Yesterday, ODE produced tip sheets for school boards, superintendents, and teachers about what they should be doing right now to continue (hopefully not “begin”!) implementing the common core. In summary, School Boards should be creating an implementation timeline reviewing curriculum crosswalks checking out these simulated letter grades for ...

Populations are made up of individuals.  The wise teacher figures out quickly each class is full of individual kids.  Likewise schools are composed of individual teachers. When you start treating individual teachers as unimportant, then ultimately schools will become unimportant. I can't escape the reality that such an Orwellian reality has ...

The embedded video above comes from NBC 29. It first appeared on June 7,2010. The video relates to the move from a seven to eight period academic schedule for students in Albemarle County High Schools. Woody Guthrie once said, ''Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.'' To say our division (at least the ...

In the previous post on the Underground, my colleague referred to Superintendent John Kuhn of Texas testifying before the Texas legislature regarding teacher evaluation and ''value-added'' systems of measuring teacher effectiveness.  Across the nation, we are moving toward systems that measure the effectiveness of students, teachers, schools, and ...

So tonight we get both a Republican and a Tea-Party response to the President's State of the Union Address, so we here at the Teaching Underground have decided to throw our hats into the ring and offer the official ''Teaching Underground Grassroots Teacher Response'' to the State of the Union Address.  We've included relevant text from the ...

In the debate over current school budgets the ''average class size'' statistic has become increasingly significant. The statistic is misused and covers some disturbing trends that directly affect the quality of what I am able to do. Admittedly most concrete data and studies indicating benefits of smaller class sizes exists at the lower grade ...