Blog Roundup Thursday Edition

"I will not hide the teacher’s Prozac" Bart's Blackboard
Season 8, Episode 13

Is Our Education Reporters Learning? Casey Lartigue
Journalists don't like to go places they have been invited. They want to go places where they must go undercover.

The Low Rhetoric of High Expectations Robert Pondiscio
At Public School Insights, Claud Von Zastrow calls out the casual use of the phrase “high expectations.”    It’s de riguer for education reformers to claim high expectations for schools and children.  “But scratch the surface of their rhetoric,” Claus writes, “and you’ll find that some of them have expectations that are really quite low.”

Court OK's "Bullying" Video
Just because some off-campus activity might interfere with the school environment is not enough for the school to take disciplinary action.

The Decade's 10 Big Ideas in Education Scholastic
As 2009 draws to a close and lists of the Decade's Big Ideas abound, it only seems fitting that education get its 15 minutes of fame. The education brains here at Scholastic have named 10 Big Ideas in Education from the first decade of the 21st Century--10 groundbreaking ideas that changed the landscape of American Education.

Comments

[Tom Hoffman]

Is this payback for Claus quoting your whole post a couple weeks ago?

[alexander]

good catch, tom --
i'd forgotten about that but maybe it was subconscious.
on the other hand, maybe i'm getting back at pondiscio for something --
usually i snag no more than a single sentence.
thanks!
/ alexander

[Tim]

The problem with the phrase “high expectations” is that it can mean two very different things: high standards and high hopes. Compare “We suspended him because he did not meet our high expectations regarding behavior.” with “Incoming 9th graders had high test scores, so we have high expectations for the test scores in 9th grade algebra.” It is simply more precise and helpful to replace “high expectations” with better language. I have stopped using it altogether and I encourage everyone else to do the same.