Parents ‘n Schools

When I was in law school, a friend told me that watching me study was like watching a child learning to tie their shoes. A study in concentration. (Or fumbling… not sure now.)
In the March 2008 issue of ASCD’s Educational Leadership, Jennifer Hartley, a 5th Grade teacher in Tennessee, writes about the success of her […]

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One of the things you learn in engineering school is “project management” and the value of charting/mapping/planning “the steps along the way” to a completed project, task or solution. (You also learn that water very consistently runs downhill, you can’t push on a rope and an engineer is “someone who can do with one dollar […]

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Imagine what parent involvement would be like if children went to school with only a single teacher… and nobody else. Not a one-room schoolhouse, a one-teacher schoolhouse.
Imagine the delegation among teacher and parents. Imagine the genuine partnership. Imagine all the families getting to know — by working with them in turns — all the children. […]

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Part of my involvement in government schooling was serving for the better part of two years on a steering committee for a multi-million-dollar initiative aimed at school improvement. Over nearly 9 years this particular program has received around half a billion dollars. It was envisioned as something of a R&D program for schoolers to develop, […]

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“What I concluded following my 16 months as ambassador — and based on my work in the U.N. system dating back to my earliest service in the Reagan administration — was that efforts at marginal or incremental reform of the U.N. are doomed to failure. Instead, I believe that we should focus on one issue: […]

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If you are acquainted with a recent high school graduate, or a young person in or around that age, and they’re twiddling their thumbs looking for something to read, find them a copy of Canadian philanthropist/investor/businessman Seymour Schulich’s recent book “Get Smarter”. Get yourself a copy, if you do not yet have one. It’s excellent […]

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“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” — […]

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I noted with interest when our provincial budget was released that included on one of the line items was a description that another $200 million was going to go toward continuing the “successful” Class Size Initiative. This is a program championed by paid educators aimed at reducing class sizes by a few students per class […]

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Out of all the things the Fraser Institute publishes and press releases and strives to bring to the world’s attention on issues ranging from energy to insurance to international trade, guess what is the Number One Thing (by far) that the media picks up on, reproduces and amplifies?
You guessed it. School Performance Studies… their various […]

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Pedagogy is one of those ten-dollar-words that get tossed around in the world of schooling which help to make it hard to follow without a glossary at hand. What I think it means is “theory”… as in a certain pedagogy is a certain theory of schooling… a certain way of schooling… a certain approach. They […]

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