What happened in Uvalde and what it says about cowardice, heroism, and if this nation really gives a **** about kids. — Americans like to pretend they’re heroic. Many Americans like to pretend that “a good guy with a gun” is the solution to “a bad guy with a gun.” Most Americans tolerate their governments handing out military equipment to local police departments and most accept that, for cops, equipment plus an…

It isn’t that “explicit training in phonemic awareness” can’t be helpful to some beginning readers, it’s that phonics and phonemes aren’t about the purpose (or the facts) of reading. “[T-ball is] not about [baseball] skill development. Kids don’t have…

As Americans we can choose to love our children, or we can choose to keep worshipping guns. But obviously, we can’t do both. The Republican Party answer to school massacres…

It cannot be the job of public education to decide which 13-year-olds will win, and which will lose. There is a much better answer. When The New York Times published a story on the admissions legal battle at Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School hundreds (and hundreds) of comments appeared. Many of those claimed that altered admissions standards for the “elite” school…

“You know why. Kids simply do not want a record of what they are reading to exist anywhere. Kids do not want the things kids need to know shared with teachers, parents, the law. They know far better than adults the power of misused data, and they are as self-protective as they are determined to find out what is important in their lives.” — I’ve always wanted to show the film Bloody Sunday to high school students and ask them, “If you had been 17 or 18 in the city of Derry in the north of Ireland in 1972, surrounded by incredible injustice…

“Time is the “first technology” because it is the most controlling of all the structures which define “school.” Learning is, of course, timeless. It exists in its own temporal zone, unique to each individual, and different for each thing “learned.” But school is all about the clock.” — Time is not on our side. Specifically, academic time. School schedules frame the world, creating limits on every kind of learning. Let me begin with a 2012 Chris Lehmann quote: “As long as high school students have to travel to eight different classes where eight different teachers talk about grading /…

From deliberately ignorant “truckers” (who clearly don’t need to earn money) to Aaron Rodgers, Rand Paul, and — sadly — people like Kyrie Irving, this isn’t about vaccines at all. But it is all about what is being done to schools right now. — Since the Eisenhower Administration white supremacists have been searching for the magic potion that would turn them into an “oppressed minority.” Like the temper tantrums of every three-year-old when mom and dad bring home a new sibling, this has been a desperate hunt for the love and attention they are…

What if we really changed the college admissions rules? — The destruction of K-12 education in America has now become the primary policy aim of one of our political parties. Whether that be via a Supreme Court that refuses to acknowledge the demolition of civil rights created by segregated schools, or by state legislatures outlawing the teaching of any history…