I had planned on writing about Teacher Appreciation Week today, and taking note of the ways we can and should be sharing the positive stories that come from our schools every single day. Things change. Instead, this week, we are all reeling again from yet another school shooting. This time in Jeffco’s neighboring community of […]
Read More Doing Something About School SafetyNote: A version of this posting appeared in Colorado Politics on January 22, 2019. For over three decades, the debate over education policy in our state and nation has been primarily waged on three fronts: accountability, school choice, and funding. Colorado created an elaborate accountability system of tests and ranking systems in step with federal […]
Read More The Education Reform We Have Versus the Education Reform We NeedThis month, students in our community, across our state, and across the nation will begin the annual rite of passage that is taking standardized assessments. As a public institution, our district is required to administer these assessments under both state and federal law. It can be rightly argued that the nation’s system of standardized assessments […]
Read More Some Thoughts on TestingLate political scientist David Easton once defined politics as “the authoritative allocation of values.” More precisely, politics (in a representative democracy) is the system where one group or another gets to determine how society will operate and can compel adherence to their set of preferred values through laws, sanctions, and rewards. This authoritative allocation of […]
Read More “The Authoritative Allocation of Values”In the wake of yet another horrific school shooting, the public debate re-opens about what we might do to prevent such tragedies in the future. Some responses are predictable. From one side, we get calls for greater gun regulation – limiting who has access to what kinds of firearms and placing limitations on the second […]
Read More A Solution for America’s School Shooting Crisis
