This year’s PDK/Gallup poll of the “Public’s Attitudes toward the Public Schools” asked Americans the following question.  As you may know, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides increased funding to education. Which of the following areas in education do you believe should receive the most new funding? The number one choice expressed by Americans [...]

Most would agree that there is seldom a single solution to a problem just like there isn’t one way to teach or one way to lead. Yet we fall into the one-size-fits-all mentality repeatedly. This is particularly true when creating education policy. We pay lip service to the ideal that there are probably multiple ways [...]

When I was deputy state superintendent in Michigan my boss, Tom Watkins referred to our colleges of education as the “weakest link” in education. As I read Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s remarks made at Teachers College, Columbia University on October 22, 2009, I thought he was heading in the same direction—and for a while [...]

In 1997, Checker Finn, a former assistant secretary of education during the Reagan administration observed that Republicans don’t like the word “national,” and Democrats don’t like the word “test,” suggesting that national tests, from a political perspective, were dead on arrival. Fast forward 12 years–politics aside, more rational education leaders recognize that the current patchwork of [...]

In March 2009, I read a fascinating education book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson. Christensen is a Harvard Business School professor, which gave me pause. I’ve heard too many business people oversimplify the challenges we face in our schools and [...]