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I often recall Houston's Apollo 20 experiment, designed to bring "No Excuses" charter school methods to neighborhood schools. Its output-driven, reward and punish policies failed.  It was incredibly expensive, costing $52 million and it didn't increase reading scores. Intensive math tutoring produced test score gains in that subject. The only real success was due to the old-fashioned, win-win, input-driven method of hiring more counselors.

Michels finds no evidence that Grier's test-driven accountability has benefitted students, but he describes the great success of constructive programs that build on kids' strengths and provide them more opportunities.

With the help of local philanthropies, however, Houston has introduced a wide range of humane, holistic, and effective programs. Michels starts with Las Americas Newcomer School, which is "on paper a failing school." It offers group therapy and social workers who help immigrants "navigate bureaucratic barriers—like proof of residency or vaccination records." He then describes outstanding early education programs that are ready to be scaled up, such as  the Gabriela Mistral Center for Early Childhood, and Project Grad which has provided counseling and helped more than 7,600 students go to college.

Students in hybrid classrooms outperformed their peers in traditional classes in all grades and subjects, according to the newest study from two organizations that work with schools in establishing hybrid instruction.

The results come out of those classes where students either took the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests or Keystone Exams to measure academic achievement.

In one example, hybrid learning eighth grade math students at Hatboro-Horsham School District (PA) passed the PSSA tests and Keystone Exams at a rate10 percent higher than their non-hybrid peers in five schools.

I am talking about data-driven instruction–a way of making teaching less subjective, more objective, less experience-based, more scientific.

Data-driven instruction, advocates say, is scientific and consistent with how successful businesses have used data for decades to increase their productivity.

Of course, teachers had always assessed learning informally before state- and district-designed tests. Teachers accumulated information (oops! data) from pop quizzes, class discussions, observing students in pairs and small groups, and individual conferences.

This dispute is just one example of the mathematical acrobatics required to isolate the effect of one teacher on their students' test scores, when so many other factors inside and outside the school's walls affect how students perform.

When a teacher whose students do well on tests moves to a school where test scores were improving the previous year, and average scores continue improving after that teacher arrives, it is hard to know how much of that continued improvement is due to the new teacher and how much to other factors.

“We are really shifting the role of an educator to someone who is more of a data-enabled detective.” He defined a traditional teacher as an “artisanal lesson planner on one hand and disciplinary babysitter on the other hand.” Educators are stakeholders in AltSchool’s eventual success: equity has been offered to all full-time teachers.

At my old school, they were, like, ‘O.K., you want to do architecture? Maybe in college you can do architecture.’ Here some people selected architecture, and we did a whole unit on architecture, and we built models and projects.”

“Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it,” Johnson said.

What’s happened to get people thinking and talking about “different” instead of “better?”

The Web and the technologies that drive it are fundamentally changing the way we think about how we can learn and become educated in a globally networked and connected world. It has absolutely exploded our ability to learn on our own in ways that schools weren’t built for.

In that respect, current systems of schooling are an increasingly significant barrier to progress when it comes to learning.

“most educators aren’t aware of the function bullying serves in school,”

The majority of kids don’t bully other kids and haven’t been victimized

Kids pick on others as a way to secure their standing among their peers or to move up a notch.

The idea that individuals have different learning styles, such as auditory or kinesthetic, is a pernicious myth. Boser compares it to the flat-earth myth — highly intuitive, but wrong.

Almost 90 percent of respondents agreed that simply re-reading material is "highly effective" for learning. Research suggests the opposite.

On the topic of "growth mindset," more than one-quarter of respondents believed intelligence is "fixed at birth". Neuroscience says otherwise.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.

one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death.

What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

We will need to accept that we have to teach in ways that we ourselves were never taught.  We will have to work on shifting from a model of content delivery to a serious emphasis on mentoring students on how to learn. 

We have to do the hard work of teaching them how to work with that content, how to develop a set of learning behaviors that are transferable to everything they do.