schoolinfosystem.org
CJ Safir and Libby Sobic: Across the country, parents, many of them low-income, are using school choice to educate their children at schools outside their public neighborhood options. Twenty-nine states, and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico provide some school choice program for students to attend private schools, including tax-credit scholarships, school vouchers, tax […]
Scott Girard: The Madison School Board seat left open by incumbent Kate Toews choosing not to run for re-election has a candidate. Maia Pearson, a Madison native who has three children in Madison schools, will run for Seat 6. She filed her declaration of candidacy and campaign registration statement with the city clerk Monday and […]
Scott Girard: West High School senior Miles Mullens, who is enrolled in the school’s Wisconsin First Nations class this semester, said the class has felt like the first time his history classes have been “honest about” what colonizers did to Native Americans. “I thought I was a quote-unquote woke person, someone who had already learned […]
Bethany Hill: We have been doing it wrong. I have been doing it wrong. I was confused for months, even after attending the last three days of professional development. How have teachers not known what the research clearly states? How did my undergraduate program not prepare me? Why did I teach children to read by […]
CJ Hauser: I did not intend to be single in the rural village where I live. I’d moved there with my fiance after taking a good job at the local university. We’d bought a house with room enough for children. Then the wedding was off and I found myself single in a town where the […]
Michael Clark & Jeremy Kelley: Public school buildings, which previously have been rated high enough by the Ohio Department of Education’s annual building report cards that families did not have access to the school-choice exit option, will instead be designated as “underperforming” if only a subset of students or academic subjects now fall into that […]
Bianca Vázquez Toness: Louisiana shouldn’t be embarrassed, but perhaps Boston should. Filthy, unsanitary, and often lacking basics like toilet paper and hot water, the bathrooms of the city’s public schools are, far too frequently, in appalling condition. It is not a conventional measure of success or failure in the city’s schools, but it is a […]
Alice Speri: The disparities don’t end in school: Black girls, in particular, are also disproportionately vulnerable to extreme poverty and poor access to health care, as well as domestic and sexual violence. And black women are incarcerated at three times the rate of white women, largely over nonviolent drug- or property-related crimes. The criminalization of […]
Jonathan Chait: In one sense, Warren is correct. The fact that she opposed the Massachusetts initiative does prove how far she is willing to go to maintain teachers’-union support. But what it says about her willingness to follow evidence, and to value the needs of low-income parents, is deeply worrisome. Boston has probably the most […]
David Blaska: Julie Marburger was a school teacher at Cedar Creek, Texas, a suburb of Austin. She posted this on social media (H/T Greg L.) shortly before the end of the 2019-2020 school year: I left work early today after an incident with a parent left me unable emotionally to continue for the day. I […]
Dana Goldstein: The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe. And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. […]
Frederick Hess & Chester Finn: The damage inflicted on our educational institutions by the onrushing tsunami of wokeness is starting to worry even a few prominent progressives. Former president Obama himself recently fretted about young activists who are “as judgmental as possible about other people,” cautioning that they’re “not bringing about change.” As a hyper-judgmental, […]
Chicago Tribune: The spaces have gentle names: The reflection room. The cool-down room. The calming room. The quiet room. But shut inside them, in public schools across the state, children as young as 5 wail for their parents, scream in anger and beg to be let out. The students, most of them with disabilities, scratch […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email AB 110, creating a Wisconsin guidebook on dyslexia and related conditions, passed the Assembly earlier this year and passed, with an amendment, the Senate Education Committee at the end of the summer. However, the bill has not yet been brought to the Senate floor for a vote. Meanwhile, […]
Zusha Elinson: Foster children in Oregon who were sent to privately run group homes out of state are now being brought back following numerous allegations of abuse. Oregon is one of several states that in recent years began relying on faraway residential treatment centers to house children with severe behavioral and psychiatric issues for whom […]
Victor Davis Hanson: What explains the bankruptcy of the elite? We have confused credentials with merit—as we learned when Hollywood stars and rich people tried to bribe and buy their mostly lackadaisical children into named schools, eager for the cattle brand BAs and without a care whether their offspring would be well educated. Graduating from […]
Kashmir’s Gander: The team looked at answers from 49,050 parents of young people aged between six and 17 years old, who took part in the 2016-2017 National Survey of Children’s Health. The parents detailed how much their child slept. The survey also measured what are known as flourishing markers, such as whether the child was […]
Peter Hasson: “I do not blame Alex one bit for attending a private school in 5th grade. Good for him,” said Reason Foundation director of school choice Corey DeAngelis, who first flagged Alexander’s private schooling Monday. “This is about Warren exercising school choice for her own kids while fighting hard to prevent other families from […]
Agnes Callard: Parenting starts out lonely, because newborn babies do not know that you exist. No one in my social circle—grad students in their twenties—had children, so I joined a new moms group at my local hospital. You know the drill: sit in a circle, tell birth stories, swap sleep advice, etc. I quit the […]
Kim Hirsch: The city of Chicago offered the teachers union a 16% base-pay raise extending over five years, but that wasn’t enough for the CTU. No, they want a 15% raise over three years. They also want every school to have nurses, social workers, and librarians, along with more special education paras and personnel. But […]
