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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Lot’s of talk around the edublogosphere about equity in education, and what poor, language learners need to succeed. First, Scott McLeod points to an article out of Portland, Oregon to ask “To script or not to script?”. The discussion continued at The Elementary Educator with Poor Minority Kids Need Scripted Teaching; Everyone Else Deserves Something […]

I will not be able to participate on a daily basis, or anything close to that as the school year winds down, but I did want to take some time to reflect on some of my online conversations, since there are some interesting and complex discussions underway… It started with Clay Burrell’s post, Muhammad Ali: […]