Susan Ohanian has been speaking, blogging, and agitating against bad education ideas for many years. Her writing is informed by a finely tuned sense of humanism–that is, she cares about people, especially children, more than big ideas and grand policies that treat people like widgets.
She speaks with honesty, candor, courage, and integrity. She is tireless. She is the real deal. She has taught every grade in school. To Susan, every issue always comes down the same question: is it good for children?
Susan Ohanian is a fearless advocate for children and good education, grounded in reality, not abstractions.
She is truly a hero of American education, and I gladly add her name to the honor roll of this blog.
To get a sense of her work, read one of her latest posts.
I especially enjoyed this tribute to Mr. Rogers.
Susan regularly posts cartoons that lampoon the madness of the NCLB-Race to the Top regime.
See here.
And here.
And here.
And here.
Read her collection of Outrages.
And for more, read her running commentary on the Common Core.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Having communicated and contributed to Susan’s blog, I can vow that her thinking and articulation is among THE most clear, precise, intentional, erudite, and truthful I have ever encountered.
Susan is a brilliant writer and advocate.
I would say her blog is equal to the Ravitch blog. . . . please read BOTH daily ! These two blogs are the most comprehensive sites for really understanding what is going on in education on a national, state, and local level.
Diane is pure Vitamin C and Susan is Co-Q10. . . . .Take your vitamins every day to be strong and healthy!
I totally AGREE! Ohanian rocks.
I still want to know what seasoned educators (like more than my 15 years in) would have liked to have seen other than NCLB? Seriously. What would the better path have looked like? I want to imagine it so we can maybe imagine it into reality.
I will keep asking this question until it gets answered.
An excellent question, Joanna Best. The premise of NCLB is that through testing one can squeeze every child into the “above average” category of achievement as determined by skills testing.
The problem is that all behaviour falls under a normal curve. The BEST that can be done is to move the average up a point or two. There will always be people performing “below average” just in the nature of things.
The question then becomes not how do we get every kid in camp to swim across the lake in under 37 minutes, but how do we get every kid to swim part way across the lake and the average to get all the way across the lake, and the best to do it in under 37 minutes. We can work with the mid group who show ability to get them to get all the way across the lake, no matter how long it takes. We have to accept that some kids will never get all the way across the lake. There will always be some kids left behind.
The name No Child Left Behind is a false metaphor. It’s as if education were a bus, and the bus driver wouldn’t wait for some kids. Education is not a bus, that you get on and which carries you to a destination. Education is a hike, not a bus trip. How far anyone gets up the mountain is determined by native strength, instruction in using the compass and map, and determination—i.e. intelligence, curriculum, and persistence. What happens in schools is only the use of compass and map. The rest are out of the school’s control, although to the extent that intelligence is knowledge of concepts and their names, that can be modified. Persistence too can be modified somewhat by offering kids chances to succeed with mostly mere persistence (e.g. sports).
But ultimately, the schools are responsible for exposing all the hikers who assemble at the bottom of the mountain to the compass (literacy, mathematical and verbal), and to the map (increasing knowledge). Some of the hikers will pick up the basis faster and better, some will make more progress through the knowledge curriculum in a shorter time. Some will get to the mountain top (Shakespeare and Calculus), but most won’t.
The problem is most teachers have not been to the mountain top, so they don’t really know the goal toward which they are assisting students. One would hope most teachers will have gotten a little further along the hike than their students.
80% of kids don’t go to the mountain top and don’t need it to be successful and the teachers who have been to the mountain top rarely make good teachers.
Easy. Evaluation based on quarterly grades and final QPA. It’s how I evaluated myself for 36 years and it worked very well. Both are better predictors of success after school than standardized tests.
Susan Ohanian’s website is a garden of many, many delights. I love this bit she posted from Albert Einstein, who was a pretty bright guy (and who had some truly wonderful ideas about education):
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture. . . . Such men [as Henry Ford} do not always realize that the adoration which they receive is not a tribute to their personality but to their power or their pocketbook.
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929
And if you send her a relevant and juicy tiparoo, she responds with gratitude and warmth.