Day 1: CHSSP & the Common Core

Joseph J. Ferreira, Jr. Blog Post

The California History Social Science Project (CHSSP) is a collaborative project between the Department of History at UC - Irvine, the Departments of History several other UC campuses and approximately 2,000 public schools in California.  The project seeks to collaboratively create history lessons that align curriculum with the history - social science outcome expectations of the Common Core ELA standards.  

Presenters from the CHSSP led two interactive sessions on teaching Common Core skills. The first session focused attention on writing argumentative essays within the history curriculum (the

Day 1: The Trip

Joseph J. Ferreira, Jr. Blog Post

As I enjoy a non-crowded journey on Amtrak to NYC to attend the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, I've been perusing the conference program to select those topics of interest to me from the over 250 sessions that are being offered by the AHA and its affiliated societies and associations.  There has been such a significant shift in the focus of professional conference sessions in the thirty years since I first joined the AHA in 1985 (as a geeky history undergrad at Rhode Island College!).  There were rarely any sessions targeted at pre-collegiate faculty and even more

Ravitch & Rhee on Educational Reform: Battle of the Titans?

Joseph J. Ferreira, Jr. Blog Post

In the October 10th edition of the NY Review of Books, Andrew Delbarco published a dual review entitled The Two Faces of American Education.  In it, Delbarco reviewed Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools by Diane Ravitch and Radical: Fighting to Put Students First by Michelle Rhee.  It is an in-depth examination of two very different views of the path educational reform has taken during the past twenty years and it is an examination that is both eye-opening and disturbing.

Dr. Ravitch is, of course, a former disciple of the