Affected Clapping

Why are you adding one more website to the already too-long list of self-indulgent sites wasting my time?

When you teach for several years, when you go to graduate school for education, you have a lot of conversations, and not just with other teachers or other grad students. I meet people at bars. They ask what I do. I tell them I’m a teacher. And what you discover, after three years of telling people you’re a teacher, in bars, is that pretty much everyone is interested in education. As Sir Ken Robinson puts it, “it runs deep with people, like religion, or money. And if you ask people about THEIR education, they pin you to the wall, don’t they?”

I wanted to create a site that doesn’t just “talk” about education, about what’s wrong with it, about some screwed up thing I saw in the hallways yesterday, but about possible solutions.

Solutions Huh? Got Any Ideas?

That’s what this website is. An ongoing collection of ideas and conversations revolving around solutions.

But before we get to the meat of the problem, I’d like to give you a quick list of things I believe. Let’s call them the underlying assumptions that this website rests on:

1. Education in the United States is embarrassing for 99% of the population.
2. We spend more on education, per pupil, today, than we ever have in the history of education.
3. Standardized testing is excellent at showing how well a student is at taking a standardized test.
4. If you’re a baby-boomer, you probably think you got a “decent” education. You’re most likely (unless your parents were fabulously rich) wrong. The reason you believe this is because either:
   1. You were able to go to college or get a job straight out of high school.
   2. You had a young English teacher who turned you on to Poetry (amongst other things).
5. We don’t pay inner-city teachers enough.
6. Class sizes are too large, but the way to fix them is not simply building more schools (we don’t have the room, not in New York anyway).
7. The Student to Teacher ratio in any classroom can effectively predict how well that class, as a whole, will perform.

So, inside you’ll find plenty of ideas. But ideas on their own aren’t enough. We need to start having conversations. Lots of them. Contentious, edgy conversations that might involve raising your voice. If you disagree with something I write SAY SOMETHING!

I’m Tired of Liberals Hiding Their Ideas in the Closet While Students Continue to Get Screwed. Stop Being a Coward and Join the Conversation.