Arguments for the arts in education generally focus on their imaginative, individualistic, and risk-taking characteristics. In this article, the author contends that there are important lessons about intellectual development to be learned by looking at the neglected aspects of the arts, including their formal, controlled, and authoritarian side.…

Educational researchers have paid little attention to "critique"--an activity young artists routinely use to assess and advance their creative projects. It is an activity from which they have a lot to learn, particularly in the context of community-based arts collaboratives. In school classrooms where teachers emphasize group projects and…

The HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) program was started 25 years ago in the belief that educationally disadvantaged students (Title I and learning disabled) were bright and that the top priority for supplemental aid for these students should be to help them channel that innate intelligence into learning at a higher level. The students were…

There is a growing consensus among members of the corporate community, university professors, and informed educators regarding the skills needed for success in college and in the marketplace. According to the Business-Higher Education Forum, "today's high-performance job market requires graduates to be proficient in such cross-functional skills…

This article presents the transcript of an interview between the author and Randy Moore. While many leading corporate executives have contributed in various ways to efforts to improve public education, Randy Moore is the only one known by the author to have stepped down from his CEO position to actually teach in the public schools for an extended…

Policy makers in education have long embraced reform. Unfortunately, education reforms have consistently been plagued by the reformers' lack of knowledge and appreciation of the history of education. Accordingly, the latest reform, touted as a panacea, meets with failure, and the search for the magic elixir begins anew. The ahistorical nature of…

In Canada, both provincial and federal governments embraced educational techno-positivism with enthusiasm. However, a few critics pointed out that most of the enthusiasm for technology in the classroom came from dubious sources, including corporations that were (and still are) in pursuit of the almost unmeasurable revenue stream generated by…

Children of Indian descent have won first place in five of the last seven years of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and this year they made up 30 of the 273 contestants, a proportion many times larger than their 0.66% of the population. These achievements were possible because some Indian parents can become obsessive when it comes to the…

When educators open their "Fibber McGee's closets" of past reforms, a pile of silver bullets will spill out onto the floor. For at least the past 20 years, the sense of public confidence in public education has been fed by an arsenal of such quick, often creative, but largely unsubstantiated remedies for turning schools and kids around. And the…

The development of the positions of nurse practitioner and physician assistant is a good example of differentiating staffing and practice to meet individual needs in an effective and cost-efficient way. This type of differentiation has been confined to the healthcare industry, principally to health maintenance organizations, but perhaps those in…

Teacher quality is a central pillar of the No Child Left Behind Act for good reason. Without high-quality teachers, one cannot realize the goal of high achievement for all students. In turn, if preservice teachers do not receive the highest-quality teacher preparation, then one cannot meet the demand for high-quality teachers. Few would argue…

Many teachers gaze in wonder at the professional teaching standards to which they are expected to adhere. Such standards too often ask more of teachers than they can possibly deliver. It is especially disconcerting that teaching standards are actually at odds with an educational environment dominated by ill-conceived accountability schemes and…

The shared struggles facing urban and rural schools, such as changing cultural and linguistic classroom profiles, increased childhood poverty, and residential segregation patterns, influence financial inequities between people and communities thus contributing to gaps in academic achievement and teacher shortages in both settings. The…

Philanthropy plays a visible but little-studied role in education reform, making it easy to both overestimate and underestimate its significance. The emergence of "new" givers in the last few years, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, has shifted the landscape of school reform. This article, based on an…

Gerald Bracey continues his annual reports on the state of public education in the U.S. As in years past, he continues to report on the implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Bracey specifically looks at some of the atrocities committed by states related to the law's testing requirements and at questions being raised about the…