Latest Blog Posts

A Playbook for the Common Core'ites: Part I

June 18, 2013 at 9:10 am

I've long said that the Common Core strikes me as an intriguing effort that could do much good. So, why am I not on board? Because I think the effort has a good chance of stalling out over the next four or five years. And, because standards and assessments are the backbone of pretty much everything else in K-12 schooling, that could tear down all manner of promising efforts on teacher quality, school improvement, and the rest.

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A Handbook for Teacher Leaders

June 14, 2013 at 9:50 am

Was recently sent a slender new book by 2009 California Teacher of the Year Alex Kajitani (a hugely interesting guy who is well worth getting to know). Kajitani's The Teacher of the Year Handbook spells it all out in the subtitle: "The ultimate guide to making the most of your teacher-leader role." Katijani takes the unusual step of providing a wealth of concrete, practical advice on how teachers can go about making their voice heard beyond the walls of the schoolhouse.

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What College Students "Read"

June 12, 2013 at 9:16 am

Hey, so I stumbled across an interesting paper by SuHua Huang, Phillip Jeffrey Blacklock, and Matthew Capps, of Texas's Midwestern State University: "Reading Habits of College Students in the United States." (A good write-up is available here in the Chronicle of Higher Education.) They find that college students are spending less than eight hours a week on academic reading, and that nearly half of their "reading" time consists of perusing Facebook updates...or devouring 140 characters at a time.

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Five Suggestions for Making Edu-Conferences Less Tedious

June 10, 2013 at 9:26 am

I spend a lot of time at various national, state, and local edu-conferences. It seems that that, no matter how thoughtful the organizers and no matter the gathering's politics or point of view, they all tend to feature a lot of really long stretches of tedium.

Now, let me make three things abundantly clear. First, I'm confident that most conferences in most fields are tedious. Second, I admittedly have an awful attention span and get bored way too easily. Third, I'm as guilty of putting together boring conferences as anyone else, so this is intended more as a public service announcement than as any kind of soapbox exercise.

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NCLB's Critical Design Flaw and the Lesson to Take

June 5, 2013 at 4:20 pm

So, looks like we're getting back into NCLB reauthorization mode. I laid out some of the broad context on Monday. While nobody is thrilled with NCLB, there are concerns that the Senate Republicans are going to go too far in "retreating" from the appropriate federal role. Today, I want to set aside for the moment philosophical arguments about the federal role, and talk about the design problems of NCLB, and why it's essential that any vision for reauth steer clear of repeating those.

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Books by Frederick M. Hess