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Having experienced many things called "education" for most of my life so far, I've developed some opinions about what works, what doesn't, and what no one in their right mind should do, but is common anyway (in essence, the good, the bad, and the ugly).

I'm starting to put up essays about my views on education, and what I think works. Basically, I'm for what could be derided as "traditional, factory-model education", just because I'm for teaching lots of content and teaching in an organized and effective fashion, even though neither of these, so far as I can tell, is necessarily boring, repetitious, or harmful to small children.

Links

Essays

• Ways to solve some problems
• My letter to the UA News on Reading Recovery.
• Goals of education
• Recent and not-so-recent articles on education from the Atlantic.
• An overview of what I think
• My experiences in school

• Core Knowledge Foundation--An organization, based on the quasi-infamous book "Cultural Literacy", which actually has some pretty good solutions for schools.
• "Why Our Children Can't Read--And What We Can Do About It" by Diane McGuinness. The latest scientific research on reading--everyone can be taught to read. This book gives very clear guidelines on what a successful reading program should include.
• Direct Instruction--about the most research-based education page I've seen; A good math program and a better-than-most reading program (though not ideal by the guidelines above).
• Mathematically Correct--Join the fight against fuzzy math.
• Information Age Math Reform--A very interesting set of documents about math education and standards.
• More to come. (hopefully!)

• Upper Arlington Public Schools--I attended these "award winning" schools from 4th grade till I graduated high school. They employ several full-time PR people to put the right catch words in applications including an increased emphasis on "discovery" learning and doing away with science texts. There were some very good points in my education, especially the math program I had from 7th grade onward (although I think they may be changing this, as well). Still, because of the many mediocre experiences I had here and the trends I'm seeing in their practices (and shown out by the trends in their test scores over the past decade), I'm putting them in the bad category. It may soon get ugly, though.
• More soon. (unfortunately!)
• Always keep in mind when reading pages like these (as well as the pages I've labeled "good"), that everyone says they want the best for kids. You have to go beyond what the PR people say, and look into what actually happens and goes on. Results are important. Always beware of vagueness in goals.
• In addition, beware of "new" ideas. Very few ideas are really new at their core. Read this article from the Atlantic a few years back, then see when it was written, to see what I mean.

• Sadly, it probably won't take me too long to find stuff for this category, but I tend to be cautious...

Write me!