In this article, the author reflects on Education Secretary Arne Duncan's speech at Teachers College, Columbia University, to an audience of pre-service teachers, their professors, graduate students, and others on the future needs of education. The author found that Mr. Duncan's speech did not suffice in addressing the depth of his subject.…

The demand that public school students, especially at the high school level, write under time pressure has been the subject of debate for at least the last seventy-five years. As state after state has added timed writing component to its testing apparatus in recent years, the debate has intensified. Those teachers who are alumni of the National…

The purpose of this personal narrative is to retrospectively analyze the actions and reactions of a young, female, white teacher who was faced with the reality of the dichotomy of race and power in a large school system. When an African American male student brings a gun to school, the teacher's personal assumptions come to the forefront, bringing…

The changes in the New Orleans public school system are proceeding at break neck speed. There is currently a bill in the Louisiana State Senate which would allow the state to sell, lease, or give New Orleans school buildings to any institution that has operated schools for 25 years. This would be done with a no-bid process. The money would not go…

This article addresses the over-reliance on numerical data primarily in the form of test scores and argues that they are inadequate as sole sources of information about high schools. While the numbers may help to identify standards of excellence, they do little to raise awareness about the serious and constraining inequities that exist within and…

Discourse about high poverty schooling generally revolves around three points of view. In the first, equity of school resources is considered to be the key ingredient in school improvement. In the second, no matter the school resources, there are successful high poverty schools, so therefore policy should focus on their example and not use poverty…

In this piece, the author argues that service-learning has been overly defined and because of that, it is in danger of becoming meaningless. He further argues that one way to recover service-learning from the wasteland of definition-making and thereby improve both its understanding and practice is by applying philosophical inquiry to the various…

Although the use of action research has made its way into various faculties of education as a means of applying theory to practice, there remains a disconnect between the teacher as an educator and the teacher as a researcher. Research must be empirically based; therefore, it has traditionally been seen to reside in the domain of the theorist or…

In this article, the author shares some of the lessons she learned after she completed a semester as a secondary English teacher-intern. She relates that her experiences during her practicum range from struggles on classroom management to failed attempts to implement a writing workshop. She also discusses how those experiences have dramatically…

It is not surprising that so little learning takes place in school. Teachers and principals are not employed for their educational skills, but for their ability to enforce law and order, to keep students under control. (Author/SJL)

The institutional features of the American high school reflect its role as the custodian of adolescents, who lack any status in society beyond that of student. These features conflict with the school's educative aim of adolescent self-development; curricular and organizational reforms are needed to correct this dichotomy. (SJL)

The author draws an analogy between today's school system and an assembly line, deploring the notion that all children are taught the same thing at the same time, ending in humiliation, disgrace, and failure for some, and nonchallenging academic activities for others. (KC)

McClung has written several articles on the legal aspects of minimal competency testing. In this article he states that Getz and Glass ("High School Journal," January, 1979) seriously distorted his earlier works. He attempts to set the facts straight regarding avoiding litigation by practicing preventive law. (KC)

The author suggests that the preconscious is the true locus of significant prose because of its greater amount of freedom to gather, compare, and rearrange ideas, and that the ultimate challenge to teachers of composition is to give freedom to their students' preconscious processes. (KC)

The author reviews research on gifted and talented students and describes several programs for the gifted. He states that educators must identify and analyze problems in dealing with gifted students and design programs which meet their individual needs. (KC)