Hack Education

Education Law and Politics 60 years after Brown v Board of Education, ProPublica’s Nikole Hannah-Jones examines the re-segregation of US schools. The Florida House of Representatives has passed legislation that would protect student privacy, phasing out the usage of Social Security numbers as student IDs and banning biometric data collection....

Just a quick note to announce that Educating Modern Learners is now live! As I wrote earlier this year, I’ve undertaken a new writing and editing project: a site dedicated to news and analysis about the future of teaching and learning through a progressive education (and progressive ed-tech) lens. Today...

Oh hey, look. The Internet is broken! Or at least, the security of sites using OpenSSL has been broken – for several years in fact. The bug, which the NSA has (shocker!) purportedly exploited, means that encrypted transmissions – the ones you thought were encrypted? – are vulnerable. The comic...

Here are the notes and the slides from my keynote yesterday at the BC Digital Learning Conference. I was asked to respond to some of the things I'd heard over the three day event. Thank you very much for inviting me here to speak to you. I spend a lot...

This Week in Standardized Testing PISA has released the latest scores from its 2012 “creative problem-solving” assessments. US students didn’t suck, performing above average. NewSchool Venture Fund’s Benjamin Riley responds with a raised eyebrow about what the test actually measures. (It goes to show that no matter the score, no...

Narratives of growing up and of schooling often contain certain themes; they’re often assigned to certain genres. The autobiographical coming-of-age story. Language. Literacy. Identity development. Professional development. Progress. Integration into the social order. Assimilation. The bildungsroman. Some recent literary critics have argued that the genre of the bildungsroman in particular...

Labor / Unions A district office of the National Labor Relations Board has ruled in favor of student athletes at Northwestern University in their bid to form a union. While the university will appeal, this is still a huge decision that could have sweeping implications for college sports and the...

I’m out of the US for a week and a bit, and a cross-Atlantic flight always makes me feel like I’ve missed out on things (or at least, I’ve lost an entire day or so). Apologies if this week’s round-up of news is slipshod. Students vs The Law A New...

“Startups should talk to teachers.” “Startups should talk to principals.” “Startups should talk to students.” “Startups should talk to researchers.” “Startups should talk to parents.” And it feels like now, after some of us have been muttering on about this for quite some time now, startups increasingly are. Ideally, this...

Happy Pi Day! And happy 25th anniversary to the World Wide Web! Law and Politics The defense has begun to make its case in Vergara vs. California, a lawsuit brought by StudentsMatter that charges that tenure and seniority rules prevent students from having effective teachers and as a result from getting a...