Today’s guest blogger is Carolyn Sharette, executive director of the American Preparatory Academies, a set of charter schools operating in the Salt Lake Valley. APA has recently opened a school in West Valley that serves many immigrant and low-income families. … Continue reading»

Along with most teachers, I think that the No Child Left Behind law has some serious flaws and needs significant revision. So I was pleased that the Deseret News published a story yesterday about the pending reauthorization of No Child … Continue reading»

One of my greatest frustrations as a department chair was managing the textbook budget. Social studies textbooks — especially textbooks for government and economics, both subjects that I taught — were a little out of date even by the time … Continue reading»

Whether or not higher education will be the next”bubble” to burst — and as I’ve blogged before, I think there’s good evidence that it is — there’s clearly a demand for less expensive routes to a decent job. So I … Continue reading»

Evaluating teaching . . . or learning? As threatened, I wanted to take a look at the recently released Utah Teaching Standards and see how well they match up with recommendations from the Gates Foundation’s Measurement of Effective Teaching (MET) … Continue reading»

While value-added teacher assessments have received a boost from the recent NBER study, virtually everyone in the education field — from scorched earth reformers to heels planted status quo defenders — still agrees that teacher evaluations need to include more … Continue reading»

My post on “Does ‘for profit’ mean ‘anti-education’?” generated the longest-running discussion I’ve seen yet . . . and still another, at least to my mind, bad argument against online learning: Some students may take courses generated by providers outside … Continue reading»

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has decided to pick a fight with the teachers’ unions over teacher evaluations. As the Wall Street Journal reports this morning, “Mr. Cuomo gave unions and the state Education Department 30 days to settle a … Continue reading»

While I’m not always a New York Times fan, I like the paper’s “Room for Debate” feature. This morning’s debate topic is “Can a Few Years’ Data Reveal Bad Teachers?” The lead article recaps the recent National Bureau of Economic … Continue reading»

As promised, I am posting a guest blogger’s piece on Mitt Romney’s positions on education. Dr. Burke Sorenson currently teaches at Salt Lake Community College and the University of Phoenix. He has taught at every educational level: elementary, junior high, … Continue reading»