It’s wonderful to see all the protests around the country against standardized testing.  At Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington, teachers are refusing to administer the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP).  In Texas, hundreds of school districts have passed a resolution saying standardized tests  are ”strangling” public schools.  The National Resolution on High Stakes Testing,...Read More

Children’s author Frank Cottrell Boyce, who, this week, won an award from the British national newspaper The Guardian for best fiction book for children, says that the way reading is being taught in the schools today risks putting children off of reading for the rest of their lives.  In particular, he criticizes the use of standardized...Read More

In an Education Week article entitled “Studies Link Students’ Boredom to Stress,”  Ulrike E. Nett, a student motivation researcher at the University of Konstanz, Germany, is quoted as saying:  “Although teachers try to create interesting lessons, they must be aware that despite their best intentions, some students may still perceive interesting lessons as boring….What is imperative...Read More

For almost two decades now, I’ve been criticizing the diagnosis of ADHD and the use of Ritalin and other psychostimulants with children (see, for example, my book The Myth of the ADD Child).  Now, a new report in The New York Times today, says that physicians are starting to prescribe these drugs to poor children...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