I remember standing at the back of a crowded, sticky-hot gymnasium each June and watching my eighth-grade students graduate. The week leading up to the big day was always a blur of rehearsals and last-minute preparations, so the ceremony itself usually provided a respite -- a moment to reflect on...

When I began blogging here at Huffington Post in January, I hoped that in addition to sharing my own thoughts on educational issues of the day, I might be able to provide space for the voices and experiences of teachers and students. Like many (but not all) bloggers who post...

I was sitting among a large crowd of students and teachers at the Chicago Public Schools Video Fair. It was 1998 -- four years before No Child Left Behind was signed into law, but already three years into Chicago's own march toward test-driven "accountability."

I listened as a high-level district...

It's been awhile since I had a classroom of my own, but my memory of teaching in Chicago bears little resemblance to the picture Mayor Daley painted last week in a talk at Wheaton College.

"Our teachers [in Chicago] work six hours a day," Daley told his...

When President Obama used a Baltimore middle school last week as the setting to talk about his plans for education spending, his visit was short and sweet. He watched kids do a science experiment, delivered some prepared remarks, chatted with a few students, and headed for the exits....

Like many Chicagoans, I spent the morning after the big snow shoveling. Sidewalk, front stoop, back walkway, back steps, gangway, entryway to the garage -- then repeated it all for good measure. By the time I finally finished, I was hoping not to pick up a shovel again for at...

Since Mayor Richard Daley took control of Chicago schools in 1995 and began appointing business-minded CEOs to head the system, the march toward a numbers-driven, test-and-punish vision of public education has been steady.

Some insist kids are better off because of it. Tighter accountability, tougher standards and top-down control,...

In the current upside-down world of education policy, there's one foolproof strategy for being taken seriously as a reformer: Make sure you're not an educator.

Urban districts nationwide, with Chicago leading the way, have hired those with business or legal backgrounds to head their school systems. Major voices in the...