Peper finds examples of great teaching in Charleston

There are more than 50,000 great public school teachers in South Carolina. Highlighting each one of them with a column in one daily newspaper would take more than 137 years, but that doesn't mean we oughtn't do it from time to time.

I'm pleased to see that Post & Courier columnist Warren Peper took note of one last week, Mark Nadobny of Moultrie Middle School:When you enter Mark Nadobny’s class

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Burke students set examples, changed history

Thanks to the Charleston Post & Courier for this weekend feature article on the sit-ins of the 1960s at S.H. Kress on King Street and elsewhere.

What a tremendous message these events communicated: That high school students could and can, in fact, have a great impact on the history of their communities.

Today, I'm afraid to say, thanks to the super-saturation of pop culture, our high schoolers

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Supporters propose a memorial for Judge J. Waties Waring

Here's wonderful opportunity to do a good thing for our state, our children and ourselves. I hope our state's educators will support this wholeheartedly and actively.

I've written several times to praise Judge J. Waties Waring of Charleston, a man whose leadership did much to change -- against the wishes of Charleston society -- the course of South Carolina's and America's history.

In this

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EOC: Goals 2020 in jeopardy without 'new sense of urgency'

An opinion-editorial was published in the Charleston Post & Courier on Friday by Barbara Hairfield, social studies curriculum specialist and Teaching American History Grant Project director for the Charleston County School District.

Hairfield is also vice chair of the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee, which makes her the highest ranking educator on that body, as state law prohibits

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When educators organize, educators and students win.

I'm a great believer in organizing.

I believe that when educators organize, educators and their students win.

Even better, when educators and parents organize together, nothing stops them from achieving their mutual goals, because even in a state like South Carolina -- where the legislature has total control of everything -- what motivates lawmakers is motivated, organized voters.

So I'm so

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Paving the road to Charleston with good intentions

I remember being a kid in school, seeing other students' parents there for any and every school activity there was. They were present so often that when they were absent, it was cause for alarm. Were they all right? Had they taken ill? Were they visiting family out-of-town?

My own parents didn't do that, and I knew well why. Both worked, full-time, to support a family with several children. We

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'Abysmal' conditions finally addressed in Charleston Head Start

Apparently, while our esteemed decision-makers in Columbia were trying to decide how much of our treasury should be offered to corporate interests in the form of tax breaks, and while our governor was doing her part by vetoing funding for public education, the littlest children of Charleston were attending "abysmal" Head Start facilities.

And the vote by Charleston's city leaders to spend the

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Congratulations to scholarship winners, other achievers

More news of great things happening every day in South Carolina's public schools:Charleston County School District students earned a record-setting amount of scholarships this past year with $47.9 million. The district's scholarship total grew $1.7 million from last year, and this year's total is a more than $10 million increase from the district total in 2007, the district said Wednesday.

The

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Judge J. Waties Waring re-directed South Carolina history

Martin Luther King Jr in 1967, channeling the sentiment of Theodore Parker's writing of 1853, told the 11th annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, "...the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

If judges, whose main interest is justice, affect the course of that arc, few of South Carolina's judges had greater impact on it -- or on state history --

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Will Charleston lose $1,000,000 for teacher evaluation?

If Charleston loses this million dollars, where does it go? Where has it been sitting for the past year?Charleston County School Superintendent Nancy McGinley and former state Superintendent of Education Jim Rex struck a deal more than a year ago to work together and develop a new teacher evaluation system that would be based in part on how well their students perform.

But their agreement led to

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Editors praise literacy gains by Charleston's educators

On the upside, in a note published in yesterday's Post and Courier of Charleston, editors praised the work being done by Charleston's classroom educators to improve literacy in the area. On the downside, the editors didn't actually bring themselves to mention that Charleston's classroom educators were doing the work. An otherwise terrific editorial rings tinny for that deficiency.

The editors

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Charleston LWV supports "high quality" education

South Carolina's educators got a vote of support from the Charleston League of Women Voters this week. On the eve of Governor Nikki Haley's veto rampage, and Superintendent Mick Zais's announcement that he still will not pursue federal funding for public schools, Jane Pulling of the Charleston Area League of Women Voters submitted the following letter to The State, which published it this week:

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Parents question mass exodus of beloved teachers

This is what happens when effective teachers leave the classroom in numbers: Parents attentive to the needs of their children step up and start asking questions.

It isn't clear why almost a dozen teachers at St. Johns High School on Johns Island have vacated their positions, all at once, and the district office is making every effort to say it isn't being "initiated by the district." But the

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