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Last month I learned that I had been appointed to the Recommendations for Education and Advancement of Learning (REAL) Agenda Commission whose job is to recommend an initial research and policy agenda for Digital Promise by producing a report to be delivered in April to White House Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra. Digital Promise is a national center created by Congress to advance technologies to transform teaching and learning.  The Commission is chaired by Dave Belanger, from AT&T, Arden Bement, from Purdue University, and Tracey Wilen-Daugenti, from Apollo Research Institute, and its membership includes representatives from technology companies, some of whom have been doing business with K-12 schools for some time and some of whom have not.  The commission is managed by TechAmerica Foundation and facilitated by Julie Evans, CEO of Project Tomorrow.   The only practicing K-12 educator on ...

On January 14 and 15, "CNN Presents" aired coverage of Dr. Sanjay Gupta's visit to Southern Middle School in Reading, Pennsylvania. The episode looked at districts in several states, but Reading stood out as a district in dire straits. The video footage from Reading showed mold and mildew, leaking buildings, and rain pouring into a classroom.

The poor indoor environmental quality of this school and many more around the country has a devastating impact on the health and performance of the student and staff who study and work in these buildings every day. Poor indoor environmental quality is linked to asthma, respiratory illness, headaches, and other short and long term health problems. Asthma alone is one of the leading causes of absenteeism in the United States, causing many children to miss school or be tardy each day.

While schools in all communities are in need of some repair, as with many concerns in public education, it is students who live in low-income and minority communities who often suffer the most from ...

Earlier today a press release for a study in the January 2012 issue of Sociology of Education caught my eye: Study Suggests Junk Food in Schools Doesn’t Cause Weight Gain Among Children.

According to the press release (I’m not a subscriber of the journal, so I didn’t have access to the full text of the study), “While the percentage of obese children in the United States tripled between the early 1970s and the late 2000s, a new study suggests that—at least for middle school students—weight gain has nothing to do with the candy, soda, chips, and other junk food they can purchase at school.”

To me, this makes a lot of sense. As one of the study’s authors, Pennsylvania State University Professor Jennifer Van Hook, points out, “Schools only represent a small portion of children’s food environment.”

But something in the release disturbed me: Van Hook’s comments that, in light of the focus in the media on the money that ...

Making international comparisons about education systems was all the rage in 2011. Rhetoric suggested that America’s education system is performing so poorly that we as a nation have lost our competitive edge, and that the world’s emerging economies are out-educating us, which will result in the further decline of our nation.

I’m not sure if that rhetoric will stop in 2012, but it is time we move beyond it. How can we do that?

First off, in talking about our education system, we need to acknowledge that, as Dan Domenech (executive director of the American Association of School Administrators and chair of the Learning First Alliance Board of Directors) points out, it is actually the best that it has ever been. Graduation rates, college attendance rates and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are at their highest levels ever. Domenech also points out that when educators and education leaders travel internationally, they find that “overseas colleagues refer to our school system as the gold standard” and “parents in every corner of the world want to send their children to American schools.” ...