I am sickened by a news report from Reuters on the rapid rise in the use of standardized testing at the kindergarten level.  The push for academic accountability in the higher grades has been essentially pushed downwards through the grade levels and now sits like a 10-ton block of steel on what used to be literally a “children’s garden”...Read More

I think there should be a whole new movement in education called “children’s peak experiences in learning.” There ought to be books about it, M.Ed. and Ph.D. degree programs about it, tons of research about it.  Why?  Because when we observe learning at its best, only then do we have true benchmarks to evaluate the...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

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

Teachers have been taking it on the chin a lot lately with calls for the abolishment of tenure, and its replacement with what have been called “value-added models” of teaching evaluation.  Basically, what this means is that teachers are going to be increasingly assessed in terms of their ability to raise the standardized test scores of their students. ...Read More