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An International Diane Ravitch Moment?

There is hope on the horizon, my dears.

For more than ten long, empty, intellectually dry and dishonest years, we’ve lived under the insanity of No Child Left Untested. (Someone told me not to be so negative. Trust me. I’m holding back.) Children, especially poor children, have been subjected to a corporate “reform” mentality of pass/fail by making their quota of test score points on some standardized garbage never designed to gauge anything more delicately complex than a child’s understanding of where the comma goes.

(Ironically, the only ones lately who have been afforded “social promotion” have been the morally corrupt CEOs who were awarded their gold star parachutes whilst bankrupting the global economy, but I digress.) (more…)

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That’s so Fargo

I went to Fargo, North Dakota, and someone actually gave me a book with the title, “That’s so Fargo.”

I plan on reading it. Because if Fargo kids are an example of “So Fargo”, there’s something for us to learn there. teachers have class

I visited a 6th grade and taught them my favorite Barry Polisar song; the touching classic, “Don’t Stick Your Finger Up Your Nose ‘Cause Your Nose Knows It’s Not The Place It Goes.” It is a song that has moved a generation. Moved them to what, I’m not actually sure, but I see smiles, so I keep singing.

Then we had a talk. I asked them, “What does a good teacher look like?” I asked them, “Give me a word that describes a good teacher.”

Hands shot up.
(more…)

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Lily & Thom Hartmann Talk Education @ Netroots

“Children are 100 percent of our future”…Thom Hartmann talks to Lily Esklsen at the Netroots Nation Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Three Main Things that Always Fail in Education

I’ve just finished one more article on what essentially becomes “The Three Main Things” that we need to do to improve our schools. They aren’t bad things. Well, sometimes they are. But, basically they sound essentially reasonable.

And I hate, hate, hate to argue with something that sounds reasonable because it puts you in the position of sounding unreasonable when you question what often seems like pure common sense, so I hate, hate, hate to say this, but…
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Three Main Things will always fail. Three Main Things are doomed. They are doomed when you are trying to fix a system.

It doesn’t matter if you are trying to fix the toughest problems in our toughest schools or the easiest problems in our easiest schools. They are doomed because a system is not like furnishing my living room.

Stay with me. When I was a young, married kid, we couldn’t afford much in the way of furniture unless it consisted of an overturned milk crate that I could pretend was an end table. We were putting ourselves through college. I wasn’t able to go out and buy a perfect Home Beautiful room. So I picked the Three Main Things. (more…)

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