Washington State and South Carolina have recently proposed alternative paths to the principalship. Apparently education is the only profession that believes that it can increase the quality of those working in the profession, teachers and administrators, by reducing the minimum qualifications to enter. Actually, education professionals are not making such ludicrous recommendations, because unlike most [...]
Archive for the ‘False Assumptions’ Category
When it comes to classes, size does matter!
March 6th, 2011
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by Stuart Singer, The Teacher Leader Bill Gates is a marvelous advocate for education in America. He has clearly demonstrated his commitment both in time and money. His views as an extraordinarily successful businessman and an educational outsider are both provocative and productive. In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Mr. Gates has outlined [...]
Ask the teachers!
December 21st, 2010
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Recently, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, in preparation for an article on the accuracy of school incident reports, asked me to respond to the following question: "Do security incident reports adequately describe the climate of a school?" Here is my complete response. The answer is simple. No single data point can accurately depict student [...]
Less Failure Does Not Equal More Success
November 22nd, 2010
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by Stuart Singer, The Teacher Leader Winston Churchill may have defined it best. “Success,” according to the former British Prime Minister, “is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” As his country’s leader in the midst of a world-wide conflict, it is clear that he understood the critical [...]
Way Too Many Misconceptions
September 7th, 2010
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by Stuart Singer, The Teacher Leader As everyone knows by now, the Los Angeles United School District decided to publish a list ranking all of the system’s 6,000 elementary school teachers based on students’ standardized test results. One of the most prominent proponents of the proposal was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who said that [...]
Summer School: The Key to School Reform? Part 1
May 12th, 2010
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You’ve heard the old adage, if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting the same results. In the same way, if we keep holding learning time constant, we will continue to have significant numbers of our students, who simply need more time to master some subjects, fail. It is time to rethink our [...]
Michael Fullan On False Assumption #3: Merit Pay
April 28th, 2010
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Some high ranking officials and several big foundations believe that merit pay for teachers will raise student achievement. I worked in a merit pay system that we were all happy to see end. Merit pay never improved student achievement but was extremely divisive. Instead of encouraging teachers to work collaboratively, merit pay placed them in [...]
False Assumptions Lead to Misguided Policy: Part 1
April 26th, 2010
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Think about it, if the first assumption we make is false, then every behavior that comes after that is wrong. What if the entire school reform effort was based on a number of false assumptions? Recently, I participated in a meeting of high-ranking education officials. After the meeting, I quickly wrote down a list of [...]
