President Obama’s new blueprint for education reform recommends using more than just standardized test scores to broadly measure school performance and student academic growth. These proposals are especially important in allowing low-income schools to address the special challenges they face.  more

The start of another school year does not signal a new day in our worst urban schools. Last year’s colossal problems had three months off. As soon as the bell rings and the buses roll in, the embarrassing reality of “education” in inner city schools will resume. The problems of last year will have snowballed; a new crop of students will be sadly left behind.  more

The first thing I ask a student of mine who tells me she’s pregnant is, “Are you going to marry the father?” The kids laugh hard when I bring up the concept. And yet: weak, broken or non-existent family structures are among the major reasons for failed schools.  more

Much attention is paid to the violent drug wars in Mexico. Not enough is paid to the drug trade fueled by deadly gangs on our streets. Thousands have died in Mexico since the government began battling armed cartels. Thousands die in cities like Baltimore every year.  more

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested, not for being a “black man in America,” but for being a belligerent jackass. It doesn’t matter if you’re an esteemed professor or a college kid hammered off of keg beer – talking back to an officer is stupid and will eventually get you arrested.  more

The students in the school where I taught for two years uploaded a video called “F$@#*N$ wit da teacha” and it revealed the horror my teaching colleague went through each day.  more

Two years ago this month, I graduated from my masters program, packed a bag full of preppy college boy clothes, kissed my girlfriend goodbye for the summer and went to Philadelphia for a summer in training for Teach For America. There, I spent five weeks with hundreds of motivated, nervous and stressed incoming young teachers.   more

“Men finish what they start.” I repeated this over and over as I passed out uniforms and track warm-ups to my groaning athletes on Friday after school. In our dingy, dirty and grafittied locker room, the kids grumbled; “Coach Gibbon, we thought the season was over last week.”
“No, you knew we had regionals this week;   more

Suddenly, a couple months before graduation, about ten kids I teach – kids who were passing and were bound to graduate high school – just completely stopped coming to school. I made calls home, left messages and notified the office.
The kids continued to not show. I talked to a few parents, saying, “I want your   more

The New York Times reported Monday on Pakistan’s Islamic schools, which fill the void for some kids in a state where public education hasn’t been valued or even known to exist. In America, gangs fill the void where public education isn’t valued or respected – where it’s “left to the dogs,” as one Pakistani puts   more

The achievement gap between white and minority students persists, and glaringly so, as this article in the New York Times details.
The lede of this article is unfair and shows the bias against President Bush’s signature education act – No Child Left Behind (NCLB):
The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent   more

I’m reading over the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a man who loved learning more than anything. I wonder what he and the founders would think of a school where it was okay for kids to read at pre-primer levels at the ages of 17-18, fight, roam the halls and cuss at adults with no recourse. The   more

The presenter at our Teach For America introductory training posed this question: “How will you respond when a student says “F You” when you assign them work or ask them to listen for the first time. 
In small groups, we were to respond with each other: “I will kick the kid out,” I remember saying. Others   more

I was put back into reality this morning after a lovely week off for spring break. I asked a girl to put away her French fries as she walked into class five minutes late and she went berserk – telling me to F off and F myself and to give her her F’ing work so   more

The D.C. voucher program is all but dead, according to this Washington Post editorial from Saturday.
This is before the Senate had a chance to debate the program, which gives $7,500 scholarships to low-income children to attend one of the many excellent private schools in the district.
A recent study, linked to in the Post editorial,   more

“He’s not one of your captains, is he?” My athletic director asked me this quite disdainfully as my tracksters warmed up before our workout on a recent weekday. Kicking aside a shattered glass bottle and the cigarette butts littered on my track, I looked up at her and said, “Yes, he is.”
“Oh. Coach Gibbon, I   more

Third quarter marking period just ended. I teach 100 seniors, and when I look at the grade book, I could legitimately give F’s to 60 of them. This is the number of kids who have missed ten or more days out of 44 this quarter.
It used to astound me how many days of kids missed   more

While being formally observed by an administrator the other day, one of my students who likes to show up completely stoned to class (he only attends about once or twice a week) kept blurting out, “Man, this is bullshit, man.” I wanted to jump out the window.
While guiding kids through a lesson on Sir Gawain   more

Somehow, Michelle Rhee considers herself a Democrat. The D.C. schools chancellor is someone I admire very much and who has made a lot of positive noise in the world of school reform. In an interview with the Washington Times on Monday, Rhee gave herself a failing grade, a straight “F”, in her first 20 months   more

My Papa Bob credited me with having some solid writing skills the other day after reading a blog entry, but he’s not so sure about the content of the material.
“I don’t think there are many people who want to read about the cancer inflicting the inner cities,” he wrote in an email.
And he’s right.   more