Category: Uncategorized

On May 01, 2023, the 74 first reported that controversial Tennessee ed commissioner, Penny Schwinn, has announced her resignation effective June 01, 2023.

According to the 74, Schwinn “declined to say what she will be doing next.” So, like other ed-reformers who began with corporate-reform, teacher-temp Teach for America (TFA) and were jettisoned to high-level ed-leadership positions, including Michelle Rhee (DC) and John White (LA)— and like Hanna Skandera (NM), state chief who lacked even TFA-like, token classroom experience and was finally confirmed after four years– Schwinn is not leaving because she is headed to another position so much as she is leaving from a top position following a tenure riddled with controversy.

The storm that is Schwinn.

Prior to becoming TN ed commissioner in 2019, Schwinn was chief deputy commissioner of academics for the Texas Education Agency (TEA). In May 2021, I wrote…

A recent ‘Best Evidence in Brief’ reported on a study comparing listening with longhand note-taking, with photo-taking, and without note-taking. This is what they say:

With the usage of smart phones becoming increasingly pervasive, taking photos to record information in class allows students to store more information with less effort. Many studies have demonstrated that longhand note-taking facilitates deeper encoding of information and reduces mind-wandering, but little research has investigated the learning outcomes of the photo-taking strategy, so a recent study was conducted to compare their effectiveness.

The sample of this study included 100 college students between the ages of 18-32 who were divided into three subgroups to listen to two lectures in three different conditions: listening with longhand note-taking, with photo-taking, and without note-taking. After they completed both lectures, participants reviewed their hand-written notes, photos they took, and plain printouts respectively to prepare for a recall test. The results…

I recently received this email out of the blue from a math teacher in California. I think that it’s really important that others read what he comes up against trying to give teach math to his fourth-grade students so I asked the sender if I could put it – anonymized – in a short blog. The sender agreed.

Dear Dr. Kirschner,

This is XXXXX, fourth-grade teacher in XXXXXXXXX, California.

I read HLH and HTH and listened to the recent Chalk and Talk podcast interview. Armed with my new knowledge, I’ve started to look at things critically and ask questions.

I’m not the only teacher enlightened by your work and likely not the first one to begin to look at education differently as a result, so I’m sorry to report that it’s not going well.

Basically, my district-adopted math curriculum (iReady k-5 classroom mathematics) doesn’t appear to have many aspects from…

The corporate world is short on workers, sooo, let’s see what states will pass legislation to loosen restrictions on child labor.

This drive reminds me of the blindside on K12 education that is Common Core– the justification (and assumption) being that the chief purpose K12 education is to “prepare students for 21st century jobs.”

Well, its the 21st century, and it seems that business is short on boidies, and any warm body will do.

So, on this Easter as I think of Jesus, who brought to the attention of his male-centric cuture the importance of considering children as people valuable in their own right, I also think of the primarily-Republican push to feed children to the god of business and industry.

On March 14, 2023, journalist Jacob Knudsen published a piece in Axios, stunningly entitled, “Lawmakers Target Child Labor Laws to Ease Worker Shortage.”

Forget childhood. We must appease the…

Cross posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org.

A couple of weeks ago, Autism Science Foundation founder Alison Singer posted on Twitter a video of an exchange she had with Cure Autism Now founder Jonathan Shestack. The clip opens with a question from Singer:

You’ve been away from the autism advocacy world for some years, but what’s your feeling about how the definition of autism spectrum disorder has changed?

Singer was alluding to the expansion of the autism spectrum to include what was once called Asperger’s Syndrome. This expansion assigns people with a range of speaking and writing abilities—some fully fluent, others completely minimally verbal—to the same diagnostic category. Back in 1995, when Shestack and his wife, Portia Iversen, founded Cure Autism Now (now Autism Speaks), autism and Asperger’s were distinct diagnoses.

Shestack, answering Singer’s question, implicitly raises another:

I forgot about social pressure!

That is, how many people claim that they still believe something either because it’s embarrassing to admit they were wrong, or because doing so means weakening their ties to the social networks that nurtured and sustained their beliefs in the first place–and losing a lot of friends in the process?

Put another way, for any given difficult-to-sustain belief, how many apparent believers are merely pretending?

Brad DeLong is listening to the AI:

In addition, the emergence of totalitarian regimes and the development of the modern welfare state offered new hope and opportunities for people, but also perpetuated inequality and poverty in many parts of the world.

This, too:

Q: Who is the author of the book “Age of Empire“?

A: The author of the book “Age of Empire” is Eric Hobsbawm. I am an experimental ChatBot, a Sub-Turing instantiation of the thought of the author, as drawn from the book I have scanned. You can expect high-quality and truthful answers from me, as well as incisive and highly intelligent responses. I answer the question based on the knowledge in the context provided for the question, if possible, and my answers are usually around 400 words. If I cannot answer based on knowledge in the extended prompt with context, I end my answer…