Nancy E. Bailey's Blog, page 77

The Kennedy Center Honorees’ School Backgrounds

On Tuesday, December 30th, the Kennedy Center Honors will be televised. We know the names of the Honorees. I thought it would be interesting to find whether these individuals were influenced to become the artists they are today by their schooling. I also looked at the 2013 Honorees. While information about schools is a bit […]

Have Yourself a Common Core Christmas…A Close Reading Parody

As you snuggle next to a roaring fire and reach for the family’s favorite Christmas poem, don’t forget we live in a Common Core world now where close reading rules even for the youngest among us. Follow the script! And don’t forget you are to read the poem three times. Of course, I really believe […]

Art Charters v. Traditional No Art Schools

Why are the arts removed from traditional public schools while at the same time charter schools are given carte blanche to create art schools? The New York Times has an article about Voice Charter School where students sing and “outperform” their peers…. Academically, students at Voice did significantly better than the city average on New […]

How to Size-Up an Ed. Reformer in Five Minutes–TN Example

Due to troubling school reforms like Common Core, it is important to study those who are running schools very carefully. Whenever anyone new is placed in a position of power, we must figure out what they will do to improve public schools and be good stewards of children. This isn’t always easy, because the language […]

What’s Behind the Teacher Shortage/Crisis? Or is there One?

There has been much talk recently about a critical teacher shortage, that many say nothing will solve unless drastic measures are taken. Just remember, serious teacher shortage talk was emphasized in 1990, and, voila, we got Teach for America (TFA). Before that, there were attempts to address teaching shortages in the emergency areas–special ed., science […]

The Damn, Destroy then Privatize Special Ed. Plan

Watching the demise of our public schools, and the dissolution of special education services, we see a common ploy that takes place within local school districts. Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine wrote about how, after Katrina, elderly and ailing–free market Guru–Milton Friedman, with help from the Bush administration, used the NOLA devastation to shutter […]

How Common Core Disparages Teachers and Drives Critical Moral Thinking out of the Adolescent English/Language Arts Classroom

Why are schools and teachers permitting Common Core to take over what they have always done well, teaching middle and high school English/Language Arts (ELA) classes? And how destructive is it to students who don’t learn to foster ideas about what they think about a novel, instead, merely picking out technical points of the text? […]

The Sneaky Takeover of America’s Teacher Ed. Programs: Today’s Target Eastern Michigan University

My last post was about the sneaky way the University of Memphis education school was being side-swiped by the Relay Graduate School, a faux education group of pretend-educators who will end professional teacher preparation as we know it. Now, Eastern Michigan University (EMU) has a similar, but slightly different, situation brewing. Moveon.org has a petition […]

Happy Thanksgiving: The Role of Public Schools

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It doesn’t have the hyperactivity of other holidays. And it isn’t dominated by one religion or another, although it certainly, for many, is religious. While there are certainly attempts to drag commercialism into the day, people, in general, seem to recognize it is a quiet time–simply to enjoy […]

University Teacher Education Takeover in Memphis

What Relay is doing largely breaks the mold. Its students are full-time elementary and middle-school teachers, almost all of them fresh out of college, almost none of them with a traditional teaching degree.  June Kronholz, Education Next At the University of Memphis there are professors disturbed about a rather secret plan, one that college officials […]