schoolinfosystem.org
Roger Partridge: Over the last twenty years, our education system has slipped from being the envy of the world to barely mediocre. Kiwi students once ranked near the top of international education league tables. In the latest results from the highly rated Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study, Year 5 students placed last among all English-speaking […]
Troy Closson: As New York embarks on an ambitious plan to overhaul how children in the nation’s largest school system are taught to read, schools leaders face a significant obstacle: educators’ skepticism. Dozens of cities and states have sought to transform reading instruction in recent years, driven by decades of research known as the “science of reading.” But […]
Colleen Hroncich My oldest child is graduating from college tomorrow, so it has me thinking about our educational journey—which could best be described as eclectic. At various times, we used private school, district school, and cyber charter school. But we ultimately landed on homeschooling. That doesn’t mean they were literally learning at home every day. […]
Christopher Rufo: Last spring, executives at Texas Children’s Hospital announced that they would cease performing transgender medical procedures on children, citingpotential legal and criminal liability. The hospital’s chief pediatrician, Catherine Gordon, an advocate for “gender-affirming therapy,” abruptly resigned. I have obtained exclusive whistleblower documentsshowing that, despite its public statements, the Houston-based children’s hospital—the largest in the United States—has […]
Stevens Malange Public school districts across the United States closed for unprecedented periods during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enrollments plunged, as students either headed to private schools or stayed home for schooling. Other children simply disappeared from schools and remain unaccounted for even today by school officials. Now, because of this exodus, school districts nationwide are […]
Troy Closson: In a recent interview, Mr. Banks said that the city’s approach had been “fundamentally flawed,” and had failed to follow the science of how students learn to read. “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault,” Mr. Banks said. “This is the beginning of a massive turnaround.” Over […]
MSU: Last summer, researchers at Michigan State University reported that one in five Michigan adults, or about 1.7 million people, don’t want children and therefore are child-free. Although that number was surprisingly large to many data has now been confirmed in a follow-up study. “We found that 20.9% of adults in Michigan do not want children, which […]
Ari Kauffman: In the 23 City Schools of Baltimore, zero students are proficient in grade-level math. The Baltimore Teachers Union, unsurprisingly, is among the nation’s most influential and a top AFT ally. They partner in hurting children. Weingarten and her totalitarians love to talk about supposed “racism,”; but if her union cared about black Americans’ […]
Janet Adams: “No matter how much they increase your pay, everything else is going up,” said Kristy Morrow, a coordinator for a hospital who lives in Big Spring, Texas. “I do fear that for the kids.” Which of the following best describes your financial situation? My finances are in better condition than I expected for […]
Amy Kazmin and Chris Giles: “It’s a demographic crisis — we are going to lose a lot of people in the future,” Testa said, adding that the forecast assumed a recovery in fertility rates to 1.5 children per woman. “It’s a pretty rapid change.” If the fertility rate failed to rebound and instead stayed at […]
Ashley Ahn: Yun-Jeong Kim grew up imagining what her future family would look like — married with several kids, a nice home and a dog. But when the lease on her apartment in Seoul, South Korea, became too much to afford, she found herself somewhere she’d never imagined: 31 years old and living back at […]
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 […]
Wall Street Journal: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin won election in 2021 in no small part on education policy, including a promise to ban critical race theory in schools. His first executive order instructed the Superintendent of Public Instruction to review curricula and end the use of “inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory.” The Black […]
Richard Dawkins: Not surprisingly, this adolescent virtue-signalling horrified New Zealand’s grown-up scientists and scholars. Seven of them wrote to the Listener magazine. Three who were fellows of the NZ Royal Society were threatened with an inquisitorial investigation. Two of these, including the distinguished medical scientist Garth Cooper, himself of Māori descent, resigned (the third unfortunately died). I […]
Nate Joseph: Over the years, I have on numerous occasions seen the claim that 95% of students can learn how to read proficiently, so long as they are provided adequate tier 1/2 instruction. Truthfully, it has always stuck out to me as a strange figure, for three reasons. First, most academic research does not typically […]
Ed Cumming ; Genevieve Holl-Allen and Benedict Smith “Words matter,” begins the discreet notice, which sits at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books. “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written […]
Ed Cumming ; Genevieve Holl-Allen and Benedict Smith “Words matter,” begins the discreet notice, which sits at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books. “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written […]
