When I was a third grader at Clara Barton Elementary School in Fargo, North Dakota, my principal Miss Minnis held an assembly where she showed us home movies of her summer trip to Australia.  I was amazed at the existence of such a large a country so far away from the U.S.  We learned the...Read More

After this pandemic is over with (or at least sufficiently in the background of American life to warrant little comment), plan to go into a classroom and ask yourself, does this classroom have life?” That’s the key test of whether there’s any real learning going on. There could be fake learning going on, to be...Read More

This blog post of mine, entitled ”What If Great Minds Ran Our Schools?” based on my book If Einstein Ran the Schools: Revitalizing U.S. Education, first appeared in the blog TeachThought on May 1, 2020: The long-awaited test results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are in, and although there’s something there for...Read More

Something has been bothering me about today’s education climate that is not easy to articulate.  It has to do with the state of knowledge in our schools.  It seems to me that knowledge has become a commodity like wheat or beef, which needs to be fed to students in finite quantities.  Most teachers act as...Read More

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