All Posts

As a public educator, I have been conditioned to oppose school choice and charter schools. As a parent, I am a strong supporter of both. Every year, the primary focus in our district is the same: “declining enrollment.” The primary reason given is charter schools. There are currently three brick-and-mortar charter schools within a mile of our high school, and since my hiring in 2017, our school enrollment has declined by over 1,000 students. There are plenty of other options

One of my 9th-grade ELA honors students was given a medal this week from our Title 1 testing coordinator for qualifying to reclassify by passing the ELPAC. Throughout the week, I saw a number of other students in my classes at different grade levels receive the same medal. It was a nice gesture to recognize the accomplishment that, for some students, has been a long time in the making. In our district, a large percentage of our EL students are LTELs who have been in our schoo

Our school has its annual PBIS walk-through this week. The visiting team will assess how well our students understand the expectations, incentives, and monitoring systems. They will check whether the systems we have created are being implemented with fidelity and, hopefully, whether they are resulting in improved student outcomes. At the end of the visit, they will determine whether our school will be recognized as a bronze, silver, gold, or platinum model school. While sligh

The story in education is that March is one of the hardest months to survive. It is one of the only months without a formal Holiday and the end of the year is finally in sight, but too far off to feel encouraging. Everything inside of you just wants to survive until you can make it to Spring Break the first week of April. It is during this time (and perhaps others) that you may start to feel pressure to motivate your students and find yourself in a headspace of wondering, “Wh

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, you just have to get people to stop reading them." -Ray Bradbury I played an audiobook for my class this week and asked them to follow along with the text as it was read aloud. This is a preferred strategy for English Language Learner (ELL) students and some students with accommodations. A little over a page into the book, I realized that the audiobook was not following the text but was instead adding and amending sections o

I first heard the term equitable grading during the COVID-19 remote learning period and during hybrid instruction. Our district used it as the justification to create a 50% grading floor. The idea was that if an F is 50% then there is no reason to give a student less than 50%. This obviously didn’t take into account that 50% of 0 should still be 0, but nobody consulted teachers on the matter. Making the floor 50% made it easier for students to make a mad dash for graduation a

As a “Millennial,” I am part of the generation that bridged the gap into the digital age. I was born in the time before a desktop computer was in every home, and you could still find pay phones to make collect calls. I graduated from high school with an iPhone that could make phone calls and search the internet from anywhere in the world. I can remember my teachers telling me to memorize math formulas because “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time,” while in the n