Ben Chapman: Districts have lost track of thousands of students who left public schools since the pandemic began, and it is unclear how many of them are truant or unreported home-schoolers, according to a new study. An analysis of enrollment data conducted by Stanford University in collaboration with the Associated Press found that there were […]
Talal Ansari: Nearly 1,000 children separated from their parents at the U.S. border under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration haven’t been reunited, federal data shows, despite a multiyear effort to do so. The federal program has reunited 600 migrant children with their parents, according to numbers released by the Department of Homeland […]
Julie Jargon: Seeing a child endure drama over group chats is enough to send parents lunging for their kid’s phone. After all, we have the skills to resolve disputes diplomatically, the words to make it all better. If only we could just… Nope, don’t even think about it. Writing texts as your child is a […]
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 […]
Quinton Klabon: The coronavirus pandemic was a 2-year catastrophe for children. Students suffered through virtual schooling, quarantined teachers, and emotional misery. Academic results, the lowest this century, still have not recovered. After sending $860 million to help Wisconsin public schools manage through spring 2021, Congress sent a final $1.49 billion to get students back on track. The goal? Do […]
The Economist: he job of a head teacher involves hiring teachers, disciplining pupils and placating parents. It does not normally include selling chickens. But that was one of several side-hustles run by Evermore Chakwizira, who until last year was the head of Chinyika High School in Goromonzi, 40km (25 miles) east of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. […]
William Jacobson: Before that, we spotlighted Providence (RI) teacher Ramona Bessinger. Our most recent post on October 8, 2022, gives the history of Bessinger’s struggles ever since she blew the whistle in a post at Legal Insurrection about the corrupting influences of a new radicalized and racialized curriculum at her middle school, Providence (RI) Schools Bow […]
Christine Smallwood: One night, while searching in the woods for food, Frankenstein’s monster discovers a leather suitcase containing three books: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Paradise Lost. Goethe is a source of “astonishment” but also alienation; the monster can sympathize with the characters, but only to a point—their lives are so unlike […]
Pamela Snow: Jane is impressed that her grandson is “sounding out words he did not know”. Wow indeed! That means her grandson has been taught the transferable skill of decoding – of lifting a previously unseen word off the page – and importantly “words he did not know”. This could either mean he had not seen them […]
Martin Austermuhle: The 13-member board that oversees the county school system has been embroiled in controversy in recent years, with Chair Juanita Miller and various board members trading accusations related to contracts and violations of board policies. An independent audit last year found problems on both sides, while separately the State Board of Education requested Miller’s removal from […]
Michael Swan: In a prestigious medical journal, doctors from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children have laid out policies and procedures for administering medically assisted death to children, including scenarios where the parents would not be informed until after the child dies. The article appears just three months before the Canadian Council of Academies is due to report to […]
CNN: “… showed the average number of children a South Korean woman will have in her lifetime is down to just 0.79. That is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population and low even compared to other developed countries where the rate is falling, such as the United States (1.6) and Japan […]
Kayley Fryre: In all education, and life in general, there is nothing more important than writing. From writing school essays and reports to applying for a job, the ability to write well is essential. More than that, in recent years, with the emergence of texting and social media, writing has devolved to be much more […]
Peter Gray: I have previously written much about the decline, over decades, in children’s freedom to play and explore independently of adults and how that has contributed to well-documented declines in children’s mental health, creative thinking, and internal locus of control(e.g., here, here, and here). Recently I came across a book that documents brilliantly how adults’ attitudes about children’s competence, […]
RT Watson: The more success the kids have found, the swankier the toys and outings have become. In one video, Vlad and Niki snub mom and the Range Rover she bedecked in fluffy pink boas for a ride in dad’s hot red Ferrari. In another video from this year, the “Kids Diana Show” hits the […]
Matthew Ladner: Emily Hanford’s podcast Sold a Story tells the disturbing tale of how schools have come to embrace patently absurd and ineffective methods for literacy instruction. I could summarize one such method, known as “three-cueing,” in one sentence: Teach children how to guess the meaning of a sentence rather than how to read it. (You can […]
