Mindworkers

Charlet T. Kerchner / MindWorkers

How To Make the Next LAUSD Superintendent Successful

The Los Angeles Unified School District is—once again—in search of a leader.  There have been nine superintendents in the last two decades, much more turnover and change in direction than a thriving organization can withstand. The school board is rightly concerned with more instability.  In recent days, the notoriously fractious LAUSD board has been making […]

Here’s The Peace Dividend In Los Angeles Charter School Wars

Learning from L.A., our book about institutional change in public education, was published a decade ago.  Then, we saw charter schools as a logical force in the transition of an institution built for the industrial age to one designed for the 21st Century. Instead, in the space of a decade, charter schools in Los Angeles […]

LAUSD viewing IPads as Key to Common Core

I have been in Chicago this week.  My colleague David Menefee-Libey, professor of politics at Pomona College reports on this discussion of LAUSD’s iPad purchase program and its relationship to the Common Core of standards. Wednesday evening I attended KPCC’s panel discussion “Tech in the Classroom: How Much is Too Much?” at their Crawford Family […]

Big Money and the School Board: An Annotation of a “L.A. Times” Op-Ed

[This story has also been posted at Ed Source.] The Los Angeles Times Monday printed an op-ed piece I wrote about last week’s school board election, where a coalition of deep pockets givers spurred by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spent over $63 per vote.  It was not only big money but also money badly spent.  (Read […]

Insanity or Courage?

Last evening, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion at a reunion of Education Pioneers, an organization that looks for and trains out-of-classroom talent for education reform.  The conversational stars of the evening were Maria Casillas, who flunked retirement to rejoin the Los Angeles Unified School District to head its efforts at connecting […]

The Elements of Learning 2.0: A Remix of Knowledge Acquisition and Practice

The words “remix” and “mashup” entered the vocabulary as descriptors of life in the digital age.  They are also key to what I am calling Learning 2.0, the next full-scale version of public education. At the simplest level, these new terms are represented by three teenagers using Apple Garage Band to combine bits and pieces […]

Why Now? The Dark Days Possibilities of Learning 2.0

[A revised version of this post appears in Thoughts on Public Education.] As I was thinking about writing this post, my attention wandered (yes, it does) to Stephen Sawchuk’s Education Week story about Monica Iñiguez, a 4th grade teacher in Los Angeles Unified who has received her third budget-driven pink slip in six years of […]

The Elephant on the Mountain:

or how to talk about public education without mentioning the financial crisis hardly at all I had a good time at Tuesday’s self-styled Education Summit.  United Way, which put on the meeting, did a fine job of organizing and packed a lot of content and good will into a half-day.  I’ve written a cover story […]

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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