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Guest Post: Talking About Reform

I’m eager to attend NewSchools Venture Fund’s Summit next week, and to have the opportunity to share ideas on what needs to be done to transform education in underserved communities.At New Teacher Center (NTC), we understand only too well the cycles that sustain inequity in our society. New principals and new teachers, who still have a lot to learn about how to be fully effective in the job, are all too often […] Read more

Unleashing great teaching

LearnZillion is all about celebrating teachers. In spite of what you might hear in the press, there are many superstars working in our schools, changing the lives of children every day. The problem is isolation. When one teacher figures out a highly-effective way to teach division of fractions, it doesn’t spread to all classrooms. Each teacher has to figure it out on his/her own—not a very efficient system, to say the least.  LearnZillion celebrates teachers […] Read more

GREAT Act Update

The movement to create a vibrant market for high-quality teacher training took another important step forward today. Due to vigorous championing by Representative Thomas Petri (R-WY), language to support states that want to create “GREAT” teacher and principal training academies has been added to the Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act – the so-called “House teacher bill” for those of us wonks who live in Washington D.C. – introduced by Rep. John […] Read more

Teaching Practice

This weekend, the Times ran a story on legal training that echoed recent reports on the shortcomings of teacher education.  In it, David Segal writes: Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern […] Read more

Why we need GREAT colleges of education

As readers of this blog and my small-but-slowly-growing Twitter followers know, this past June Senator Michael Bennet introduced the GREAT Teachers and Principals Act, S. 1250. I haven’t stopped talking about the bill since, so I’m happy to finally be blogging this time about…well, still about GREAT! Specifically, I’d like to take a moment to explain and clarify some confusion that seems to have arisen around the interrelation between the GREAT Act and […] Read more

GREAT Act Q&A, part 2

Last Wednesday, I blogged about Senate Bill 1250, the GREAT Teachers and Principals Act, designed to create and support high-performing teacher and principal “training academies.” The introduction of this legislation sparked a wave of media coverage, which in turn generated a number of questions and discussions over Twitter, Facebook, and in the blogosphere. So, in the spirit of the Q&A theme used in my original post, I thought I would answer a […] Read more

GREAT Act Q&A

Today, Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) will introduce a bill, co-sponsored by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), and Mark Kirk (R-IL) to support the creation and expansion of teacher and principal training academies. This legislation, titled the Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals Act (GREAT Act), represents a bold, innovative approach to improving the quality of teacher and leader training. And in the spirit of […] Read more

Nick Ehrmann’s Rethinking Human Capital in Technology–Based Education

In his response to last week’s NewSchools Summit, Nick Ehrmann of Blue Engine gives a warning to those who would believe that ed tech will accelerate student learning in the absence of other fundamental shifts in the way that K-12 schools and classrooms are structured. It’s a terrific piece, although we hasten to add that NewSchools is enthusiastically interested in entrepreneurial work outside the education technology world—and particularly in organizations that integrate […] Read more

Guest Post: Transforming education faster bottom-up instead of top-down

By Tory Gattis, Social Systems Architect and Founder of OpenTeams This post is an attempt to introduce some controversial buzz into the conversations at the summit: Is it possible our whole approach to reforming education is wrong? And by wrong, I don’t mean failing – great things are definitely happening – but wrong in the sense that we’re making progress too slowly given the size and urgency of the problem. Even today, after […] Read more