You might have been wondering why we're trying to fill the AERO Conference now when it it isn't until August 3-7 in Portland, OR. This year AERO staff will be participating in the International Democratic Education Conference in June so we'll need to know very shortly how many attendees we'll have. July is too late for most of our non-local attendees who need to arrange flights, hotel, etc. AERO attendees are mostly not local and come from nearly every state and many countries. In order to know whether we can offer such things as pre-conference excursions as we did last time, more workshops and keynoters and special events we need to know what our numbers will be. This is one reason we've kept the deposit option so long. The discounted special and sweepstakes announced Thursday end tomorrow. Read about them here. 

If you are planning to attend but haven't registered yet, please do now or at least use the deposit option. It will help us greatly. If you can't register now or have a group, special need or want to volunteer, please contact us by replying to this e news. 

You can register this week for the 5 day AERO conference for  $275 , and you also have the option to register at the $225 rate if you are low income . This will end without warning as the conference gets more full. We still have the $500 patron rate for those who want to sponsor another attendee, half of which is tax deductible. Other rates: Volunteers and students can still register at the $200 rate . The rate for children under 12 is $100 , which includes child care. Contact us directly for special group rates. 

Get more info or register here!

By   Vicki Hyman

"60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley on Sunday takes viewers inside  St. Benedict's Preperatory School  in Newark, the Catholic prep school whose motto is "Whatever hurts my brother hurts me."

The school is run by headmaster Fr. Edwin Leahy, but he says much of the decision-making rests with the students themselves, a tactic designed to empower the mostly black and Hispanic student body. "It's a population that never gets to have control," Leahy tells Pelley, who visited St. Benedict's over its 11-month school year. "That's a better learning experience for them ... The rule typically is if you're going to make a decision without adult advice, you had better be right." 

St. Benedict's success - the school has a 98 percent graduation rate, and 85 percent earn college degrees - was also the subject of  a 2013 documentary called "The Rule," the 72-chapter philosophy written in the 6th century by St. Benedict of Nursia that emphasizes helping others.

The "60 Minutes" segment features student Andrew Brice, a former foster child who was living on the streets when he snuck into school's natatorium one day and told the water polo coach that he needed help. Brice is now a junior, living at the monastery next to the school and studying to be a dancer. "He's not a quitter," says Bruce Davis, St. Benedict's senior group leader, about Brice. "And that's another motto. Benedict's hates a quitter." 

This week, on the  e-book section of our bookstore we are offering on sale for the first time the e-book of Chris Mercogliano's How to Grow a School!

That's only $5, a third of the print book cost and and half the e-book price.  

Buy the E-Book here .

By William Doyle

Spend five minutes in Jussi Hietava's fourth-grade math class in remote, rural Finland, and you may learn all you need to know about education reform - if you want results, try doing the opposite of what American "education reformers" think we should do in classrooms.

Instead of control, competition, stress, standardized testing, screen-based schools and loosened teacher qualifications, try warmth, collaboration, and highly professionalized, teacher-led encouragement and assessment.

At the University of Eastern Finland's Normaalikoulu teacher training school in Joensuu, Finland, you can see  Hietava's students enjoying the cutting-edge concept of "personalized learning."

I've known educational documentarian John Merrow for many years. He just retired. These are his thoughts on retirement. JM

By James Harvey.

By the time he retired last October, John Merrow had had a 41-year bird's eye view of American schools as a journalist with NPR and PBS NewsHour. Armed with a doctorate in education from Harvard, he'd served as a critical school friend throughout his career, pointing out the flaws in the thinking of defenders and critics of public education alike.

In just a single example of his doggedness in pursuing a story, Merrow once spent six years following superintendent David Hornbeck around Philadelphia for the raw material on a documentary about life as an urban school superintendent, titled, appropriately enough, "The Toughest Job in America." Merrow, who founded the production company, Learning Matters and won numerous awards in journalism including Emmy nominations, prestigious Peabody Awards, and the Harold W. McGraw Prize in Education, was once hailed by Jim Lehrer, former host of PBS NewsHour, as "quite simply, the leading education journalist in America."

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