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5/15/12 Weekly link round-up

Here are some interesting links from around the web this week: Here is the latest issue of the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning including submissions on home learning, trust in making learning decisions, learning to read, and the immigrant experience of learning. Liberation Education is out with their newest volume that includes personal experiences [...]

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5/6/12 Weekly news round-up

 Here are some alternative education links we’ve found over the last week: Stop Racing! Starting Living (It Works!) was published in the Huffington Post by Kenneth Danford, co-founder of the North Star Self-directed Learning for Teens, an AERO member, in Hadley, MA. Will the Common Core Create World-Class Learners? An interview of author and professor [...]

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4/27/12 Weekly link round-up

Don Glines has been called the “Vice President for Educational Heresy.” He was founder and principal of what some have called the most innovative high school in the United States, the Wilson High School, in Minnesota. He told me that when he started he look all of the desks in furniture and piled in in [...]

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4/10/12 Link round-up

Here are some interesting links from this past week: STODDARD ON INCREASING GRADUATION RATES: “To impose a generic, one-size-fits-all, common core curriculum on students will actually result in more dropouts and lower graduation rates. Higher graduation rates are only possible by making curriculum fit the students, not by making students fit the curriculum. This can [...]

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3/17/12 Link round-up

Here are some interesting links from the past week: The following are two links to a letter to the editor and a guest editorial that were recently published in two of Utah’s major newspapers by Lynn Stoddard who will be presenting at our conference this year. They are a plea for genuine, authentic accountability in [...]

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3/11/12 Weekly link round-up

Above, in a video from many years ago, Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, discusses technology that lets people take the reins of their own educations. Other links from this week: A new national survey values views of students, parents & educators. Last year, 64% of students reported that they talk to their parents about [...]

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3/4/12 link round-up

As students across the country stage a National Day of Action to Defend Public Education, Democracy Now! looks at the nation’s largest school systems—Chicago and New York City—and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In her presidential address (pdf) at the [...]

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2/26/12 Weekly link round-up

In the links this week we start with a nice story about how architecture can dramatically change the school environment: Is Sweden’s Classroom-Free School the Future of Learning? New York City just released teacher performance assessments for 12,000 teachers based an what most consider very flawed data. Here even Bill Gates criticizes the release: GATES: [...]

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2/19/12 link round-up

How to stop cheating on standardized tests (reported in at least 32 states!) NOGUERA TALK: ‘Education is about preparing young people to make the world better than it is’ HISTORICAL DOCUMENT: HOUSE OF LORDS DISCUSSION ON SUMMERHILL. In 1999 Summerhill School, the forerunner of all democratic schools, was under attack by the British educational bureaucracy. [...]

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2/11/12 link round-up

The above video features students from Legacy high school in Manhattan and Paul Robeson high school in Brooklyn — both of which are being closed by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott — for being so-called “failing schools”. How a crackpot theory of education reform became national policy Mark Naison is a Professor [...]

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Democratic table tennis club

I’ve been playing table tennis since I was a kid and I love the sport. Along the way I had [...]

Sir Ken Robinson to keynote 2012 AERO conference!

Register now! In line with the conference theme, “Finding the Catalyst for the Education Revolution,” Sir Ken Robinson will share [...]

A response to the crisis of our time

In the United States, many people express their political or philosophical opinions by attaching small signs on the back end [...]

Trivial pursuit

There’s a YouTube video going around online right now – maybe you’ve seen it – the one where a bunch [...]

The rights of children in school

In my work as an educational consultant, I have visited many schools all over the world. I have observed, in [...]

A place to grow

Nice title, isn’t it?  How do you like it as a name for a school?  Makom Ligdol – “a place [...]

A map of the alternative education landscape

What type of learning environment is right for your child? Choosing a school, or choosing to educate your child outside [...]

My brain said ‘no’

One of the benefits of homeschooling is that it is generally unnecessary to hold to a rigid schedule. In other [...]

Nature principle

The compelling reasons kids need nature were explained factually and forcefully by Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods: [...]

Educating children in a violent world

I was recently asked to write a column for a national education magazine. When the editor told me the theme [...]

Caring education and meaningful democracy

Is it possible to have caring education or a meaningful democracy in a culture that is fundamentally competitive, materialistic, and [...]

Taking risks and breaking rules

Albert Einstein once said that it is a miracle curiosity survives formal education. Unfortunately, it often doesn’t. When my husband [...]

The peaceful school

“You must be so patient.” If I have heard that once, I’ve heard it a hundred times. I must be [...]

Education for a green society

There is a strong connection between the business world and the modern institution of schooling. Historians of education have explained [...]

How to listen and how to be heard

Do you really want a dead cat on your desk?” When a teacher took a parent’s phone call at the [...]

The lifelong journey

It was a cloudy day in April, 2004. It was cloudy in my mind. And storm clouds were brewing over [...]

Toward participatory democracy

As I pursued research for my book on the 1960s-era free school movement, I came across numerous references to the [...]

A history lesson and survival guide for young people during the decline of America

If you’re an American teen or young adult, you’re a pioneer. You may not think of yourself as a pioneer, [...]