EdSpeak: Connecting Teaching to Policy Through Research

When we talk about changing schools, everyone has a different reaction. Some view this as a futile attempt to change for no reason and some view it as the natural progression of the life of schools. When schools do change, … Continued

Introduction Today’s blog is about how school choice has not really been implemented as a system. The Learning Policy Institute has produced a report on school choice that reminds us, “Simply creating new options does not lead automatically to greater … Continued

One of the ways in which we turn on each other is to blame someone else for our problems. Natural as this may be, blaming schools for a lack of education in this country misses an essential point about those … Continued

Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that all men were created equal echoed the founding fathers of America. As opposed to the aristocracy of the Europe class system from which they came or fled, America would treat everyone as equal under … Continued

Authority The American system of education is not a national system of education, but rather, a local authority system of towns, regions and state schools. Each public school has been built and supported by a local educational authority, which most … Continued

My son and I spent two days at an Audubon Site in Massachusetts learning how to handle all kinds of backcountry health emergencies. This course was sponsored by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and REI. I was very impressed … Continued

Happy Holidays to one and all! Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746 – 1827), a swiss educator who was influential in eradicating illiteracy, hardly gets any mention these days. In fact you are much more likely to hear about Montessori in early education … Continued

Money can not be divorced from human activity. So it is with schools and the frustration many years ago about the cost of bloated school administrations. The flattened management structure, often referred to as lean, came to influence school financing … Continued

In working out the relationship between quantitative and qualitative research I came across Einstein’s phrase: “There is no hitching post in the universe—as far as we know.” Einstein’s famous way of explaining his theory of Relativity was related to the … Continued

One of the first research reports on the arts in education was called, “Basic Abilities Required for Understanding and Creation in the Arts,” by Nelson Goodman, David Perkins and Howard Gardner. In their Final Report (1972) they talk about why … Continued