schoolinfosystem.org
Ann Althouse The post title is the first sentence of the article, and the next part I quoted is very far down in the article. The SPLC’s designation takes prominence over any explanation of what this group is and why it deserves denouncement, and the explanation isn’t convincing at all. These are the parents who […]
I’m an educator. Masters in elementary ed, NYS certified. @ehanford knows far more about reading instruction than most of us, who weren’t properly trained to teach reading effectively. She’s done the field an immeasurable service. https://t.co/xkGg1Yd3F3 — Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) June 23, 2023
Tom Rees: “Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through onto customers,” Pill said in an interview streamed Tuesday on the “Beyond Unprecedented” podcast.
Reagan on PARENTAL RIGHTS: “Isn’t it the parents right to give counsel and advice to keep their children from making mistakes that may affect their entire lives? Many of us in government would like to know what parents think about this intrusion in their family by government.… pic.twitter.com/EdbiIyk61T — Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) April 18, 2023
Here is the snippet: pic.twitter.com/85iBeXC0Wn — Seidler (@SeidlerCorp) March 17, 2023
Wall Street Journal: All of this has been another failure of progressive economics. By focusing solely on macroeconomic demand, while ignoring supply-side and regulatory bottlenecks, their policies fueled the inflation we have today. They also ignored the role of excess money, forgetting economist Milton Friedman’s famous lesson. As President Biden declared in an April 2020 […]
Matthew Crawford: Throughout history, there have been crises that could be resolved only by suspending the normal rule of law and constitutional principles. A “state of exception” is declared until the emergency passes — it could be a foreign invasion, an earthquake or a plague. During this period, the legislative function is typically relocated from […]
This is the first page of Paul Ehrlich’s book ‘The Population Bomb’, published in 1968. The book sold millions of copies and was taken very seriously. Extraordinary how confident Ehrlich was when making these extremely dark predictions. pic.twitter.com/2wHTLo3vXu — Max Roser (@MaxCRoser) May 20, 2022
Laura McKenna: Parental involvement went beyond homework and mental health. They also marched into school board meetings across the nation, loudly advocating for their positions on masks and curriculum. Their views were felt in the voting booth as the angry parent vote swung state elections, and may also play a critical role in the the […]
CDPH is refusing to disclose the emails between @CAPublicHealth & @WeAreCTA about K-12 school masking because they “reveal the deliberative process of CDPH leadership.” Why is CTA involved in the “deliberative process” of school masking policies? What is CDPH hiding? pic.twitter.com/pjbLD0PUQ0 — Reopen California Schools (@ReopenCASchools) February 28, 2022
Apporva Mandavilli: Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status […]
I would love to know what Harvard Prof. Thomas Burke, who testified in favor of shutting schools in Aug. 2020, now thinks. He is the Chief of the Division of Global Health and Human Rights at Mass General Hospital.@MGHGlobalHealth https://t.co/hIHC4P6oW6 https://t.co/kqdtlza1pP pic.twitter.com/h1jCLCHtTq — Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 28, 2021 Professor Thomas Burke notes and links. […]
Member (and former President) of the SF school board thinks merit-based admissions are “segregationist”. Meanwhile her kids go to a special magnet school for children gifted in the arts. Utter hypocrisy. https://t.co/k6L2OwJg9E — Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) December 9, 2021
Meir Kohn: I did not become a libertarian because I was persuaded by philosophical arguments — those of Ayn Rand or F. A. Hayek, for example. Rather, I became a libertarian because I was persuaded by my own experiences and observations of reality. There were three important lessons. The first lesson was my personal experience of socialism. The second was […]
Eric Boehm: Kentucky’s public education establishment loudly complained about legislation that would have forced school districts to compete for students—and on Wednesday, Gov. Andy Beshear did their bidding. Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed a school choice bill that would have allowed families to cross district lines in pursuit of better schools, with education dollars following students who decided […]
Mackenzie Mays: Gov. Gavin Newsom declined to say Friday whether he will send his children back to class after several Sacramento County private elementary schools received waivers this week to resume in-person instruction, including one that sources say his own children attend. “I’ll let you know after I process that with my wife,” Newsom laughed […]
Logan Wroge: The Madison School Board approved a contract Monday to hire a Minnesota school administrator as the next superintendent before releasing details of the agreement to the public. That’s a change from how the board handled the hiring process for its first choice for superintendent — who later backed out of the job — […]
Michael Powell: Are Protests Unsafe? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What. Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests last spring as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism. “We know best”, notes and links.
