South Carolina is looking at passing a law allowing teachers to be members of the school boards for charter schools where they teach. In some states teachers can be on the boards of schools in other school districts but in general teachers are not allowed to serve on the school boards of districts…

I ran into an interesting article today about struggles keeping the Romansch language alive in Switzerland. Romansch is one of the four official languages of that country but the population of native speakers is on a decline. One of the problems is that there are several written dialects and that…

Chris Higgins has a great post about all the things he is learning during his first year of teaching that they didn't teach him when he was studying to become a teacher. One of the things he doesn't talk about but that I hear a lot about is that teachers are not taught to use technology. They are…

Sometimes, all too often it seems, school administrators and teachers act too much like the children they are supposed to be mentoring. The worst of it is when the rush to judge students harshly. One expects children to jump to conclusions, do inadequate "research" and judge people based…

A couple of posts by Cal Teacher (here, here and here) have gotten me moved me to write about something I have been thinking about for a while - making high schools smaller either by a school within a school model or splitting them up. The Gates Foundation among other groups have been pushing this…

The other week I attended a good sized programming competition at St Joseph's College in Patchogue New York. It was a great event and very well run. There were over 100 high school students in 34 teams representing about 16-18 high schools. I'd love to point you to an online news article about it…

I found a facinating article on the sucees and struggles of a Catholic high school in Harlem today. Rice High School spends less than half per student as the city's public schools and yet:A public high school principal who lifts the minority graduation rate above 50 percent will win accolades for…

You know every so often someone writes a simple blog post that when you read it makes you want to hit your head and say "how in the world did I not think of that?" Vicki A Davis did that today in her Cool Cat Teacher blog. No wonder she is one of the most linked to education blogs around.…

The title of this post is a statement I have heard from teachers, in one form or another, more often than I can count. Often times it feels like people say it to justify boring students out of their minds. Not always of course. And just as often those same teachers do use entertaining techniques,…

I spent today at EduBloggerCon - a pre-unconference at NECC. At one of the sessions I made that comment that "what goes on in school stays in school”. What I mean by that is that students think that what they learn (or at least what teachers are teaching) doesn't matter outside of…