Communications Plan Want to develop a plan for communicating with your staff using a variety of methods? Interested in looking for a way to maximize your limited resources of time and energy to create an optimal school climate where communication is NOT your number one stumbling block?    I have composed a “why and how to design” a plan, what key elements need to be considered in the plan design, and the different audiences and classifications of information that ne

  Let’s take a lesson from the results of the single sex California Pilot program or even from the ill-fated attempt by Georgia’s Greene County to implement a single sex initiative.  Single sex implementation without knowledge of legal mandates, without full by-in from educators involved and with adequate professional development is doomed to failure.             Institutions and districts that jump on the bandwagon wit

Here’s a modest proposal: teachers should recall that their first loyalty is to children and parents, not the elite educators who manage the system. As I’ll show, these people are often indifferent to the misery they cause, and that's why we need a Teacher Liberation Front: In 1944 Life magazine reported that "Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia." This was a phony epidemic created almost entirely by Whole Word. Did the educators pushing this hoax apologize or change

Moral and Values-Based Leadership And School Improvement by Michelle Fattig-Smith, Ed.S.  “Public school leaders today are somewhat like an heir receiving a handsome legacy from a distant relative, who neglected to include in the will instructions for maintaining the bequest,” (Tyack & Hansot, 1981, p. 14).   Criticism of public education today may be due, in part, to technological advances outpacing the ability of schools to compete and the ensuing ‘erosion of tradit

By Ned Vare Why Johnny Can’t Think "The sad truth is that public education has destroyed the American dream for countless numbers of young people by preventing them from acquiring those academic skills needed to achieve success." - Samuel Blumenfeld, Educator and Author Homeschooling, of course, was once the norm. Throughout most of history and in all places, children got their learning in the home, through family activities and their natural and cultural surrou

By Ned Vare School Is Hell; a series of articles “What seems undeniable is that there is a substantial contrast between the vision of what public education is supposed to be and the reality of schooling itself.” -- Bruce Goldberg, Why Schools Fail In my state, Connecticut, children are not required to attend school, but the law requires children to be given instruction in certain basic skills and knowledge, and parents are responsible whether they send them to school or n

By Ned Vare Part of the series: School Is Hell Who Owns the Public Schools? “Without a real private competitive market for education in America, all that is available is what the state education central planners choose to provide.” -- Richard M. Ebeling, President, The Future of Freedom Foundation The so-called "public” school system does not belong to the public; it is owned and run by the government. Therefore, the public schools serve government needs, not the

I predict ergonomic education is the next big thing. I know we need it! Although neither teacher nor engineer myself, I’ve always been fascinated by a point at which the two fields intersect. Namely, how do we make education truly efficient? How do we teach the MOST knowledge in the LEAST time with the LEAST effort by both teacher and student? With the added proviso that the info has to stay put, ideally for a lifetime...There’s fast ways and slow ways of doing every job. If we could pit one a

The basic pedagogical process can be defined as a systematic transfer of knowledge and / or skills from an instructor to a learner. Depending upon the basic objectives of the process, the transfer may be limited to cognition of facts or may be extended to application and extension of facts, their inter-linkages and derivative concepts.Since the important players in this interaction are the instructor and the learner, the important determinants of the effectiveness of the process should include

                                                           May 15, 2007_________________________________________________________________________________         &