2011 at InterACT – Martha Infante

Martha Infante preparing to speak to the USDOE Equity and Excellence Commission, ( San Jose, CA; 4/21/11)

I’m going to take some liberties in putting together an end-of-year page for Martha Infante, because I think the most significant blogging she did on InterACT was a series of posts that started in 2010 and ran well into 2011 before concluding.  Back in the fall of 2010, Martha’s school was slapped with a label and declared a “failing school.”  Such labels are gross over-simplifications, and as I wrote about earlier this year, when the term “failure” is linked to adequate yearly progress (AYP) under No Child Left Behind, it’s becoming an increasingly useless distinction.  Martha’s posts on this topic have allowed readers to see behind the label, to look at the school, the students, teachers, and community, and to see so much of what everyone should understand about the situation.  They are not failing.  The high-stakes and extra pressure are counter-productive.  The result of the whole process was to waste thousands of hours of work that could have been dedicated to purposes closer to the classroom.  The label was removed a year later, leaving people cynical and demoralized.  I hope you’ll take some time to look back at this important series of blog posts by Martha Infante.

• Month One as a Failing School
• Month Three as a Failing School: The Hatchet Drops 
• Month Five as a Failing School
• Month Nine as a Failing School
• Failing School No Longer (But Were We Ever?)

But as significant as these posts were, I’d also be remiss in my duties if I failed to note that Martha’s most read blog post of the year was Not Insulted, in which she takes Arne Duncan to task for trying speak for teachers – and against Diane Ravitch.

You can view all of Martha’s blog posts by using the index in the right-side column of this page – or just click here.

Martha is also an active Twitter user – why not follow her?