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Transforming Schools to Match the Needs of a Minority-Majority Nation
There’s an Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post in which the New America Foundation’s Maggie Severns urges states to rethink teacher preparation in light of our country’s ongoing shift to a minority-majority nation. As Severns explains, immigrant youths and the children of immigrants are among the lowest-performing groups of students in U.S. public schools, AND they will account for virtually all growth in the workforce over the next 40 years.
Read More »Classroom Closers?
After spending yesterday afternoon watching my beloved Boston Red Sox blow another game in the ninth inning, I was reminded of a simple fact: some losses are more emotionally significant than others.
As my disappointment threatened to disrupt the rest of my Memorial Day – we were so close! – I realized there’s a good argument to be made that the one statistic in the data-obsessed world of professional baseball most likely to at least partially reflect the collective confidence of a team is the one the Sox’s shaky new closer, Alfredo Aceves, failed to earn for his team yesterday: the save.
Read More »Bill Gates — Close, But Not Quite, on Teacher Evaluations
There’s an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times in which Joe Nocera discusses the Gates Foundation’s ambitious new efforts to crack the code of teacher assessment and evaluation, a valid goal is ever there was one. Piloting a new system in four districts — and providing local leaders with tens of millions of dollars to implement it — the Gates team seems to have recognized the limited value of test scores; in these communities, they comprise only a small part of a teacher’s evaluation scorecard.
Read More »Living the DaVita Way
On a chartered bus in Nashville, surrounded by colorfully-clad nurses and office administrators, I knew I was in for a different sort of experience when the woman next to me found out I was a newbie, leaned closer and assured me: “Everyone remembers their first.”
It’s not what you think.
In fact, it was the annual conference for the 41,000 employees of DaVita, a Fortune 500 company that specializes in renal care – and, as it turns out, in creating a transformational organizational culture.
Read More »Kid Whisperers
In theory, Buck is a documentary about horses, and a cinematic profile of the laconic cowboy who has learned to speak their silent animal language.
In fact, Buck is a film about the invisible line that connects being to being, and the ways that line can serve as either a tether or a bridge.
Read More »Stories of Transformation: Blue (School) Skies Ahead
It was fifteen years ago, but I still remember the first time I saw Blue Man Group. Watching those bald blue aliens discover how to eat a Twinkie, or investigate the queasy vibrations of a giant Jello cake, or climb the walls of the theater to learn more about the people who were sitting there – well, anyone who’s seen the show knows there’s nothing quite like it.
Since that time, Blue Man Group has become an international phenomenon, and an unlikely aesthetic portal through which to vicariously experience the wonders of inquiry, discovery and mischief. And now, those same core ingredients are at the heart of a remarkable new school in New York City – a school I got to visit and see through the eyes of two of its founders, “Blue Man” Matt Goldman and his wife, Renee Rolleri.
Read More »Hey Parents – It’s Time to Stop Playing Favorites
The other night over dinner, hours after my mother-in-law had returned home to New York, I casually asked my son Leo: “What was your favorite part of the weekend?”
As I watched him stare blankly back at me, struggling to find an answer, I found myself wishing I could have a parental do-over. Why do we ask children this question so often? Would it make a difference if we asked it a different way?
Read More »The Politics of Education – Dueling Budgets
This weekend, I was on CNN to speak about President Obama’s and Representative Ryan’s dueling budget proposals, and asked to comment on which of the two lighted the surer path to true education reform. See for yourself:
Read More »Why You Should See “Bully” – and What We Should All Do in Response
Bully, the new film that opens today in theaters across the country, begins with the image of a heavy-diapered toddler named Tyler, happily staggering across the wet grass in front of his family’s Oklahoma home. Moments later, we learn of Tyler’s painful path in the adolescent years that followed – years that were marked by […]
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