Jonathan Kozol Offers Notes To His Book, Letters To A Young Teacher

Jonathan Kozol, whose latest book, Letters To A Young Teacher, is out this month, gives us some insight into the experiences of a first-year teacher full of enthusiasm, idealism and a commitment to engage and inspire her young first-grade students without relentless test preparation.
Read this article by Jonathan in Teacher Magazine to see why [...]

Dan Brown Stirs The Pot on NCLB

Dan Brown, author of the first-year teacher memoir, The Great Expectations School, was interviewed recently on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” where he stirred things up along with Jonathan Kozol, award-winning author of several teaching-related books, including his newest, Letters To A Young Teacher and Doug Mesacar, Assistant Secretary of Education. They had a spirited [...]

Three New Books Offer Inside View of Schools

The new issue of Newsweek features an article interviewing three authors of education-related books coming out this month.
Dan Brown writes about his first-year teacher experience in The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle.
Journalist Linda Perlstein writes a book with a title that says it all: Tested : One American [...]

Virtual School Offers Ways To Build Face-To-Face Community

Yes, it’s true that learning online means less time spent interacting socially with classmates.
But there are creative ways to bring virtual students together face to face.
One virtual school in Wisconsin recently brought 35 families together for a picnic and photo session, and others coordinate field trips and other opportunities for online learners to get [...]

Your Teacher Is On the Phone

Here’s a great article from eSchoolNews about the potential for using the iPhone in education.
Some fascinating quotes:
“Online simulations, games, learning objects, widgets, blogs, and built-in-camera features … could [make] the iPhone the next one-to-one platform for learning.” –Helen Barrett, an Apple Distinguished Educator and recent retiree from the faculty of the College of Education at [...]

Florida Leads in Online Learning

In an excellent Associated Press article on online learning we get the skinny on the status of virtual education, including these highlights:
**Florida Virtual School is one of the nation’s oldest and largest online schools with at least 2700 full-time and up to 52,000 part-time students in grades 6 through 12. The students live in [...]

College Board Annnounces SAT Results

This week, the College Board announced this year’s SAT statistics. Overall, scores were down slightly for the second year in a row on the 81-year-old test which was overhauled in 2005. A record-breaking 1.49 million students took the test this year.
Some highlights of the report:
**student performance declined on all three sections of the [...]

New Poll Shows Half of All Recent Grads Say High School Is Too Easy

A new poll conducted by the Global Strategy Group examines generational impressions of high school and suggests that many students will be bored and unchallenged in school and will leave unprepared for their financial futures.
Among Americans ages 18-29, just 43 percent said their high school experience was very positive and nearly three out of [...]

More People Know About NCLB, And More People Dislike It

A recent poll by Phi Delta Kappa International and the Gallup Organization indicates that more Americans are aware of the No Child Left Behind act–and they’re not necessarily happy about it.
The survey found that Americans remain concerned that the federal education law’s focus on testing students for their proficiency in reading and mathematics often results [...]

Department of Ed Gives $13 Million To Four Groups Training Early Childhood Educators

Last week, US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced that the Department of Education awarded funds totalling $13.3 million to four organizations for programs to train early childhood educators.
The three-year grants were awarded to Georgetown University ($4.2 million), Zero to Three ($4.5 million), the South Carolina Department of Education ($2.4 million), and the Georgia head [...]