Chris von Csefalvay: In early March, British leaders planned to take a laissez-faire approach to the spread of the coronavirus. Officials would pursue “herd immunity,” allowing as many people in non-vulnerable categories to catch the virus in the hope that eventually it would stop spreading. But on March 16, a report from the Imperial College […]
Brendan O’Neill: It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. […]
Erin O’Donnell: RAPIDLY INCREASING number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school, choosing instead to educate them at home. Homeschooled kids now account for roughly 3 percent to 4 percent of school-age children in the United States, a number equivalent to those attending charter schools, and larger than the number […]
Brooke Binkowski: And this is what social media needs to do, now, today: Deplatform the proudly ignorant disinformers pushing snake oil and false hopes. Do so swiftly and mercilessly. They will whine about freedom of speech. They will cry about censorship. Let them. How can I be so cavalier about freedom of speech? I hear […]
Zeynep Tufekci: Authoritarian blindness is a perennial problem, especially in large countries like China with centralized, top-down administration. Indeed, Xi would not even be the first Chinese ruler to fall victim to the totality of his own power. On August 4, 1958, buoyed by reports pouring in from around the country of record grain, rice, […]
Brentin Mock: The tree-planters met stiff resistance: Roughly a quarter of the 7,500 residents they approached declined offers to have new trees planted in front of their homes. It was a high enough volume of rejections for such an otherwise valuable service that University of Vermont researcher Christine E. Carmichael wanted to know the reasons […]
Daniel Jupp: Like Jeremy Corbyn or Channel 4’s scrupulously impartial Jon ‘fuck the Tories’ Snow, Attenborough has shown himself to be another elderly, middle-class man suffering under the delusion that he is an 18-year-old student radical. And Glastonbury was not an isolated incident, either. Anything a 16-year-old Swedish girl can do, Sir David has obviously […]
Ross Douthat: Over the last three years, since Brexit and the Trumpening and the general rise of disreputable forces in Western politics, there has been a steadily boiling elite panic about the power of the paranoid fringe, the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, the pull of fake news and the danger of alternative realities. And yet […]
Dan Rasmussen & Haonan Li: An elite pedigree — the type of pedigree favored by headhunters and corporate boards — is not predictive of superior management. One of the central rationales for Jensen’s campaign (increasing CEO pay by tying it to share price performance) appears, in retrospect, to have little empirical support. These credentials, however, […]
Margot Cleveland: Two recent bills proposed by state legislators in Illinois and Iowa reveal a disturbing perspective on parental rights that’s becoming more prevalent in our country: the belief that parents cannot be trusted to care for their children. The Swiftly-Defeated Illinois Bill In Illinois, a little over a week ago, Democratic state Rep. Monica […]
Jared Diamond: these stories of isolated societies illustrate two general principles about relations between human group size and innovation or creativity. First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I mean […]
Robby Soave: Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited Harvard University’s Institute of Politics to discuss her school choice agenda. Students in the audience interrupted her several times; some even held up a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist.” The irony, of course, is twofold. One, the subject of DeVos’s Harvard address—school choice—is […]
Robert McFadden “We find when we bring average Americans together that they listen to one another, that they can contribute and that they can build, develop a vision of what they want our society to be like. And it’s really inspiring.” In a speech at the Drucker Institute in Claremont, Calif., in late 2008, Mr. […]
Bagehot: For my money the best analysis of what happened was inadvertently penned by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his 1967 essay on “The Crisis of the 17th Century”. Trevor-Roper argued that the mid-17th century saw a succession of revolts, right across Europe, of the “country” against the “court”. The court had become ever more bloated and […]
Caleb Crain It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from […]
Peggy Noonan Those who come to this space know why I think what happened, happened. The unprotected people of America, who have to live with Washington’s policies, rebelled against the protected, who make and defend those policies and who care little if at all about the unprotected. That broke bonds of loyalty and allegiance. Tuesday […]
Emmmett Rensin There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s […]
Jeff Guo: Recently, Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg conducted a study of the unglamorous D.C. bureaucrat. These are the people who keep the federal government humming — the Hill staffers, the project managers and all those desk workers who vaguely describe themselves as “analysts.” As Bachner and Ginsberg argue, civil […]
