Conservatives have many ideological complaints about the current public education system: the way it indoctrinates their children, the way it teaches them history, the way it institutionalizes them. Their most recent issue (which, arguably, many liberal parents have a problem with, too) is over the federal government’s mandate that a transgender boy at a Chicago-area school be given full access to a girls’ locker room.

So, given conservatives’ growing laundry list of complaints, why don’t they just take their kids out of the public education system? Why don’t they simply put them in a private school or homeschool? Such an action would show conservatives are backing up their talk with walk.

I don’t wish to be combative with this post, nor is it necessarily a validation of the conservative complaints. I’m just honestly confused… Continue reading →

How do we design classrooms and education systems that truly reflect the brilliance of our most underrepresented children? How do we create learning communities for the greatest thinkers and most thoughtful people for the world? As an elementary school teacher focused on multilingual, immigrant, and refugee students, I’ve been asking myself these questions for years and am convinced that there is now more potential than ever to answer these questions in tangible ways. Continue reading →

A parent in Rutherford county, Tenn., refused to let her daughter complete this assignment in a Studies Weekly publication, which asked students to write from the perspective of a plantation owner. — Image from Facebook post

When Nikita Walker, a parent in Rutherford County, Tenn., saw that her daughter’s homework asked the then-5th grader to write a few sentences in support of slavery, she was confused—and angry.

Walker’s daughter was given the assignment last year in an issue of Studies Weekly, a national social studies publication that presents lessons on history, government, and society in a newspaper format, designed to be consumed week-by-week. Continue reading →

Teachers and education activists march from Riverfront Park to the Oregon State Capitol for a day of action Wednesday, May 8, 2019 in Salem, Ore. Tens of thousands of teachers across Oregon walked off the job Wednesday to demand more money for schools, holding signs and wearing red shirts that have become synonymous with a nationwide movement pushing lawmakers to better fund education. — Anna Reed/Statesman-Journal via AP

The most remarkable thing about the recent wave of teacher strikes may be the widespread public support for something that’s ultimately going to put a squeeze on the taxpayer’s wallet. Continue reading →

The American Psychological Association found that teens are more stressed than adults.

May can be a particularly dangerous month for schoolchildren. According to 13 years of recent data collected on mental health emergency room visits at Connecticut Children’s Mental Health Center in Hartford, May typically has the most. Continue reading →

Whether it’s security cameras, armed guards, or psychological screenings, mass schooling is becoming increasingly prison-like.

A worrying trend is emerging in schools across the country. With increasing regularity, school districts are tracking students’ mental health and raising flags if a screening shows something amiss. Continue reading →

Imagine if Congress were to enact a law that required everyone to attend church on Sundays. The overwhelming majority of Americans would go up in arms. The concept of religious liberty is so deeply ingrained in our American heritage that there is no way that people, including devout Christians, would accept such a law. That heritage was enshrined in the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from enacting such a law.

Now, suppose things had been the exact opposite… Continue reading →

The earliest ancestor to our system of government-mandated schooling comes from 16th-century Germany.

Image Credit: NPS Photo by John Tobiason

~ Part I ~

While it’s almost universally understood that the American school system is underperforming, “reform,” too, is almost universally prescribed as the solution. Yet in other walks of life, bad ideas are not reformed—they are eliminated and replaced with better ones. Our school system is rarely identified as a bad idea.

The system is reflexively left alone while the methods are the bad ideas that get cycled in and out: open concept schools, multiple intelligences, project-based learning, universal design for learning, merit-based pay, vouchers, charters, and most recently, educational neuroscience. Every decade or so we are told by the pedagogic experts that they have found an answer to our school’s problems. The trouble is, they’re looking right past the problem.
Continue reading →

To all you math wizz out there…

1. Teaching Math In the 1960’s

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the selling price. What is his profit? Continue reading →

What will it take to reshape our care-worn system? Money, talent, and time.

Editor’s NOTE: There are times when Metropolis Café finds it beneficial to take a time machine back some years – just to study how our Public Education system was being looked upon at that time. The following was written in early 2002. How far we have fallen – and the same questions are being asked 17 years later. ~ Ed.

More teachers, more vouchers, more computers, more charter schools, more tests, more federal money, more local control, more, more, more. The calls constitute a cacophony of pleas and threats, warnings and promises from public figures, parents, teachers, and other citizens – all asking for more learning.

As each call is debated, pushed, shot down, revived, and discarded again, we move around the same endless circle, once again looking for a place to stick another Band-Aid on an institution suffering from malnutrition and structural inadequacy. Continue reading →

Kindergarteners Noah Bellamy, L, and Morgan Creek read together during their kindergarten class library visit at Peabody Elementary School on Wednesday, February 25, 2015, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

There is a newly published study out of the University of Virginia titled, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?” (based on a 2014 working paper), which finds, not surprisingly, that it is. This work should not be confused with the the 2009 study “Crisis in the Kindergarten” from the nonprofit Alliance for Childhood, which said:

Kindergartners are now under great pressure to meet inappropriate expectations, including academic standards that until recently were reserved for first grade.
Continue reading →

From the Father of Education himself,

Noah Webster

Noah Webster’s would define the word in his 1828 dictionary For the American Language:

“EDUCA’TION, noun [Latin; educatio.] The bringing up, as of a child, instruction; formation of manners. education comprehends all that series of instruction and discipline which is intended to enlighten the understanding, correct the temper, and form the manners and habits of youth, and fit them for usefulness in their future stations. To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties.” Continue reading →

A Nationwide effort?

Saying too much money is wasted on duplication, state lawmakers took the first steps earlier this month to force consolidation of the more than 200 school districts in the state – some of which are in the West Valley.

And the combinations could occur without voter approval.

The proposal by Rep. John Fillmore, R-Apache Junction (Arizona), would eliminate any separate elementary and high school districts that now exist. Instead, they automatically would become unified districts no later than July 1, 2024.

But HB 2139, approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on a 6-3 party-line vote, does not stop there. It would require every school board in the state to annually determine how much money could be saved by not just unification but also with consolidation with other adjacent districts. Continue reading →

~ Forewords ~
Who even remembers? After all, it happened in ancient times. November 9, 2016, to be exact, at newly elected president Donald Trump’s victory rally, when he so memorably said, “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none.” During that campaign he had similarly sworn that he would deliver a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending over the decade to come. And when he finally unveiled his vaunted plan, in February 2018, for no less than $1.5 trillion dollars, it promptly disappeared without a trace in a Congress his party still controlled. In its wake, the only infrastructure left obsessively on the president’s mind or on anybody’s table was that “great, great wall” of his (which won’t get built either). Continue reading →

“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.”

The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.

Photo Illustration by Tracy Ma/The New York Times; Getty Images (woman and child)

A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K. Continue reading →