University of Michigan alumnus Sanjay Gupta returned to Ann Arbor this past weekend at the start of the 2012 commencement season and delivered an uncommonly entertaining speech to more than 45,000 people in the Big House. Too many commencement speeches are, well, boring — too long, too conventional, utterly humorless. Not Gupta’s. A neurosurgeon and CNN medical correspondent, Gupta told great stories — including about how his parents remarkably met and about his own stellar career path as he dispensed the requisite advice to more than 10,000 graduating students and their friends and family. “Simply being here,” he said at the beginning, “is incredibly personal for me. You see, not only was the foundation for most of my life conceived in this town. I myself ... Continue reading →

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. By Carol Corbett Burris My 10-year-old neighbor stopped by for a visit. She likes to talk school with the “school lady’ whose dogs she loves to pet. From the look on her face I could tell that this was not going to be the usual school story. She looked far too glum for that. “I want to know why after vacation I have to take test after test after test,” she asked. “I know what math I’m good at. My teacher knows the words I can’t spell. My mom knows ... Continue reading →

Finland’s high-achieving public school system is now part of the conversation about U.S. education reform these days. What, it is often asked, can we learn from Finland? (Plenty, actually, though U.S. reformers consistently ignore the lessons .) The query has been asked and answered so often that it seems like a good time to ask what the United States can’t learn from Finland. So I asked Pasi Sahlberg, author of “ Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland? ” to tackle the subject, which he does, below. Sahlberg is director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation. He has served the Finnish government in various positions, worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. and for the European ... Continue reading →

A new report being officially released today — by a Council of Foreign Relations task force chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice — seems to want very much to be seen as the new “A Nation at Risk,” the seminal 1983 report that warned that America’s future was threatened by a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the country’s public schools. It’s a pale imitation. The U.S. Education Reform and National Security report, to be sure, has some similar language and themes of a Nation at Risk. It says (over and over) that America’s national security is threatened because America’s public schools aren’t adequately preparing young people to “fill the ranks of the Foreign Service, the intelligence community, and the armed forces” (or diplomats, spies ... Continue reading →

This was written by Donna McKenna, an elementary ESL teacher who is passionate about language learners and language learning, and a new mom trying to raise her daughter in a bilingual/bicultural home. This first appeared on her blog, No Sleep ‘til Summer. By Donna McKenna Tell me how you determine the value I add to my class. Tell me about the algorithms you applied when you took data from 16 students over a course of nearly five years of teaching and somehow used it to judge me as “below average” and “average.” Tell me how you can examine my skills and talents and attribute worth to them without knowing me, my class, or my curriculum requirements. Tell me how and I will tell you: How ... Continue reading →

This was written by Vicki Abeles, director of the documentary “Race to Nowhere,”and Abigail A. Baird, associate professor of psychology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Baird’s primary area of research focuses on the neurophysiology of adolescence. By Vicki Abeles and Abigail Baird, Ph. D This coming week most of us will lose an hour of sleep as we set our clocks ahead for Daylight Saving Time. But imagine if you lost an hour of sleep — or even more — every night of your life. That’s what it’s like for our nation’s teens, who are facing an epidemic of sleep deprivation. How bad is it? “Every single high school student I have ever measured in terms of their alertness is a walking zombie,” says ... Continue reading →

This was written by Katie Osgood, a teacher on a child/adolescent inpatient unit at a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. Her students attend all types of schools but most are from low-income minority neighborhoods. This post first appeared on her blog Ms. Katie’s Ramblings. By Katie Osgood I came across a Wall Street Journal opinion piece written by Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp. She rightly condemned the public release of teacher rankings based on student test scores in New York City. I applaud her for speaking out against this disgusting act. But as I read, I became enraged when I saw a story about Ms. Kopp's own experience with her child's teacher.She writes:A few years ago, my son had a teacher who under the current ... Continue reading →

This was written by Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a nonprofit public policy research organization, writes about education, equal opportunity and civil rights. This appeared on the foundation's blog. By Richard D. Kahlenberg Charles Murray, the author of the much-discussed book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 , (and, years ago, the widely discredited volume, The Bell Curve ) has an op-ed in today’s New York Times outlining some solutions to the growing class divide that he depicts in Coming Apart . Among his ideas is to “replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action.” Murray writes: “This is a no-brainer. It is absurd, in 2012, to give the son of a black lawyer an advantage in college ... Continue reading →

This was written by Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He writes the Sociological Eye on Education blog—where this post first appeared—for The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media. By Aaron Pallas What can one say about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s leadership of the New York City public schools that hasn’t been said before? After nearly a decade of mayoral control, the Bloomberg regime is the status quo. Through most of that time, Bloomberg has justified mayoral control as a mechanism for focusing accountability for the achievement of New York’s 1.1 million students. Mayoral control, he argued, placed him solely responsible for the system, and he should be judged ... Continue reading →

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. She is one of the co-authors of the principals’ letter against evaluating teachers by student test scores, which has been signed by nearly 1,400 New York principals. By Carol Corbett Burris New York newspapers just published the evaluation rankings of New York City teachers based on student test scores. A good deal of anger is being directed their way for publishing the results. Although I abhor what the newspapers are doing, much of the anger, I believe is misplaced. This was the inevitable conclusion of an evaluation system, created by ... Continue reading →