Thoughts on Education Policy

The local paper ran a rather bland article yesterday about the number of new teachers in local schools ("School debate value of novice...

I often criticize my program for focusing (almost exclusively) on quantitative methods -- at the expense of qualitative methods.* I'm n...

The last couple weeks have just flown by, and I somehow never found time for a blog post. I did find time, however, to read an excellent bo...

To: Mark Roosevelt, Superintendent, Pittsburgh Public Schools CC: Dr. Jerri Lynn Lippert, Executive Director of Curriculum, Instruction an...

Yesterday I expressed outrage at Pittsburgh's new grading policy and also posted the district's rationale . I'd like to take ...

My last post mentioned the fact that Pittsburgh has altered the grading system so that no student may receive a grade below 50% on any assi...

It's late. My title is needlessly acerbic. My post will be short. I may write more on this later. I complained an awful lot about the...

I usually avoid taking stances on issues in this blog for a few reasons, maybe because I'm early in my career and am not convinced I kno...

A recurring theme in education commentary is that there are too many bad teachers -- largely because teachers are too hard to fire. The lat...

The Fordham blog alerted me to the fact that George Will again mentioned David Whitman's new book in his latest column (which, if you...