Chris Arnade Trump voters may not vote the way I want them to, but, after having spent the last five years working in (and having grown up in) parts of the US few visit, I know they are not dumb. They are doing what all voters do: Trying to use their vote to better their […]
Madison students have long endured the disastrous results of “we know best“. Reading Recovery and Connected Math are two prominent examples. Chris Mooney: The question then is whether there is an effective way to prime people to be more science-curious — which could then also have political ramifications. “It’s an asset that there’s a segment […]
Lawrence Summers: We do not want to learn what we can get used to. I’m sure once the historical commission had delayed the bridge for many months, there was an attitude of “What’s another couple?” In a broader sense, the Anderson Memorial Bridge tale tees up a bigger question. Where is the outrage? Why didn’t […]
Deirdre N. McCloskey: The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment. Why are we so rich? An American earns, on average, $130 a day, which puts the U.S. in the highest rank of the league table. China sits at […]
Joe Gelonosi: I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally. The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing […]
Harriet Alexander: Venezuela’s embattled government has taken the drastic step of forcing food producers to sell their produce to the state, in a bid to counter the ever-worsening shortages. Farmers and manufacturers who produce milk, pasta, oil, rice, sugar and flour have been told to supply between 30 per cent and 100 per cent of […]
Conor Friedersdorf: Last summer in Kansas, a 9-year-old was loving his Little Free Library until at least two residents proved that some people will complain about anything no matter how harmless and city officials pushed the boundaries of literal-mindedness: The Leawood City Council said it had received a couple of complaints about Spencer Collins’ Little […]
Joseph L. Bast, Lindsey Burke, Andrew J. Coulson, Robert C. Enlow, Kara Kerwin & Herbert J. Walberg: Americans face a choice between two paths that will guide education in this nation for generations: self-government and central planning. Which we choose will depend in large measure on how well we understand accountability. To some, accountability means government-imposed […]
With the nationalizing of the American healthcare system well underway, nationalizing public education pre-K through 12 is the next big thing on the progressive agenda. Wait for it.
It will be called ObamaCore Education, for short.
The original 2008 Obama campaign Blueprint for Change document included a “Plan to Give Every American Child a World Class Education” and linked to a 15-page, single-spaced document entitled “Barack Obama’s Plan For Lifetime Success Through Education.” It offered a litany of proposals as part of a broad, federal intervention into America’s public education system.
A case can be made that the regime would have been better off, in the long run, nationalizing public education before healthcare, because the fundamental transformation of education would have been easier.
How so? you ask.
The reasons for the relative ease — compared to ObamaCare — of installing ObamaCore Education were cited in the American Thinker back in June 2009.Related: Up for re-election Madison School Board President Ed Hughes: “The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”. Remarkable.
Matthew DeFour (and many others):
That led minority leaders to complain about the perceived control white Madison liberals — including teachers union leaders — exert on elections and on efforts meant to raise minority student achievement. Some local leaders have undertaken soul-searching while others say more minorities need to seek elective office.
“You could not have constructed a scenario to cause more alienation and more mistrust than what Sarah Manski did,” longtime local political observer Stuart Levitan said, referring to the primary winner for seat 5. “It exposed an underlying lack of connection between some of the progressive white community and the progressive African-American community that is very worrisome in the long run.”
In the last few weeks:
- Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire in a lengthy email described the failed negotiations involving him, district officials and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews over Caire’s proposed Madison Preparatory Academy geared toward low-income minority students.
- Ananda Mirilli, who placed third behind Manski for seat 5, released emails in which Sarah Manski’s husband, Ben Manski, accused Caire of recruiting Mirilli to run for School Board and linking Caire to a conservative foundation. Caire confirmed the email exchange, but said he didn’t recruit Mirilli. The Manskis did not respond to requests for comment.
- Two School Board members, Mary Burke and Ed Hughes, vigorously backed former police lieutenant Wayne Strong, who is black, to counter the influence of political groups supporting his opponent. In the seat 3 race, Strong faces Dean Loumos, a low-income housing provider supported by MTI, the Dane County Democratic Party, Progressive Dane and the local Green Party.
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.
