The Blog of Ms. Mercer

Here is an interview with my husband. He is an African American who has spent time working in urban schools (he supervised and AmeriCorp tutoring team in Oakland, California as I was working on my teaching credential and substitute teaching there). He also grew up in a large foster home with parents from the pre-WWII [...]

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Continuing the discussion about what (poor) African American kids need (but this could apply to any kid in the “have-not” group), I started with this video from Bloggingheads.tv where Debra Dickerson (Mother Jones) shares that she wants to have schools in the black community become so good that whites want to go there.
I think this [...]

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Clay Burrell has a very popular post that has generated a huge number of comments at Muhammad Ali: A D- Student? Or an F- School? | Beyond School
And teachers - English teachers, especially, but any teacher using writing to assess understanding and merit in your classrooms - ask yourself, in this age of user-created video [...]

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I’ve been slow posting this here in the hurly burly that has been my life lately, but here is an excellently received interview with my husband. Due to my pig-headedness, he is not “Mr. Mercer” (I made him keep his “maiden name” when we wed 21 years ago), but is Mr. Terry Preston.
I am not [...]

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Recently I shared the situation at my school, which is set to lose 6 out of 22 teachers (actually 6 out of 17 classroom teachers) in Pink slips, we don’t need no freakin’ pink slips… @ In Practice
I wish I could say my trip to a district budget sub-committee meeting helped, but my folks who [...]

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Brian Crosby has been on a tear lately with a couple of fantastic posts on poverty in education. First up is Whose Problem Is Poverty? | In Practice where he builds on ASCD: Whose Problem is Poverty by R. Rothstein about how school reform is being used in lieu of an anti-poverty policy. That we [...]

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This is part of a series of related articles on Kindergarten, policy, and the achievement gap that started out for me at In Practice.

TMAO talks about how poor education quality is turning kids off from school, but in reflecting on kindergarten readiness lately, and how some kids are behind from the start I wanted to [...]

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From my friend Carrie, a Web site designer at UC Berekley:
A Brief Message: No Child Left Behind Is Leaving Designers Behind

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Dangerously Irrelevant: Contest: Six-word motto for your nation’s schools? has lots of great entries. Here are some of my favorites:
USA:
Unhealthy Relationship With The Status Quo
or
Organizational Tortoises: Evolving in Revolutionary Times
or
Rudderless in the Sea of Change
Take your pick. I think they are all appropriate.
Posted by: Dave | February 06, 2008 at 10:29 AM
Another solution to a [...]

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For the Passion Quilt meme by Scott McLeod. Here is my entry…

The inspiration was a photo from the CARF (Children at Risk Foundation) photostream on Flickr, and plagiarizing from Unitarians. The above photo was titled limitless personality, which says a lot.
I’m going to leave it up to my readers to participate in this if they [...]

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