Alex Blasdel: During the past two centuries, educators, psychologists, toy companies and parents like us have acted, implicitly or otherwise, as if the purpose of play is to optimise children for adulthood. The dominant model for how to do that has been the schoolhouse, with its reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. The more book learning we […]
Casey Briggs “We have now reached peak child,” Dr Charles-Edwards says. “There will never be more children alive on the Earth than there is today.” Fertility peaked in the 1950s when women were, on average, having five children each. That number varied dramatically between regions of the world. But since then, fertility rates have reliably […]
Robert Kuttner: Kids have suffered during the coronavirus pandemic in ways whose long-term effects are only starting to become evident. And the reliance on screen time, whether for distance learning or for babysitting, has only worsened things. I am no fan of standardized testing. But as a gross measure, tests can tell you how well […]
Charmaine Mok “The most valuable lesson I have learned [from children] is that cheese goes with pretty much everything,” seasoned food writer Melissa Leong tells me. She is only half-joking. “Dairy is never a bad idea. Cheese and pasta – no matter where you come from, it’s pretty special if it’s the right combination of […]
Kevin DeYoung True, human beings are reproducing—but in most countries, not fast enough to replace themselves. Measuring total fertility rate (TFR) is not an exact science, so the numbers vary from source to source, but the trends are undeniable. Outside of Africa, which is home to forty-one of the fifty most fertile nations, the planet […]
National Geographic: Three Inca mummies found near the lofty summit of in Volcán Llullaillaco Argentina were so well preserved that they put a human face on the ancient ritual of capacocha—which ended with their sacrifice. Now the bodies of 13-year-old Llullaillaco Maiden and her younger companions Llullaillaco Boy and Lightning Girl have revealed that mind-altering substances […]
Julie Jargon and Andrea Petersen: For busy families, gathering together for dinner can feel like an impossibility. Children could use it now more than ever. Robin Black-Burns’s teenage daughter has after-school activities that fall over dinnertime, making evening meals at home a thing of the past. The SUV has become their de facto dinner table. […]
Nicholas Casey: On a balmy October day in 2017, Ana Belén Pintado decided to clear out some space in her garage. Her father, Manuel, died in 2010, followed by her mother, Petra, four years later. Their belongings sat gathering dust at her home in Campo de Criptana, a small town in the countryside south of […]
Roger Simon: “Fight Fiercely Harvard!” as Tom Lehrer used to sing in a mock football fight song. “Demonstrate to them our will.” However, that will—a university devoted to even-handed intellectual inquiry for the public good—no longer exists. The truth has an inconvenient way of interfering with propaganda. The Ivy League schools that once did so much to […]
Wishkub Kinepoway I wanted diversity. I wanted my children to see, like, different nationalities. I wanted them to feel included. And I also wanted, like – I’m an educator, so I have an education background with early childhood, and I just wanted intentional learning experiences for my children. I was actually unfamiliar with what a […]
Robert Pondiscio In 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring that parents or guardians send their children to public school in the districts where they lived. The Society of Sisters, which ran private academies, claimed that the law interfered with the right of parents to choose religious instruction for their children. The […]
Douglas Belkin: Now, as the pandemic disruptions wane, many of these families aren’t going back, opting instead to stick with personalized curricula and private instruction. The model, once limited to the very wealthy, is being adopted by families in the upper middle class, according to private-tutor placement companies and their clients. Many children have endured […]
Walter Kirn: It does impart information, strictly speaking, but not always information about our world. Or not good information, because it’s so often wrong, particularly on matters of great import and invariably to the advantage of the same interests, which suggests it should be presumed wrong as a rule. The information it imparts, if one […]
Hannah Natanson We have all heard, by this point, that school closures during the first year of the pandemic damaged children. We have heard that children slid behind where they should be academically, with the most vulnerable slipping fastest; that many children with disabilities did not learn anything at all and began regressing; that the […]
Bethany Mandel: Millions of American children are about to enter their fourth year of Covid-impacted schooling. In vast swaths of the United States, a child now entering second grade has never had anything resembling a normal school experience. No child entering kindergarten has a memory of life before the pandemic. A rising junior in high […]
Christopher Rufo: I have obtained insider documents that reveal this troubling collaboration between gender activists at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and school administrators throughout the Chicago area. According to these documents, and a review of school district websites, Lurie Children’s Hospital has provided materials to school leaders promoting radical gender theory, trans activism, and sexually explicit […]
