Posts in Category Schools

In the Interest of Full Disclosure

I am a public school teacher. I teach First Year Spanish. I have been teaching for 15 years. I am a parent. My children are students in a democratic free school.



In the interest of full disclosure, I feel the need to divulge a few things to the IDEA audience.



I AM a public school teacher, in a non-democratic school. Students do have a choice in course selection, but often do not receive the classes they ask for in their schedule. Kids can choose to ditch class, and face the repercussions. Students can also choose their level of engagement in each class, and to some extent the grade they will earn for the course. Those are the choices the students can make, and the extent to which...

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Posted on Sep 03, 2010 - 10:22 AM by Alison Bagg Brink

New assessments - are they better?

Secretary Duncan and the U.S. Department of Education announced the awarding of $330 million yesterday to two consortia of states under the Race to the Top Assessment program for their proposals to create a new generation of assessments. This is on top of the $4 billion announced in the past months to the state-wide Race to the Top competition. The Department of Education framed the contest as one that would create assessments that help "prepare students for college and the workplace, that more validly measure student knowledge and skills, that better reflect good instructional practices, and that support a culture of continuous improvement in education." The plan is for the assessments...

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Posted on Sep 03, 2010 - 08:44 AM by Dana Bennis

Pray For Doubt

Pray for Doubt

...is a phrase I read sometime somewhere. "Pray for doubt," the author advocated. At first I didn't understand why anyone would want to ask for Doubt. Isn't it better to be sure? Isn't Certainty the ironclad, surefire way to know something Good and Right and True and to hell with all the rest of it? I mean, what would doubt do for anyone on a mission?!

I'll tell you what doubt does: It gives you pause. And pause gives you time to step back. And stepping back gives you perspective. And perspective gives "you" (yes, ME) a chance to see things more clearly.

I had a moment of doubt the other day. Oddly enough this occurred while I was reading this article about...

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Posted on Aug 06, 2010 - 08:29 AM by Cian Sawyer

The Big Why

Why do I want to start a school anyway?

First and foremost, there is one key person who played a major role in diverting my life onto this track (though thinking about it now, I know it was inevitable). So in some ways she was more like an turning point in the course of this river of my life's work that was always bound to end up in the ocean of education(al reform).

A woman by the name of Lisa Sawyer McCartney took a chance on me and hired me to teach at her well respected and very succesful pre-school (now elementary school), Unicorn Village in April 2001. In hindsight it feels like I blinked and went from working in retail (to somewhere in between starting my Bachelor's in Early...

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Posted on Jul 10, 2010 - 10:23 AM by Cian Sawyer