National Champions - 2009

This year’s National Forensic League Championship speech and debate tournament concluded on Saturday, so I should have the 2011 rankings done by week’s end. In the meantime, we continue to countdown with the top ten schools from the Nationals in 2009. These are NOT the NFL’s official results; they have no such rankings at the national level. (For more on that, see my earlier post here.)

10^th: Eastview High School – Apple Valley, Minnesota. Unlike the California schools profiled so far, which often have dozens of miles between them, this is the fourth school south of St. Paul to reach the NFL’s top ten (so far).

National Champions – 2008

Continuing from yesterday’s post, we count down my unofficial tally of the top ten high schools at the National Forensic League Championships in Speech and Debate from the year 2008. These are NOT the NFL’s official results; they have no such rankings at the national level. (For more on that, see my previous post here.)

10^th: University School – Hunting Valley, Ohio. This all-boys private school resting about ten miles east of Cleveland brought a squad of just seven students to the tournament in Las Vegas. All seven advanced into the elimination rounds.

National Champions

It certainly feels like championship week with the Boston Bruins capturing the Stanley Cup last night and a title parade set this morning for the NBA’s Mavericks in downtown Dallas. Dirk Nowitzki and his teammates will also pass by hundreds of high school students seeking national titles of their own as the National Forensic League hosts their annual speech and debate championships in Big D. Sadly, while the individual orators and debaters can vie to be recognized as the best in the nation, their schools cannot be recognized in the same way. The NFL abolished their sweepstakes awards – which ranked all the participating teams based on their students’ performance as a group and dubbed a single school the year’s national champion – in October of 1994 at the behest of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Why Teachers Should Be Paid Like Baseball Players

The California Teachers Association hasn’t spent an entire decade conspiring with the State Superintendent to mask its members’ illicit use of performance-enhancing drugs. Barring that, I see little difference between this association and that which represents the players in Major League Baseball.

Open Letter to Legislators and Government Leaders in Education

To Whom It May Concern:

Naturally, the state of education rests somewhat precariously upon the state of the economy; despite this, I view our current dilemma as a massive opportunity to finally fix what is broken in our instructional and assessment practice. Decisions regarding staff and program cuts test the true ethical priorities of our schools, districts, and our state and national leaders, too. No Child Left Behind certainly established a clear priority of rigorous education accessible to all students across all race, gender, cultural, social, and economic lines. This essential equity lies at the heart of the law’s mission; however, the proficiency targets laid out for all the various student subgroups run contrary to this cornerstone of fairness.

Values and Culture

If your family dog got run over by a car, would you cook it and serve it for dinner?

Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, posed this and other scenarios (all viscerally unpleasant, but not at all harmful) to subjects from a variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Upon studying the reactions, Haidt concluded that a traditional definition of morality didn’t adequately explain the variety of responses.