Education and poverty add up to a social justice issue . That’s why I keep writing these posts and urging more teachers to speak up. Increases in U.S. childhood poverty by 4.5 million over 11 years are unconscionable, as the numbers are showing. Can education help? Studies by the Chicago Consortium on School Research show […]

It’s Memorial Day, when we honor fallen soldiers and eat barbecue. But we educators are never quite off duty, at least in our heads. So let’s celebrate teachers who ARE speaking up. First, harking back to Teacher Appreciation week, Janet Ilko, on the National Writing Project iAnthology, honored our Teachers Speak Up effort (Many thanks, […]

Wow! I’m stunned! Dozens of New York Teachers are writing to critique a new ELA test created by Pearson publishers. Their comments are posted at a new website created by Lucy Calkins and the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Judging from the teachers’ copious reports and analyses (we counted 59 teacher responses plus a […]

on Teacher Appreciation Day, what better activity than to get parents, friends, community members, legislators, and others to learn from teachers about why they teach. So go to the Learning Matters website page on “Why I Teach,” and enjoy, add your own explanation — but also use Facebook, Twitter, email, and any other tool you […]

More and more teachers are telling why they keep teaching. It looks like Beth Shaum’s video on her blog Use Your Outside Voice — which we featured on this site just yesterday — really struck a chord. Beth has received statements from a number of additional teachers & posted them. Here’s Collette Bennett’s way of […]

OK, let’s get serious and look at some numbers. I’m in the Chicago metro area, so I’ll focus on Illinois. A national study shows Illinois is the second worst state in the union for funding disparity between high and low poverty-level schools. This partly results from shortfalls in state aid to schools. In recent years, […]

The wider public, being less connected to schools than we teachers are, tends to have some limited concepts of our work and how to improve it. But in some fascinating and extremely helpful research the FrameWorks Institute provides smart advice on how to talk about education with the wider public. General attitudes about schools differ […]

Sam Chaltain, a passionate advocate for public, democratic education explains in a handy Education Week blog post how to write a good story about teaching. As he points out, what helps people most to understand our work is the immediate on-the-scene picture of what great teaching and learning look like and sound like. He calls […]

There are a great many ways to tell a teacher’s story so that the public can appreciate the value and the humanity in what we do. We just learned about a teacher, Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, who web-published a tribute to his own 4th grade teacher — an autobiographical piece following the teacher’s career and his […]

WE’RE FINDING TREASURE. Outstanding letters, newspaper columns, blog posts, and guides for helping teachers connect in savvy ways to the wider public. Check them out on our Teacher Tools for Reaching Out -and Examples, Teachers Reach Out More Widely-Examples, and Teachers Writing for Support pages. Then let us know what you think about these, and […]