Caroline Alphonso: “If teachers know only 60 per cent of the correct responses, then they can only teach with 60 per cent accuracy to their students at best. So, it clearly does have impacts,” he said. “It also tells us, across the faculties, that whatever we’re doing, we’re not quite doing enough,” he added. “We […]
Associated Press: In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world. The National Council of Teachers […]
Jackie Longo and Christopher Maynard In the fall of 2022, more than 49 million studentswere enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools across the U.S. About 32% ended the last academic year performing below their current grade level in at least one subject. Unfortunately, many of these kids were afforded different levels of assistance to help […]
Danielle DuClos and Kayla Huynh: Most Wisconsin students are poor readers. Each year, about three out of every five typically fail to score proficient in state reading tests. But it’s not just students struggling. Wisconsin’s prospective teachers haven’t fared much better in exams they must pass to become a licensed educator. In the most recent […]
Matt Lamb The Chicago Teachers Union president has a convenient excuse for low test scores in the public school system: The exams are “rooted in white supremacy.” “The way in which, you know, we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy,” Stacy Davis […]
Holly Korbey In schools, the podcast was a shot across the bow in a longstanding battle over the best way to teach young children to read. “A lot of teachers didn’t know about this research. It was very clear to them, when they started to learn about it, that it has huge implications,” says Hanford. […]
Peter Gray: Many parents strive mightily to get their children into high achieving high schools. A high achieving school (or HAS) is defined as one where students score high on standardized tests and a high percentage go on to selective colleges. Such striving occurs through various means. Some move to a wealthy suburban community and pay a […]
Jack Murtaugh: The Guinness brewery has been known for innovative methods ever since founder Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease in Dublin for £45 a year. For example, a mathematician-turned-brewer invented a chemical technique there after four years of tinkering that gives the brewery’s namesake stout its velvety head. The method, which involves adding nitrogen […]
Aaron Sibarium: Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science […]
ATHENA CHAPEKIS, SAMUEL BESTVATER, EMMA REMY AND GONZALO RIVERO This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that: To see how digital decay plays out on […]
Kayla Huynh: After years of stagnant reading scores, educators see renewed promise in Act 20. The law, signed in July with broad support from legislators and school districts, is set to make sweeping changes across the state in how schools teach kindergarten through third grade students how to read. Under the act, districts next school year will […]
Donald Knuth (2003): Editorial Board, Journal of Algorithms Dear Board member, Let me begin with some background information from my personal perspective. I “grew up” professionally with Academic Press journals: Part of my thesis was printed in Volume 2 of the Journal of Algebra (1965); soon afterward I published an article about trees in the […]
Mike Hlas: “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” the 1990 non-fiction bestseller by H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger about a prominent west Texas high school football team and societal issues in its Odessa, Texas home is one of 19 books recently removed from school shelves in Mason City. Others include Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” […]
By LaTonya Goffney, Sonja Santelises and Iranetta Wright: America is finally acknowledging a harsh truth: The way many schools teach children to read doesn’t work. Educators, and indeed families, are having a long overdue conversation about how one of the nation’s most widely used curricula, “Units of Study,” is deeply flawed — and where to […]
Joanne Jacobs: Jessica Bradshaw’s daughter — now a son — was diagnosed as on the autism spectrum, as well as with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, PTSD and anxiety, the California mother told Baker. Her teenager “had struggled with loneliness during the pandemic” and “repeatedly changed his name and sexual orientation.” School officials had put her […]
Joel Kotkin The United States today stands as a living contradiction to the ‘great man theory of history’. For the US is a great country led by small minds. In recent times, it has been ruled by a narcissistic moral reprobate and it is now being run by a cognitively deficient and scandal-plagued politician. There is a growing […]
Lucy Kellaway: Life at my school is founded on the Gospel values which, I found after a spot of googling, involve the sort of thing even the most devout atheist should be able to sign up to: forgiveness, honesty, trust, family and, above all, love. I listened with disbelief in the first staff meeting when […]
Luke Rosiak: A Virginia grand jury investigating a public school district’s apparent coverup of the rape of a girl by a male student in a girls bathroom–which made national headlines after a Daily Wire investigation–blasted school officials for their “stunning lack” of transparency and “intentional amnesia” in a much-anticipated report released Monday. In the fact-finding report, the nine-person Loudoun […]
William Buckley: I have always thought Anatole France’s story of the juggler to be one of enduring moral resonance. This is the arresting and affecting tale of the young monk who aspires to express his devotion to the Virgin Mary, having dejectedly reviewed, during his first week as a postulant at the monastery alongside Our Lady of […]
