Education News, Analysis, and Commentary
The Parkland school shooting was three years ago today. One parent of a student killed that day, Alex Schachter’s father, Max, created a non-profit to disseminate best practices about school safety. They’re launching a database of school safety incidents in Florida – School Incident Report to increase transparency and support for schools to do better. An …
Bellwether was named one of Washington’s Best Places To Work by Washingtonian. Was at a school today that uses Summit but as they were telling me about the various tools they use they made a point of distancing themselves from that one…So, the Times story seems to have accomplished what advocates hoped. What’s ironic, of …
OK, it’s awfully hard to defend Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, especially when she shows up again and again at hearings seemingly unprepared to answer what should be obvious questions. Yet there is also an element of the unserious to the whole process. We might remember how when Al Franken “mansplained” to her about testing …
Continue reading “Situational Leadership In Edu, Today In Headlines, Parkland Suit…”
The strike is on in LA. It’s about bigger political agendas than the district (national narratives, political ambitions of people involved, etc…) and so the district’s situation is getting lost. Remember, from 2001-2016 expenditures in LAUSD are up 55%, but salaries and wages 24%. That’s in large part because spending on benefits are up 138% …
2018 holiday book list tomorrow. Lina Bankert on how to think about tight and loose in school networks. Chad Aldeman on how teacher pension data are a treasure trove on questions far beyond just retirement policy. Hailly Korman on the juvenile justice bill on its way to the President’s desk. Related, have you played “Rigged” yet? …
Bonnie O’Keefe and Aara Johnson in the MinnPost on multilingual ed. In The 74 Drew Pache and I look at school safety and what schools can do to to improve security without terrifying kids or turning schools into bunkers. Not a lot of enthusiasm for arming teachers. Revisiting the 1982 Lake Braddock school shooter episode in …
In The 74 today Drew Pache and I take a look at school security. The defeat of the shooter at Covenant School was professional and highly competent, which is not always the case. Still, two things are true at once. The violence there could have been far worse. It was also not the best outcome, …
Continue reading “When It Comes To Schools, The Best Gunfight Is The One That Doesn’t Happen”
It turns out some people don’t realize the Boomtown Rats hit “I Don’t Like Mondays” was born of a school shooting. When the shooter, who killed 2 and wounded 9 with a .22 rifle, was asked by a reporter why she did it she responded, “I don’t like Mondays.” The silicon chip inside her headGets …
Over the past year and a half I wrote a few posts on Loudoun County and how the “narrative” about it was often at odds with the facts on the ground. From an October 2021 post: A common response to those posts was the idea this Loudoun controversy was all partisan, it was transphobic, it …
Last week I wrote about Uvalde and the issues around school safety and firearms safety. Mary Wells and I also wrote this. The short version is that these episodes are shocking but far more rare than most people realize. Schools are safe and trying to convince parents otherwise in pursuit of political goals is counterproductive no …