BretWagner.com

Employment at Will — Why Education Needs this Policy

I go to work every day because I enjoy it. I look forward to it. The day that stops, I’ll promptly leave. My employer appreciates my work. Approves of the effort I put in when working with customers and coworkers. The day that stops, they’ll promptly ask me to leave. No restrictions. No threat of [...]

What I’m Standing For

I don’t typically put my political views out there front and center, but a read through this Sunday’s State Journal has me inspired to write what I believe is worth standing for. First, end the Bush tax cuts for the rich and end corporate welfare. Raise corporate income taxes and the upper brackets of the [...]

Life Lessons I Wish I Learned 15 Years Ago

Opportunities are all about luck. Put yourself in a position for luck to find you. You’re not going to find your dream job by sending out cover letters and resumes. You need to get out there and meet people that can open the doors for you. You’re not going to start a billion dollar business [...]

Why Teachers Unions Have it Wrong

Let me just get this out there before I go too deep — I think teachers unions represent an important and valuable aspect of public education. I agree with about 80% of what they stand for, and appreciate what they’ve done for teachers’ pay and benefits in the past 40 years. However, a number of [...]

Get your Technology, Entertainment, and Design Fix

TED Blog is all you’ll ever need to visit to learn about technology, entertainment and design (hence TED!). Thing I love about this site is all the streaming content– TED has some great presenters. What I would give to get a ticket to this event. Check it out here.

The Bell Curve and Public Education

Some people are always in the middle of the bell curve. Take any population anywhere on the planet and measure just about anything, and the distribution of the population almost always comes out as a perfect bell curve. Weird? No. Just normal (Gaussian to the statisticians out there). Public education in Wisconsin has traditionally been very [...]

Rails Community Growing in Madison

Hey Madison… Here’s an interesting trend you’ll want to follow closely– the rails community in your town is alive and growing. I just attended the Mad-Railers meetup last night at Murfie’s headquarters downtown. The event was well-attended — at least 25 people across all levels of ability. What I found most exicting was the number [...]

A Framework for Startups

Few organizations have been able to recruit such high-quality people into an organization, track their progress, then objectively evaluate their performance to determine who the best are. Teach For America is one of these organizations. I think the qualities that make a teacher excellent in the classroom translate very well to the startup world. There [...]

Why Schools Have it All Wrong

We’re teaching the wrong things in school. We are focusing too much on rewarding what the individual knows rather than how they work with others and problem solve in a team. The current push for standardized testing only reinforces this misplaced focus. States are using these standardized tests to determine who graduates, how funding is [...]

The Other 25%

Whatever business you are in, think about this scary statistic: 75% of all businesses in the US depend 100% on the US consumer. America is a consumer-driven economy, which is why things get rough when consumers keep their cash safely tucked away rather than spend it. We should celebrate the other 25% that have figured [...]