Jasmine Lane: In 2017, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that sixty percent of children nationwide are not reading proficiently. If we look to the disaggregated data by race, it becomes even more stark. Though these levels of proficiency have not improved in the last 30 years, we’ve been made to believe that […]
Logan Wroge: On Oct. 9, Anderson, who had worked at West for three years and at East High School for eight years before that, said he responded to a call about a disruptive student who was being escorted out of the school by an assistant principal. When the situation with the male student escalated, Anderson […]
Neel Kashkari: This commentary was first published in the Star Tribune. Today, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis released a comprehensive report on the performance of Minnesota K-12 schools in preparing our children for their futures. On average Minnesota schools perform well compared with other states. Unfortunately, those averages mask some of the worst educational […]
Citizen Stewart: My friends at the Network of Public Education (NOPE) have an ongoing series under the hashtag #AnotherDayAnotherCharterSchool that aims to keep your eyes trained on the supposed never-ending abuses and fraud case in charter schools. I applaud their commitment to public integrity and I share their vigilance in rooting out grift in public […]
Cheri Kiesecker: Does it feel like this MVP lawsuit is trying to silence a parent from speaking about his own child’s education? As this EdWeek article points out, this lawsuit would set a precedent against parents: “It’s a surprising move that some say could have broad implications for parent advocacy around curriculum and instruction. A […]
Logan Wroge: The reasons for the proposal go “beyond nostalgia” for the writing style, he said. Thiesfeldt, chairman of the Assembly’s Education Committee, said research suggests taking notes by hand, as opposed to typing, can lead to better comprehension and understanding of material, and cursive has long been billed as a faster method of note-taking […]
Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, Tyler Ransom: The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among […]
Logan Wroge: Last school year, the district began using a 35-page guidance document on student gender identity, which is based on federal and state laws and School Board policies regarding anti-bullying and non-discrimination, Hohs said. While the document was not voted on by the Madison School Board, members received updates on it when it was […]
Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler and Tyler Ransom : The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an un- precedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, lega- cies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty […]
Bruce Baker: That is, teachers and their unions are the primary drag on overall quality and a primary cause of inequality of educational opportunity. These two assertions form the basis of a recent spate of lawsuits which claim that teacher seniority protections and tenure laws – not funding levels or disparities or any other factor […]
Rod Dreher: You have to read this long Atlantic piece by George Packer, in which he describes the disillusioning of him and his wife — good urban liberals — by the militant wokeness that overtook the New York City public schools that their children attended (and that their son still attends). The piece begins with […]
Dale Russakoff: HOW THE OTHER HALF LEARNS Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice By Robert Pondiscio Every fall, astonishing news emerges from Success Academy, the largest and most controversial charter school network in New York City. With considerable fanfare, the network announces that its predominantly low-income and minority students have once again defied […]
Betsy Morris and Tawnell D. Hobbs: When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping the district reach the “one-to-one” ratio of one for each child that […]
Ben Eisen: Additionally, workers tend to spread out geographically during an economic cycle’s later stages, economists say, raising questions about how these cities will fare in a downturn. Workers are usually more confident—and employers more lenient—when the economy has been flourishing. Ms. Swift said she and her family were effectively living paycheck to paycheck in […]
Hua Hsu: Since 2012, Zaloom has spent a lot of time with families like Kimberly’s. They all fall into America’s middle class—an amorphous category, defined more by sensibility or aspirational identity than by a strict income threshold. (Households with an annual income of anywhere from forty thousand dollars to a quarter of a million dollars […]
Hanna Fry: The dangers of making individual predictions from our collective characteristics were aptly demonstrated in a deal struck by the French lawyer André-François Raffray in 1965. He agreed to pay a ninety-year-old woman twenty-five hundred francs every month until her death, whereupon he would take possession of her apartment in Arles. At the time, […]
Amanda Quintan: She took on the responsibility of paying for a tutor and removing her children from MMSD. After a year of working with Priscilla Gresens at the Arnold Reading Clinic, the Perez kids are reading at grade level. “After years of interventions to not have any results, and then a year of one hour […]
Dave Zirin: Then there is the palpable fear in the offices of the National Football League about what the retirement of Luck represents and the attendant public relations hit. Behind the pageantry, the war planes flying overhead, and the tailgating keg stands, this is a game largely played by black people from poor backgrounds for […]
Betsy Morris and Tawnell D. Hobbs: The uncertainty is feeding alarm among some parents already worried about the amount of time their children spend attached to digital devices. Some believe technology is not doing much to help their kids learn, setting up a clash with tech advocates who say technology is the future of education. […]
Will Flanders: At Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), there exist two distinct school systems. Despite its economic growth, low-income families in Madison are more likely to stay poor for their entire lives. While 60% of white students at MMSD are proficient or higher on the Forward exam, only 9.8% of African Americans are proficient. This […]
Maya Jasanoff: If a writer harbored bias, shall we never speak his name? Or when he wrote with insight, might we read him all the same? Christopher Benfey opens his book about Rudyard Kipling with the inevitable questions. He answers by coming neither to praise Kipling nor to bury him, but to explore him as […]