The Washington Post would have you believe that “gender-affirming surgery” for minors is a myth, but the research is clear: American doctor are performing sex change operations on children as young as 15 years old.https://t.co/gzXoWpZj0v pic.twitter.com/5Xw9Md7Lf4 — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 27, 2022 Ann Althouse: The removal of healthy, functioning organs from children […]
Dale Chu: In the 1840s, Horace Mann, known as the “father of American education,” argued that children should be taught to read whole words instead of individual letters, which he described as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” that make children feel “death-like, when compelled to face them.” This malformed opinion morphed into the broader whole-language theory, […]
Captain Beckett: Last Friday, gun shots rang out in the West District. When this happens, dispatch airs alert tones over our air indicating that something serious has happened. Sometimes it’s a panic alarm, sometimes it is someone armed with a weapon during a fight and sometimes it is someone with a gun. After 17 years […]
Lucy Kellaway: In less than two weeks, 250,000 18-year-olds in England will turn up at school for one last time to collect a piece of paper on which three letters of the alphabet will be printed. These grades will sum up their academic achievement so far, will affect the rest of their education — and […]
Perry Stein: D.C. students who are 12 and older must be vaccinated against the coronavirus to attend school this upcoming academic year. The youth vaccine mandate in D.C. is among the strictest in the nation, according to health experts, and is being enacted in a city with wide disparities in vaccination rates between its White […]
Marty Makary: At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. “They have no leadership right now. Suddenly there’s an enormous number of […]
Neeraj Sood, Shannon Heick, Josh Stevenson, Tracy Høeg; There is still considerable debate about whether mask mandates in the K-12 schools limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in children attending school. Randomized data about the effectiveness of mask mandates in children is still entirely lacking. Our study took advantage of a unique natural experiment of two adjacent […]
John Schuppe: In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, […]
Ian Miller: But a new study out provides some important new evidence with regards to the efficacy of mask mandates. The Study Design The study authors included several credentialed experts like Tracy Høeg and USC’s Neeraj Sood, along with one extremely qualified data analyst, Josh Stevenson. You may know Josh from his fantastic work on Twitter as well as Substack, […]
Kaleem Caire: I have grave concern for our children in Dane County and Wisconsin. We face no greater long-term crisis in America than the widespread underperformance, diminishing motivation and poor preparation of children and young people in our nation’s K-12 schools, and the rapidly declining number of educators available to teach our children. Student performance […]
Anthony LaMesa: Findings highlight importance of “normalcy” for children A recently published journal article concluding Swedish primary school children suffered no learning loss drew international attention, but foreign observers of Sweden’s responsible decision to keep most schools open may have missed a journal article published in December 2021 with good news about the emotional well-being […]
Pedro Gonzalez: Last week, Hawaii high school teacher Alden Bunag was arrestedand made his initial court appearance on June 16. Among other things, he admitted to prosecutors that he made a sex video with a 13-year-old boy who was a former student and sent it to others, including another teacher in Philadelphia. This sordid case has […]
Alex Gutentag: The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 […]
Claire Cain Miller and Bianca Pallaro American schoolchildren’s learning loss in the pandemic isn’t just in reading and math. It’s also in social and emotional skills — those needed to make and keep friends; participate in group projects; and cope with frustration and other emotions. In a survey of 362 school counselors nationwide by The New […]
Charles Mitchell and Scott Walker: The goal of Act 10 was to remove unfair powers wielded by government union executives over state budgets, education policy, and politics. A recent study from the Commonwealth Foundation found that Act 10 saved Wisconsin taxpayers nearly $7 billion in 2018. Other analyses from a free-market think tank in Wisconsin suggested […]
Beth Hawkins: As four-fifths of the district’s federal COVID recovery funds are taken up by the new teacher contract and to keep educators on the payroll despite dramatic enrollment losses, Graff’s successor will have to find a bare-bones solution to dire learning losses. In some populations, more than 90% of children are now behind, but […]
David Leonhardt Across much of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, school buildings stayed closed and classes remained online for months. These differences created a huge experiment, testing how well remote learning worked during the pandemic. Academic researchers have since been studying the subject, and they have come to a consistent conclusion: Remote learning was […]
Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak The new, federally funded study found that children who received Reading Recovery had scores on state reading tests in third and fourth grade that were below the test scores of similar children who did not receive Reading Recovery. “It’s not what we expected, and it’s concerning,” said lead author Henry May, director […]
