Educator and media critic Neil Postman once remarked that:  ”children enter school as question marks and leave school as periods.”  In other words, kindergarteners and first graders are full of enthusiasm, raise their hands high when asked a question, and respond favorably to new learning activities, but by high school, the zip is gone and...Read More

It’s been eight years since the Common Core State Standards were unveiled and states began adopting them for use in their evaluation programs.  The firestorm of controversy which initially greeted their introduction into American education from both sides of the political aisle seems to have died down somewhat and presently the Common Core appears to...Read More

Back in the early 1970’s when I was just starting my career in education as a student at the University of Massachusetts School of Education, I visited the St. Paul Open School, where the principal was Wayne B. Jennings.  My guide through the school I remember was a little boy, perhaps first grade, who had...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

I’ve written a book for educators called The Best Schools: How Human Development Research Should Inform Educational Practice (publisher:  The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, December, 2006).  In this book I suggest that our educational climate has become totally overwhelmed by what I call an “academic achievement discourse.”  This discourse concentrates on accountability, rubrics,...Read More