Wall Street Journal: In response to the concerns raised by Professor Michael Thaddeus on his faculty website, the school said in Junethat it would review past years’ data submissions and wouldn’t participate in this year’s U.S. News & World Report ranking of the nation’s best colleges. … Also Friday, the school released two sets of numbers for what […]
Joel Kotkin: Housing is an industry, but it is also where people live, raise families, and stake their future. Yet increasingly, all around the world, housing has increasingly become just a commodity to be traded, often by foreigner investors, notably from China, as well as by large well-capitalized financial institutions who plan to cultivate a generation […]
Beth Hawkins: Mounting evidence supports an academic strategy known as acceleration, in which students who are behind are challenged with grade-level material while getting help with missing skills or knowledge. But new research finds its use in schools “is currently more talk than action.” Analyzing data from 3 million students assigned lessons through a widely […]
Wall Street Journal: At his first big political rally of 2022, President Trump was again focused on 2020. “We had a rigged election, and the proof is all over the place,” he said. Mr. Trump was apparently too busy over Christmas to read a 136-page report by a conservative group in Wisconsin, whose review shows […]
Vinay Prasad: Collins is not an epidemiologist, and he has no standing to decide what counts as a “fringe” view within that field. As NIH director, his job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, he attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.The efforts to censor Malone and McCullough […]
Joe Levin: Most Texans, however, know him as a coach. He is almost certainly the best in high school football today. He is arguably the greatest of all time. (He might have to settle for second-best when it comes to coaches, at any level, produced by Jefferson, thanks to class of ’61 grad and Pro […]
Tawnell D. Hobbs and Andrea Fuller: Some of the wealthiest U.S. colleges are steering parents into no-limit federal loans to cover rising tuition, leaving many poor and middle-class families with debt they can’t repay. Parents at Baylor University had the worst repayment rate for a type of federal loan called Parent Plus among private schools […]
Bluprince13: Consuming knowledge is the first step towards getting good at anything. Today, the primary way I consume knowledge is via the Internet. As a software developer, keeping up to date with developments in my industry is something I used to find particularly challenging. I used to rely on social media, but I became tired […]
Astral Codex: [edit: existing polygenic screening companies might not read enough genes to do this. Although it would be easy to offer a more complete service that reads most genes, banning the more complete version might be one way regulators could prevent this otherwise hard-to-prevent thing.] What about IQ? There are definitely scientists who have […]
M Anthony Mills: Among the more influential truisms about science today is that it is essential for technological — and thus economic — progress. It is fitting, then, that the apparent slowing of American innovation has fueled a debate about the importance of science and the need for the federal government to support it. Indeed, […]
Daniel Willingham: People considering the economic impact of school closings have primarily focused on lost wages and productivity due to parents missing work, but a much greater cost lies ahead. Years from now the U.S. economy will lose trillions when those students who have fallen behind during remote learning enter the workforce. Kids must make up for lost learning, […]
Thomas Astebro, Serguey Braguinsky and Yuheng Ding: We document that since 1997, the rate of startup formation has precipitously declined for firms operated by U.S. PhD recipients in science and engineering. These are supposedly the source of some of our best new technological and business opportunities. We link this to an increasing burden of knowledge […]
Joselle Kehoe: When I first became fascinated with mathematics’ tightly knit abstract structures, its prominence in physics and engineering reassured me. Mathematics’ indisputable value in science made it clear that my preoccupation with its intangible expressions was not pathological. The captivating creative activity of doing mathematics has real consequences. During my graduate school years, I […]
Judith Shulevitz: You might assume that this curious story of how the Church narrowed the criteria for marriageability would be relegated to a footnote—a very interesting footnote, to be sure—but Joseph Henrich puts the tale at the center of his ambitious theory-of-everything book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar […]
Nicolas Bourbaki: The group is known as “Nicolas Bourbaki” and is usually referred to as just Bourbaki. The name is a collective pseudonym borrowed from a real-life 19th-century French general who never had anything to do with mathematics. It’s unclear why they chose the name, though it may have originated in a prank played by […]
Tony Young: You probably haven’t heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is a petition started by three scientists on October 4 calling for governments to adopt a policy of ‘focused protection’ when it comes to COVID-19. They believe those most at risk should be offered protection — although it shouldn’t be mandatory — and those […]
Michele Solis: In a perfect world, we would learn from success and failure alike. Both hold instructive lessons and provide needed reality checks that may safeguard our decisions from bad information or biased advice. But, alas, our brain doesn’t work this way. Unlike an impartial outcome-weighing machine an engineer might design, it learns more from […]