Christopher Hooks: The problem is not what information kids get. That cat’s out of the bag. It’s how we strengthen kids’ ability to sort through and contextualize the avalanche of information—good, bad, and weird—that they’re getting, not only about sex but about history and politics and culture. Right now, the debate we’re having is whether schools should […]
Christopher Buckley The first point is that human children face a monumental learning task, which has resulted in the evolution of a much longer childhood than that exhibited by other animals. They must acquire and reproduce a very large amount of cultural information and skills related to language, human society (kin and non-kin relationships), subsistence activities (hunting, […]
Darcy Moore: The year 1937 was a seminal one for both men and useful for highlighting their different lifestyles, politics and literary experiences. Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford published The Hobbit – a quaint novel for children with dwarfish miners, dragons and wizards – in a modest print run of 1500 […]
George Packer: What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,” Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx and […]
Dana Goldstein: The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency. As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic. In Virginia, one study found that early […]
Martha Fulford, J. Edward Les and Pooya Kazemi This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Throughout North America, it is not uncommon to encounter parents who are absolutely terrified of their children contracting COVID. This is because many parents significantly overestimate the potential harms of COVID to their children. These parents […]
Anya Kamanetz: Kerry Dingle is a mother of two. She thinks masks should be optional for kids in schools and child care. And that makes her feel pretty lonely in Silver Spring, Md. “As soon as you question ‘Is it a good idea to put a 2-year-old in a mask all day?’ you’re suddenly a […]
Urgency of Normal: In much of the United States, adults have the option of returning to life essentially as we knew it in 2019. However, children continue to experience disproportionate restrictions, and the costs are mounting. Youth depression, suspected suicide attempts, drug overdose deaths, and obesity have all risen dramatically during the pandemic. The unintended […]
Margery Smelkinson, Leslie Bienen, and Jeanne Noble But in America about half of the country’s 53 million children remain compulsorily masked in school for the indefinite future. Sixteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia follow the CDC guidance closely and require masks for students of all ages, regardless of vaccination status; other states rely on a patchwork of policies, usually […]
Corey DeAngelis and Christos Makridis: The long-term closing of schools, and the harm it did to children nationwide, was a decision based not on health, but on politics — thanks to teachers unions and the Democratic politicians they fund. A study by researchers at Michigan State University found that when governors left it up to districts whether to have in-person […]
C Bradley Thompson: The fundamental question of our time is: who is responsible for educating children, parents or the government? And only after we answer this question can we address two related questions: what should children learn and how should they learn it? The “who” determines the “what” and the “how.” But the “who” question is partly dependent on how we […]
Jonathan Chait: Within blue America, transparently irrational ideas like this were able to carry the day for a disturbingly long period of time. In recent days, Angie Schmitt and Rebecca Bodenheimer have both written essays recounting the disorienting and lonely experience they had watching their friends and putative political allies denounce them for supporting a return to in-person learning. […]
Max Edén: History never quite repeats itself. But if we don’t learn from it, then it can quickly rhyme in hideous couplets. First, tragedy. Then, farce. Last year’s coronavirus school closures were an unspeakable tragedy for schoolchildren. After the first viral panic, these closures were not driven by the prevalence or danger of the disease, […]
Nicola Woolcock: Forcing pupils to wear masks in the classroom is dystopian and critics should not be smeared as Trumpian Covid-deniers, the children’s author Julia Donaldson has said. The creator of The Gruffalo said that she feared that the use of face coverings in schools was becoming normalised and was concerned that children’s education should […]
The Economist: Over the past two years America’s children have missed more time in the classroom than those in most of the rich world. School closures that began there in early 2020 dragged on until the summer of 2021. During that time the districts that stayed closed longest forced all or some of their children […]
Joy Pullman: Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and […]
Dana Goldstein and Noam Scheiber: Few American cities have labor politics as fraught as Chicago’s, where the nation’s third-largest school system shut down this week after teachers’ union members refused to work in person, arguing that classrooms were unsafe amid the Omicron surge. But in a number of other places, the tenuous labor peace that […]
