Our guest columnist today is John Thompson, an Oklahoma City teacher and writer who comments frequently on this blog. He has an unsettling take on the effects of school choice in his city. — Jay Since November when the Daily Oklahoman described the violence and the low academic performance of my old school, Oklahoma [...]
Sol Stern shines a welcome spotlight on New York Citys Core Knowledge Language Arts pilot program in a Daily News op-ed. Launched to considerable fanfare under then-Chancellor Joel Klein three years ago, the program has quietly continued in ten low-income elementary schools. It represents a ray of reading hope in the city, says Stern, and one that stands in sharp [...]
After Graduation, I now have a lot of time to “reflect upon my MIT experience.” Technically, I’m not kicked out from the blogs until the end of the summer, so I hope to continue writing a few blogs discussing various aspects that I’ve come to gain a better understanding of after my four years here, [...]
This is a description of my trip to China in January 2007 from my book titled, Sakai: Free as in Freedom. It would be my first trip to China and I would be accompanied by Zhen Qian from the University of Michgan. Zhen was a senior Sakai developer at the University of Michigan responsible for [...]
I saw the D.C. schools headline in The Post, “600 instructors could be fired in July.” Here we go again, I said. Summer is often a bad time for urban school districts, as officials fill teacher openings too late to get the best candidates. If the D.C. schools are waiting until July to see whether [...]
It is kind of weird. Over the past two years, I have been putting a lot of energy into IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability and even have a new series of tattoos that are about IMS BLTI that are healing as I write this blog post. It has been my focus for a long time. [...]
Many of the most prominent names in education reform attended private schools as children, observes Michael Winerip of the New York Times. Does their background “give them a much-needed distance and fresh perspective to better critique and remake traditional public schools?” he asks. “Does it make them distrust public schools — or even worse — [...]