose conversation, as the piece states, ”leaps gracefully from Plato to Henry...Read More

There’s a whole new climate of opinion that’s been sweeping over the educational scene in America these days.  It’s all about accepting as perfectly normal the creation of a monstrous monolithic “learning” enterprise from preschool to post-college that consists of uniform standards, standardized testing, the collection of “data”, and the evaluation of teachers based on test scores (a practice incongruously called “value-added”). I find this...Read More