Eduskeptic

Earlier this month, California State Superintendent of Schools, Tom Torlakson, released a top ten list of suggestions for students and parents, ostensibly to celebrate National Teacher Appreciation Week. It contained the usual smattering of ancient exhortations to students and teachers. Do your best, raise your hand, turn in your homework, that sort of thing. Nothing...

Are you and yours spending too much time tethered to the electronic grid? It has been reported that children spend a little over 4 hours per day, every day, in front of an electronic gadget of some kind. While it is true that this doesn’t apply to all children and all families, it...

March brings basketball crazieness, quirky weather, and the steady roll out of spring across the U.S. It’s a pretty exciting month. Educators have spent the last 7 months or so teaching, re-teaching, testing, laughing and crying, in their classrooms, getting ready for spring. This is the time of year when so many things come together...

It’s March. March brings with it the Vernal Equinox, the transition from winter to spring, college basketball hysteria, spring break at the schools, and what has become the annual pink slip invitations to teachers to join the unemployment line, which is true March madness. School districts throughout California, all 1,000+ of them, have sent out...

Classrooms are generally good places to learn something, no matter your age. We have all spent a rather large amount of time in them. Some of the time was good, some bad, some ugly. It’s just the way things are. Not everything is perfect. It is safe to say that not all learning takes place...

It is impossible to go through an entire week without reading something in the newspaper or the e- media about schools and testing. There is, it does seem, a bottomless well of theories and opinions on who, how, and when to test everything pertaining to the public school system. Quite a few of the big...

School is meant to be a place where learning takes place. Drudgery isn’t actually supposed to be part of it, although most of us could easily dredge up an instance or two when that’s what we think we went through. It’s a fine balance between learning, really learning, and simply repeating factoids. It’s not that the...

On Wednesday, Jan. 25, Michelle Rhee and Kevin Johnson were in Sacramento to hold what was termed “round table discussions” regarding education. Just a bit of a fact finding experience, in several different large California cities. Rhee’s stated goal is for her StudentsFirst company to be a “voice” for children in education. The piece on...

Diane Ravitch, in an interview in the Sacramento Bee on Saturday, Jan. 21, mentioned something that the Eduskeptic has written about before, and most likely will again. Ravitch doesn’t think that there should be an “alternate path” to become a teacher. I agree. There are those who believe that, somehow, becoming a teacher doesn’t really...

Diane Ravitch, has a long history of working within various educational systems. She has a doctorate in history from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, along with an impressive curriculum vitae. She has been quite active since earning it in 1975. Her focus was on history and education history. She started out championing...