After more than 35 years in the education realm, retiring Oklahoma City Public Schools Superintendent Karl Springer said that he is most proud of three policies he helped implement. He brought the “Great Expectations” curriculum to elementary schools and Teach for America to the district and put into place a year-long school schedule that allowed […]
John Thompson
Posted inNews
Avoiding a fiasco in education
High-stakes testing forced schools to narrow the curriculum, focus on remediation and test prep, and commit to basic skills instruction that verges on educational malpractice. Worse, states must start using primitive bubble-in tests for teacher evaluations. Teachers are also supposed to turn on a dime and teach the opposite types of tests, known as Common […]
Posted inNews
Common sense about Common Core
Now they must also implement policies that may or may not make sense, such as creating high school academies, retaining third-graders who don’t pass reading tests, remediating seniors who have not passed four graduation examinations and avoiding state takeover of schools that fail according to the state’s report card. Even more time and money must […]
Posted inNews
Embracing early childhood education
In contrast to previous mandates for bubble-in quick fixes, the administration now endorses collaborative and coordinated efforts emphasizing socio-emotional interventions and diagnostic data so that children read for comprehension by third grade. He now heeds the wisdom of generations of scholars, including Nobel Prize winner James Heckman, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and many […]
Posted inNews
The fallacy of test-driven school reform
Credit: Mark Hancock I have taught in the inner city for 19 years, have served on the MAPS for Kids Steering Committee and have been intimately involved in local education reform. MAPS promised policies based on our best social science and the collaborative exchange of evidence. We promised high-quality early education, intensive instruction of reading […]