Apparently our school board’s getting ready to “lawyer up”

Tennessee seems to be the latest hotspot for school reform.

I haven’t met Ernesto Prada, but I hope to someday. He’s a student at Santa Fe High, and he’s asking the very question we’ve been researching at the Academy for the Love of Learning for the last couple years: What can “school” be?

Great to hear President Obama talk about expanding preschool in last week’s State of the Union address; less inspiring was his idea for older kids.

Turns out our new superintendent was a troublemaker when he was in school. In a recent interview with Nancy Udell of Santa Fe Stories, Joel Boyd describes how he frequented the principal’s office until his high school wrestling coach, of all people, helped him get on track.

In the second presidential debate, on Oct. 16, the men who would rule our nation uttered the word “children” just once in 90 minutes—when Romney declared we’re all “children of the same God.” They said “job” 100 times and “tax” or “taxes” 76, but “education” was mentioned only 13 times, generally as a footnote to comments about the economy or gun control.

For years after becoming a classroom teacher, I wondered if I was truly a professional. People said I was a professional, but I didn’t get paid all that much and, unlike my lawyer buddies, I never had time for a game of tennis at lunch.

It’ll be a few years before we know how well we’ve done in choosing Joel Boyd as our new school superintendent. Judging by the district he came from, and the people on his transition team, he seems to belong to the new generation of school reformers—a bold class of data-driven leaders who use good business practices to transform school systems into sleek, well-run learning machines.

For this year's Best of Santa Fe issue, columnist Seth Biderman offers three of the best options for reforming Santa Fe Public Schools.

In the banter about how to improve education, you don’t hear much about homeschooling. Though it’s on the rise nationally, with three support groups in Santa Fe (including the Santa Fe Homeschool Association, with over 200 families), home schooling is often dismissed as a fringe practice of the religious and the radical, an economic impossibility, a sure path to geekdom for the kids. Common wisdom holds that parents should help with homework and Halloween fairs, but schooling in the post-industrial age is a high-stakes, complex affair, best left to officials and pedagogues.