Category Archives: Education

Use Your Voice!



The Obama Transition Team is looking for feedback and stories as it attempts to craft the direction of its administration going forward. I urge everyone to post your ideas and stories at change.gov/page/s/yourstory. Here’s the story I just posted related to The No Child Left Behind Act and its impact on an alternative charter school my partner Sally was on staff for and my daughter Emma attended… Continue reading →

My Take on Obama’s Education Plan

Me in my kitchen writing this post
Me in my kitchen writing this post

The incoming Obama administration’s transition team has published a position paper with a fairly high-level breakdown of their plan for addressing early childhood, K through 12, and higher education.  For the purpose of this post I want to focus and comment on the K through 12 plan components including my comments.

Though I supported Clinton in the primary, I am really thrilled that Obama was elected and think he will be a transformational leader for our country.  But the education policies of most any liberal democrat – Clinton, Obama, or most anyone else – I’m generally just not comfortable with.  There is way to much bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all social engineering in most of my progressive comrades’ approach to education.  Maybe I am overly jaded and need to give them the benefit of the doubt, or maybe I am naïve in my analysis… you be the judge. Continue reading →

School Decision Makers… Revisited

Emily responded to my “School Decision Makers” post and shared her frustration that she is apparently sending her son to a school that, as best as she can tell, is not the right place for him, and there seems to be little she can (as a parent) do about it except for pulling him out of it.

Eric's Middle School
Eric's Middle School

What kind of real collaboration can parents and public middle school teachers have when it comes to finding the right educational path for each kid? When our son Eric was going to a public magnet middle school, his mom and I were lucky if we got to speak with each of his teachers more than once or twice a semester, and then often to find out that making any adjustments or accommodations for individual students was impossible either due to school policy or the size of the class. That was extremely frustrating for us as parents. All we could do was basically drop him off at school at the beginning of the day and leave him to his own devices to deal with this large bureaucratic institution… take it or leave it. Continue reading →

School Decision Makers

Iain Coggins is an educator who has signed on, like me, to the start up of a group called “Educating for Human Greatness”, an effort to advocate for redefining schools and the profession of teaching focused on a more holistic and humanistic vision of how kids really learn. In his comment to my previous post Iain said, “I think a key to our efforts at Human Greatness is creating an unbreakable link between educators and parents. As both an educator and a parent I feel confident in saying that a true paradigm shift in education will be impossible without educator-parent unity.”

I agree with Iain on this idea of “educator-parent unity”. It certainly is general wisdom that kids are served if their parents are actively involved with their kid’s teacher. From my point of view, relationships are a good thing. Better to find a path forward through relationships with key players in your life or those of your family rather than relying on rules and other elements of bureaucracy as a substitute. Continue reading →

Thoughts on Emily & Middle School Issues


I want to start by acknowledging the first two people to post on and support my blog… Emily and Joan. Emily is a friend through Unitarian-Universalism, who has a son in middle school and reports that her son is having difficulties with that learning environment. Joan is a long–time activist for holistic and humanistic education and one of the people a few years back that inspired me to get more involved in the cause.

So Emily… as Joan indicated in her comment, she can speak with wisdom and experience as a holistic educator, working in profoundly alternative Waldorf schools. I have never been a formal educator, and my experience is all from the perspective of a parent and is in the area of homeschooling, particularly the more self-directed “unschooling” flavor of it.

Emily… your situation with your son recalls for me my own middle school years (we called it junior high back then), plus what I went through with my own kids, particularly my son. But before I say more about that I would like to recommend three resources for more information about homeschooling… Continue reading →