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"The most frequent cliché I hear regarding educational policy is, "We're doing this for the good of the students." We undoubtedly mean that, but the fact that students are not included in district-wide and school-wide decision making essentially excludes them from expressing what they perceive as "for the good of the students." It should be conventional wisdom that including students directly and empowering them to help shape high school and district policy would be educationally beneficial for both schools and students."

"The real question we should be asking is, "What do we believe should happen after the end of the school day to help ensure that students retain what they have learned and are primed to learn more?" Any answer with the word, "work" in its name, as in "homework," is not typically going to be met with eagerness or enthusiasm by students. Ideally, we want children to understand that they are always learners. In school, we refer to them as "students" but outside of school, as children, they are still learners. So it makes no sense to even advertise a "no homework" policy in a school. It sends the wrong message. The policy should be, "No time-wasting, rote, repetitive tasks will be assigned that lack clear instructional or learning purposes.""

Great overview of the current education landscape

"English teachers, I ask that you incorporate more sci-fi into your curriculum. Librarians, bring books into your libraries that include protagonists of all shapes, shades, and perspectives. Other educators, think about the following: how other books beyond 1984 can help us examine polities; how books set in the distant future can help us teach evolutionary biology; what dystopian novels about despotic regimes can teach children about a school's zero-tolerance policies. We shouldn't be in the business of fostering mindless containers of knowledge, and science fiction can be an invaluable tool for examining and improving the learning environments we create for our students."

"The rigidity of the current standards-based system could present a problem as personalized learning tries to grow - although some hope advocates on both sides will find compromise that strengthen both ideas. "There's a conflict in the sense that the standards and accountability movement has focused on grade-level standards," said Sara Mead, a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based policy group, "and the idea that equity to some extent is based on getting everybody to master the same content at the same time.""

"What teachers say they really need isn't free food and a once-a-year exercise in flattery. What they want, they say, is for their profession to be respected in a way that accepts educators as experts in their field. They want adequate funding for schools, decent pay, valid assessment, job protections and a true voice in policy making."

"In the first large-scale analysis of new systems that evaluate teachers based partly on student test scores, two researchers found little or no correlation between quality teaching and the appraisals teachers received. The study, published Tuesday in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association, is the latest in a growing body of research that has cast doubt on whether it is possible for states to use empirical data in identifying good and bad teachers."

Interesting article on grading policies and inquiry. Some of the ideas could be applied to portfolio assessment.

Arthur Levine has spent much of his career writing about how tough it is for poor minority kids to get into college. But rarely has this widely respected educator and former president of Teachers College at Columbia University written more urgently than in his latest book, Unequal Fortunes.It was a journey that took him back to his childhood in the South Bronx to figure out why he made it and why most kids living there now don't. "My hope is that this book shows this community is isolated not by choice but by circumstance, and I hope that it shows that the community is a dangerous one to live in. It's hard to blame them for conditions like that," Levine says.Unlike so many of Levine's books, Unequal Fortunes is not just about failed institutions and policies. It's more of a plea for readers to peer into poor children's harrowing lives and become advocates for what Levine calls a Schindler's List kind of change - maybe not to save all children but to rescue as many as possible.

"Four years ago, I quit zeroes. They are no longer allowed in my classroom. I still have F's which communicate, in number and learning, performances well-below standard. Kids still receive failing scores in my classroom, but I don't tack on punishment, additional insult to injury in the form of sub-50% scores; 50% is now the lowest score possible in my class. The kids know from the mark that they have failed to meet standard; I don't need to crush them more with added penalties. It makes sense to me, it makes sense to my kids, and it makes sense to parents. It's also beginning to make sense to some of my colleagues, who, too, have adopted a no-zero policy. But not all. Some of my colleagues have accused me of malpractice, suggesting I am ruining kids' lives by not teaching them a lesson. And I guess of that I am guilty. But I sleep at night knowing that I have given kids a fair shake, and while I may not be teaching them the harsh lessons of life, I am giving them opportunity by creating a realm of possibility in room 219."

"There's an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby's Tom Buchanan, as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century. It's not just their infamous carelessness, the smashing-up of things and creatures that propels Tom's denouement and has seemed to many a Twitter user to be the animating force behind Trump's policy and personnel decisions. The two men, real and fictional, mirror each other in superficial but telling ways."

"While individual efforts are valuable, students can learn the skills of collaborating on civic issues by working together as a whole class. Here are the five broad steps they should follow: Identify issues important in their lives and community, and decide on one to address. Research the chosen issue and decide how to change or improve the situation. Plan an action, including determining a goal for change; identifying who or what body in the community has power to make the change; and deciding how to approach that person or those people. Carry out the action through letters, talks, meetings with officials, policy proposals, and activities, depending on the specific goals of the project. Reflect on the effort when it is over in order to understand their successes, challenges, and ways to continue learning in the future. Two features are especially crucial to making the experience authentic and empowering. First, students must own the key choices and decisions and figure out solutions to problems themselves, so they discover that they can do this. The teacher facilitates the work, of course, but leaves as much of the decision-making as possible to the students. Second, the work should culminate in some action focused on change in the school or community. It's not enough to just talk about change, practice mock legislatures, or serve in a soup kitchen (as valuable as these activities may be). Only when students see adults listening to them with respect, do they realize they have a voice and can make a difference in their world. Their efforts may not always succeed, but in being heard they come to value the studying, reading, writing and planning that they have done."

"The debate about mis- and dis-information has intensified, but, as our report argues, we're still failing to appreciate the complexity of the phenomenon at hand. The report refrains from using the term 'fake news' and urges journalists, academics and policy-makers to do the same. This is for two reasons. First, the term is woefully inadequate to describe the complexities of information disorder. Second, it has been appropriated by politicians worldwide to describe news organizations whose coverage they find disagreeable, and, in this way, has become a mechanism by which the powerful clamp down upon, restrict, undermine and circumvent the free press. Our new definitional framework introduces three types, elements and phases of information disorder. We describe the differences between the three types of information using dimensions of harm and falseness: Mis-information is when false information is shared, but no harm is meant. Dis-information is when false information is knowingly shared to cause harm. Mal-information is when genuine information is shared to cause harm, often by moving private information into the public sphere."

"Questions for teachers, parents and students, from an educational psychologist"