21st Century Scholar

by Bill Tierney At least the graphics and background music in Waiting for Superman were professionally done. In The Cartel we have another documentary about schools made by a reporter, Bob Bowden; this time the storyline is largely about New Jersey public schools. Early on in the movie he gives us a voiceover that what [...]

by Randy Clemens Failure is an option and students don’t matter in the Los Angeles Unified School District. That’s the message Los Angeles’ city leaders are sending. Consider some numbers: LAUSD officials sent over 5,000 Reduction in Force (RIF) notices to teachers and staff. The district faces a $400 million deficit. John Deasy, the future [...]

by Randy Clemens There’s a rumor going around that the country’s economy has turned a corner. The Great Recession is over. I don’t know the metrics that pundits and politicians are using, but if we consider the financial stability (or instability) of school districts, the recession is certainly not over. Consider, for instance, the case [...]

by Randy Clemens My sisters and I used to trick or treat, collecting our candy in sleeping bags. A successful Halloween night ended with tired legs and a mound of sugary confections to sort through. A good bounty included quality stuff like full-sized candy bars and hand-fulls of Sweetarts. Pennies, candy corn, tootsie rolls, and [...]

In 2006 Arthur Levine published Educating School Teachers, a report about the short-falls of teacher education. Since then the number of teacher education programs has increased–largely due to online degrees–but the quality has not. Arne Duncan gave a speech this week at Teachers College and stated, “Yet, by almost any standard, many if not most of [...]

Education is peculiar. I know a now retired elementary school teacher who proclaims that teaching is the best profession: every day and every year is different, and every day and every year has a start and a finish line. She is right. But education, with all of its newness, also involves a tremendous amount of [...]

Tapped, a blog by the folks at The American Prospect, recently commented on some comments made by Arne Duncan. In particular, the Secretary of Education said great teachers perform “miracles every single day” and effective teachers “walk on water.” The blogger, Dana Goldstein, describes the ideology of Arne Duncan: Teachers can and do educate disadvantaged students, but [...]

So I’m going to tread on some traditionally dangerous waters today and talk about that most taboo of subjects… public school teachers. Two fairly recent articles have got my attention. The first is the opening of a new charter school in NYC that has just hired its “dream team” of teachers and are paying them [...]

Schools need money. California is out of money. Thanks to some fire and brimstone reactions and reporting, the dilemma should be apparent to everyone. The catastrophe, unfortunately, should have been apparent a long time ago. A couple of weeks past a judge prohibited a one-day strike by the teachers’ union; they were reacting to the idea of [...]

Laurent Cantet’s The Class, Entre les Murs in French, accentuates experiences typically ignored in most classroom-based films and elicits new feelings from the audience. Based on François Bégaudeau’s semi-autobiographical book about the life of a teacher in an inner-city school in Paris, we follow the evolution (or de-evolution) of Monsieur Marin, played by Bégaudeau, and [...]