STOP Award More than 340,000 Chicago Public School students have been forced to stay home by self-interests who dominate the Chicago Public School system. The failure of Chicago’s leadership to open school even after receiving more than $1.5 billion from the federal government in the past year to ensure they are always open safely to […]
Amy King: From how we say ‘hello’ to the side of the road we drive on, all societies have norms – or ‘rules’ – that shape people’s everyday lives. Now a new study – the first of its kind – has shown that children worldwide will challenge peers if they break the ‘rules’, but how […]
Sabrina Tavernise: Demographics are changing too. Growing numbers of Hispanic people and Asian people from the Marshall Islands call Enid home. The county of Garfield, in which Enid is the seat, was 94 percent white in 1980. Last year, that figure was about 68 percent. The county experienced one of the largest increases in racial […]
School closings and “remote learning” have caused a massive mental health crisis among teenagers. This, and the disruption to their intellectual development, will be enduring and severe.https://t.co/Q3mtWJ9MnR pic.twitter.com/ONrnYIWBPI — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 26, 2021 I think about whenever I (frequently) see children running around outside, masked. Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public […]
David Zweig: The debate over child masking in schools boiled over again this fall, even above its ongoing high simmer. The approval in late October of COVID-19 vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds was for many public-health experts an indication that mask mandates could finally be lifted. Yet with cases on the rise in much of the country, along with anxiety regarding the Omicron […]
VICTORIA THOMPSON, ELIZABETH WOLFSON, AND MANDY HOLLISTER: “Teaching reading is rocket science,” Louisa Moats is well known for saying. It is something we frequently referenced during our guided reading professional development for teachers. Sadly, until we started on our Science of Reading journey two-plus years ago, we had no idea how bereft our instruction was of the […]
Denisha Merriweather, Dava Hankerson, Nathaniel Cunneen and Ron Matus: The shift to an increasingly choice-driven education landscape for Black students in Florida has been driven by Black parents, who have enrolled their children in choice programs in growing numbers and made it so they cannot be ignored politically. “Options make it so that I can […]
James Freeman: Since the start of the pandemic, some media folk have continued to insist on making obscene comparisons between the number of Americans who have died with Covid and the number of Americans killed in various wars, as if it’s irrelevant whether one dies at age 80 or age 18. But there is one […]
James R. Copland John Ketcham Christopher F. Rufo: In 2021, public school parents vaulted to the forefront of America’s fractured political landscape. Around the country, parents objected both to Covid-related school closures and to racially divisive curricula. Parental frustration helped secure sweeping GOP wins last month in Virginia, highlighted by Glenn Youngkin’s victory over former […]
Schools aren’t the problem. They never have been. One of the frustrating things about the pandemic has been our inability, even at this late date, to understand why surges occur. They hit communities with mask mandates, and communities without. Last year, we believed that the surge from October through February was caused by seasonal changes. […]
Andy Kessler California government becomes less trustworthy by the minute. It lifted most Covid restrictions in June based on 70% of adult Californians receiving at least one vaccine dose, meaning you could go maskless in Trader Joe’s. By August, however, health officials, blaming the Delta variant, reimposed mask mandates in California’s big cities. Then in […]
Robin Lake: What happened during the past 20 months should have been entirely predictable for anyone who was advocating for students and families before the pandemic struck. A rigid system designed for sameness cracked under the pressure of a crisis. Despite the exhaustive work of many well-meaning people, schools and school systems were largely unable […]
Joe Setyon: Rhode Island mom Nicole Solas found this out the hard way. When Solas emailed the principal of her daughter’s public school earlier this year, asking for the kindergarten curriculum, she was stonewalled. Then, she got hit with a bill from the school district for $74,000. Solas, who the Goldwater Institute is defending in […]
Jacey Fortin: If everything had gone according to plan, California would have approved new guidelines this month for math education in public schools. But ever since a draft was opened for public comment in February, the recommendations have set off a fierce debate over not only how to teach math, but also how to solve […]
Oh my God she’s amazing. No wonder the Media Party ignored her. pic.twitter.com/DHpDLv38Mb — Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) November 3, 2021 about 5:30: Our children are going to get a good education, because education lifted my father out of poverty, education lifted me out of poverty, education will lift us all out of poverty. We […]
James Freeman: The story of the Covid era is largely about a political class imposing one burden after another on the young for the theoretical benefit of the old, with little effort to conduct serious calculations of risks and costs. Kids who were never in great danger from the virus have been forced into isolation […]