Ozymandias: The Poem We Teach and the Poem Shelley Wrote

A close reading of Shelley’s Ozymandias, accompanied by illustrations.

Jonathan Lovell: Martin Luther to Walt Disney to Arne Duncan

Diane Ravitch has re-posted my “Martin Luther and Walt Disney as Teachers of Reading” illustrated essay (see the fourth post below this one), which appeared last month in the University of Missouri’s Engaging Cultures and Voices: The Journal of Learning Through Media. Diane writes: Jonathan Lovell is a professor at San Jose State University in San Jose, California, where he supervises students who plan to teach high school English. In this […]

Redefining the Art of Response

Redefining the Art of Response “And thus do we, of wisdom and of reach, With windlasses and essays of bias, By indirections find directions out” Hamlet, Act II, scene 1, lines 63-65 You know how it is with a class that’s gone unexpectedly well. Gone a lot better than you’d anticipated. You’re convinced it was an accident. The gods were smiling on you. The law of unintended consequences broke in […]

Martin Luther and Walt Disney as Teachers of Reading

As a university supervisor of secondary level student teachers in English at San Jose State, I’ve spent a good deal of time over the past three decades observing students at the middle and high school levels reading and responding to what they read. Often, as I observe these classrooms, I see teachers behaving as if the Lutheran revolution was the only game in town.   You know the general story. Luther […]

Jonathan Lovell Writes Secretary Duncan About Punishing Colleges of Education for Student Scores

This comment was Initially posted on Diane Ravitch’s blog on December 15, 2014 (see here) Jonathan Lovell, who has contributed several posts to this blog, has written to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about his intention to grade colleges of education by the test scores of the students of their graduates. The deadline for submitting comments is January 2. Send comments to: https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/12/03/2014-28218/teacher-preparation-issues Lovell writes: Dear Secretary Duncan, As a teacher educator for […]

Holiday Greetings from the Walton Family Foundation

[Gordon Lafer, Associate Professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center] Jennifer Berkshire, educational investigative reporter extraordinaire and blogger under the moniker of “EduShyster,” has recently entered an exceptional, and exceptionally important, blog posting (see here). It’s an interview with Gordon Lafer [decidedly NOT to be confused with economist Arthur Laffer),  a political economist and an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center. […]

Agency and the Teaching Profession

“Among the . . . young, you see people who have been raised to be approval-seeking machines. They act active, busy and sleepless, but inside they often feel passive and not in control. Their lives are directed by other people’s expectations, external criteria and definitions of success that don’t actually fit them.” David Brooks, “The Agency Moment” (11/13/14 Op-Ed in NYT) I’m excerpting David Brooks recent Op-Ed piece slightly out […]

Common Core “irrelevant to any real change in the opportunities available to low-income students”

Diane Ravitch writes yet another scorching blog post on the search for silver bullets in educational policy (see here). In this post, she succinctly summarizes the resesarch of Professor Iris Rotberg of George Washington University. Ravitch begins by noting that, as recalled by Rotberg, “a study [in 2009] claimed that attendance at a charter school in New York City for several years would virtually close the achievement gap.” We now […]

How is the US doing in international tests of reading, science and math?

“We’ve all heard how poorly our 15-year-olds are doing in comparison with the rest of our competitor countries across the world on the PISA exams (17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 30th in math).” We hear this quote repeated so often these days by high profile politicians and policy makers, it’s sometimes difficult to remember just how misleading and dishonest it is. Blogger Lloyd Lofthouse has performed the inestimable […]

Robert Reich on widening inequality in school funding

Another spot-on blog posting by Robert Reich. Robert Reich on widening inequality in school funding.