State TCAP Data is out! James Aycock breaks down middle school performance to identify who’s doing well and who isn’t for the purpose of learning from the best and improving the rest.
An open letter to the blog Jersey Jazzman on his response to our piece “Poverty Doesn’t Dictate Academic Outcomes.”
Over spring break I finally had a chance to visit New Orleans. The city has flourished in recent years, but you can still see signs of the tremendous damage caused by hurricane Katrina. On a city tour I asked my…
Disruptive education is a commonly used phrase. But have you ever stopped to think about where it comes from and what it means for our kids? Check out this post from BCE contributor Ezra Howard to learn more.
Memphis is a great place to live for many reasons. But a new report out suggests that our population continues to stagnate. Worse, people continue to leave, as Fox13 reports in this video (worth a watch if you click on the…
Last week Arne Duncan gave a great speech to the National Assessment Governing Board Education Summit for Parent Leaders. In it he highlighted one of the most important things missing in our efforts to reform the American public education system, the…
I’ll be taking a break from writing between now and Christmas. Before I do, though, I want to highlight some of the things that we have going for us as educators in Shelby County, Tennessee and the United States. So…
Memphis and Shelby County typically gets knocked pretty hard in measures of human capital. However, the picture might not necessarily be so bleak. Take a look at the following census data maps pulled from this article in the Atlantic titled…
I found this video created by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) via facebook. It gives a critical breakdown of the PISA scores (PISA: an international test administered by OECD countries used to compare student learning across those countries) in…
When I told my kids in May that I wouldn’t be returning the next year and said that I’d be moving schools, one of my students, Annie (not her real name) made a comment that I’ll never forget. She said…