Asra Q. Nomani and Glenn Miller: This week, a group of about 200 students, parents, alumni, and concerned local residents flooded the sidewalk in front of America’s number-one-ranked public high school—Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. This was no back-to-school event. It was a rally to save the soul of […]
David M. Ewalt: The more things change, the more they stay the same—at least at some of the oldest, most prestigious universities in the U.S. That’s one of the takeaways from this year’s Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, which award Harvard University the top spot for the fourth straight year, followed by its […]
Timothy Rybeck: Three infamous conflagrations illuminate the pages of Richard Ovenden’s fascinating new history, Burning the Books. The first is the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, which, according to Ovenden, did not go up in a single blaze but was gradually destroyed by repeated acts of arson and plunder, until there was nothing […]
Bradley Thomas: One of the most oft-cited and criticized goals of the Black Lives Matter organization is its stated desire to abolish the family as we know it. Specifically, BLM’s official website states: We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, […]
Hunter Gardner: Homer’s Iliad — what some consider the origin of European literature — begins with a plague. In the epic, which I was teaching as part of an upper-level Greek course just months ago, the destructive power of disease parallels that of war itself: Apollo, lord of the silver bow, sheds arrows of pestilence […]
Annysa Johnson: Howard Fuller announced this month that he is retiring from Marquette University, where he is a distinguished professor of education and founder and director of its Institute for the Transformation of Learning. At 79, Fuller has served in many roles in his lifetime: civil rights activist, educator and civil servant. He is a former superintendent of Milwaukee […]
Michael Graham: “Is it your belief that only well-educated parents can make proper decisions for what’s in the best interest of their children?” asked a dumbfounded Rep. Glenn Cordelli (R-Tuftonboro). Rather than saying “no,” Dietsch instead repeated her view that parents without college degrees are less capable of overseeing their children’s education. “In a democracy, […]
Alan Borsuk: In both cases, what do those insights say about how things can be better than before, once we go back to what we used to think was normal living? What can we learn from all of this about what makes families and homes function at their best possible level? How are we measuring […]
Emily Files: When Andrew Martin was hired to work in MPS in 2012, he showed up to his assigned high school and was greeted with confusion. “The principal said, ‘Oh I didn’t know we were getting somebody. What position are you here for?’ And I said ‘Well, I was hired as a social studies teacher,’” […]
Alice O’Keefe: In his treatise on the future of humanity, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the philosopher-historian Yuval Noah Harari offers the young people of today some advice. In order to survive and thrive in adulthood, they should not rely on traditional academic skills such as solving equations or learning computer code. These will soon […]
Wendy Berliner: Young children sit cross-legged on the mat as their teacher prepares to teach them about the weather, equipped with pictures of clouds. Outside the classroom, lightning forks across a dark sky and thunder rumbles. Curious children call out and point, but the teacher draws their attention back – that is not how the […]
Annabelle Timsit: The endless stretch of a lazy summer afternoon. Visits to a grandparent’s house in the country. Riding your bicycle through the neighborhood after dark. These were just a few of the revealing answers from more than 400 Twitter users in response to a question: “What was a part of your childhood that you […]
Yin Yin Lu: In 2020, we will finally open our eyes to the reality that personalisation does not actually serve our best interests. Rather, it serves the best interests of private companies, driven by advertising – the business model of the internet. Personalisation drives profit because it reduces digital advertising waste. The richer and more […]
Zoe Corbyn: We know a lot about the small but serious health risks associated with the pill – things like stroke and blood clots. Why have we been kept in the dark about the effects on the brain? Until very recently, there has been little research. And the research that is out there doctors often […]
Mitchell Schmidt: Andrews became executive director of WEAC, the state’s largest teachers union, in 1972. At the time, the association of 40,000 teachers had little involvement in state politics or lobbying efforts. But that soon changed. Andrews was considered a force to be reckoned with in the statehouse halls and advocated for teachers, bus drivers, […]
Dan Kopf: The books are based on the concept of “statistical learning,” a mashup of stats and machine learning. The field of machine learning is all about feeding huge amounts of data into algorithms to make accurate predictions. Statistics is concerned with predictions as well, says Tibshirani, but also with determining how confident we can […]
Chad Aldeman: But in this country, there are at least a few thousand preparation programs attempting to teach future teachers to teach reading. And yet, we have no evidence that any of those programs produce reading instructors who are better (or worse) than any others. This is a scary realization, but it has implications for […]
Peter Schuck: Anthony Kronman, my long-time Yale Law School colleague and perhaps the most eloquent individual I know personally, has written a brave, high-minded, argumentative, and largely persuasive book about the values and choices that should animate our greatest colleges and universities but no longer do. His book, The Assault on American Excellence, is also […]