The word “alignment” has many meanings:  there’s wheel alignment, body alignment, road alignment, and many other kinds of alignment.  But when the word is used in the field of education, that should be a red flag to educators and parents.  Beware!  Usually the word is used in reference to the curriculum at different age and grade levels. ...Read More

In high school I always remember feeling fuzzy-headed after my school lunches.  Well, now it turns out that school lunches do more than just create transient mental haziness.  A study in the December 2010 issue of the American Heart Journal looked at 2000 sixth-graders and concluded that there was a clear relationship between obesity and school lunch programs.  Of...Read More

Reuters reports that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pouring money into the development of biometric devices that will be worn as bracelets by students to monitor their “attentiveness” and “engagement.”  The biometric bracelets will send a small current across the skin and measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the nervous system responds...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

Thirty-five years ago, when I was at the beginning of my teaching career, Piaget was all the rage.  We read his books, and puzzled over how observation of children interacting with real life situations could enable us to understand the development of their minds.  We also were able to catch the tail end of interest...Read More