Mindworkers

Charlet T. Kerchner / MindWorkers

Flap of the Week: Close Schools, Fire Teachers

President Obama has joined the fray over firing teachers in an underperforming Rhode Island high school. It’s time to get beyond the controversy and start designing better teacher evaluation systems, tenure rules, and teacher professional development techniques.

New Policy Brief Based on Learning from L.A.

PACE (Policy Analysis for California Education) has just issued a new policy brief based on the conclusions in Learning from L.A.: Institutional Change in Public Education. It retraces a little of the historical narrative from the book and introduces the five policy levers we think are necessary to move the District past muddling through permanent […]

Wounding Public School Choice in L.A.

The Los Angeles Unified School District board did serious damage to their Public School Choice plan on Tuesday.  They amended Superintendent Ramon Cortines’ recommendations to remove the strongest of the charter school applicants, those that could have been future contenders to take over failing schools.  The district has more than 100 schools that have been […]

Learning About Learning Differently

When we finished with Learning from L.A. and The Transformation of Great American School Districts, we came to the crashing insight that almost all the education reform we had seen was about rearranging what adults did.  All the reforms had a trickle down assumption, such as, “if teaching became more interesting for teachers, students would […]

Mindworkers.com is changing

Mindworkers.com is changing.  With the help of John Watson and Anja Ross, the web site will be fronted with a blog page.  I will share my thoughts on education politics and policy here and invite your comments in the convenient blog fashion.  I’ll also provide links to writing that appears in other places.  The behind […]

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About

Charles Taylor Kerchner is an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Claremont Graduate University. My daily musings appear in the blog. The archives of my EdWeek blog are available via link under the 'On California' head. Some of my photography can be seen by clicking on 'Gallery.' And numerous links to academic work and other research and commentary can be found by clicking on 'Projects.'

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