By Bradley Harrington Flynn, MA in History, Ed. I’ve spent the last seven years as teacher in a rough urban school district. Like many urban districts, we battle poverty and crime – which are not unrelated – and a number of other issues, too many to enumerate. I love my job and wouldn’t think of choosing a different profession. Recently, however, I’ve realized that my job is less and less teaching and interacting with students and more and more managing compliance to top-down initiatives purporting to be the silver bullet to the district’s educational woes. At a recent district-mandated professional development session, my colleagues and I recounted the numerous initiatives which have come and gone from education. Still, there we were, listening to well-meaning master educators explain to us why the last approach was wrong and why this approach will work. These frustrations have inspired me to compile a list [...]