Katy Sedgwick: In America, however, that very system has been weakened from within. Here’s an overview of what’s different between my childhood Soviet education and my kids’ U.S. public schools. Mathematics Math was the dissident’s favorite in the Soviet Union. It was believed that the subject is so logical and abstract, the party could never […]
Dana Ansel: Last year, the Massachusetts Legislature decided that the time had come to understand the state of education that gifted students receive in Massachusetts. They issued a mandate for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to review the policy and practices of education in public schools for gifted students as well as for […]
Laurie Frost: I am grieving the death of Toni Morrison. I admired Morrison deeply because she had the courage to speak truth with unflinching clarity, and because she did so with a magnificent lyricism. In the wake of Morrison’s passing, I have been feeling doubly sad because I know the vast majority of our black […]
Amanda Cantrell: Three weeks after I enrolled my youngest child in a neighborhood nursery school in Brooklyn, I got the call. An administrator and my child’s lead teacher urgently wanted to meet with my husband and me. Our daughter, it turned out, was wandering out of the classroom. She wasn’t making eye contact. She didn’t […]
Greg Ashman: Let me lead you through a portal created in the basement of some secretive and sinister government laboratory and into the Educational Upside Down. The Educational Upside Down is a parallel dimension where elementary school children are captivated by street signs and bored rigid by myths and tales of heroes. It is a […]
Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (170-171), via Will Fitzhugh: NO EXPERTS NEED APPLY In 2002, a distinguished historian wrote that the widely told tales of “No Irish Need Apply” signs in late nineteenth-century America were myths. The University of Illinois professor Richard Jensen said that […]
Mark Seidenberg Wisconsin legislators are considering an important issue: how to help dyslexic children who struggle to read. You might think that helping poor readers is something everyone could get behind, but no. Dyslexia was identified in the 1920s and has been studied all over the world. It affects about 15% of all children, runs […]
Casey Mindlin: Thomas Jefferson said that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it expects what never was and never will be.” And Abraham Lincoln called education “the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.” If we are to preserve the American experiment, it won’t be done in […]
Ben Bajarin, via a kind email: Hello panelists! I hope you are all having a great summer. We have a number of surveys planned for the fall so look for many opportunities to participate coming! We are conducting a study on kids use of technology and how parents make decisions around technology their children have […]
Jodi S. Cohen and Melissa Sanchez: Dozens of suburban Chicago families, perhaps many more, have been exploiting a legal loophole to win their children need-based college financial aid and scholarships they would not otherwise receive, court records and interviews show. Coming months after the national “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal, this tactic also appears to […]
Bethany Blankley: Their plight “is symbolic of rural education in Wisconsin (and the Midwest) which lags far behind the suburbs and, in Wisconsin, performs worse academically than urban schools,” CJ Szafir, executive vice president at Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), told The Center Square. WILL filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit […]
Rohan Seth: There are six billion characters in our DNA. All of us have spontaneous typos in this code — a mutation. Some typos, like Lydia’s, cause serious diseases. Collectively, there are seven million people in the U.S. suffering from typos that affect the brain. Majority of affected are children. This doesn’t include the millions […]
Greg Jackson: On the college campus where I have been living, the students dress in a style I do not understand. Continuous with what we wore fifteen years ago and subtly different, it is both hipster and not. American Apparel has filed for bankruptcy, but in cities and towns across the US the styles forged […]
Derek Thompson: A few years ago, I lived in a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York. Every so often descending the stairway, I would catch a glimpse of a particular family with young children in its Sisyphean attempts to reach the fourth floor. The mom would fold the stroller to the size […]
Derek Thompson: The counties that make up Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia shed a combined 2 million domestic residents from 2010 to 2018. For many years, these cities’ main source of population growth hasn’t been babies or even college graduates; it’s been immigrants. But like an archipelago of Ellis Islands, Manhattan and […]
Erika Sanzi: Angelica Infante-Green, Rhode Island’s new education commissioner, will never be known for her poker face and at a time like the one we currently face in Providence, that is actually a comfort. The pain is real. The failure is real. And it’s important for parents and community members to see disgust, disbelief and […]
mp3 audio – Machine Transcript follows [Better transcript, via a kind reader PDF]: I’m Carousel Baird and we have a fabulous and exciting show lined up today. Such a fabulous guy sitting right across from me right here in the studio. Is Madison metropolitan school district current superintendent? She still here in charge of all […]
Ravie Lakshmanan: The heart of the issue concerns the telemetry information sent by Windows 10 operating system and the company’s cloud solution back to the US. This information can include anything from regular software diagnostic data to user content from Office applications, such as email subject lines and sentences from documents where the company’s translation […]
Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick: Thus, I actively participated when MMSD crafted the Behavior Education Plan (BEP). Indeed, I was the person who suggested that it should carry that name instead of simply MMSD’s Discipline policy, because moving away from zero tolerance also requires MMSD to actively engage in teaching children with challenging behaviors how to behave properly. […]
Lisa Miller: On an unseasonably chilly morning in May, three dozen or so plaintiff-parents, most of them from the Green Meadow Waldorf School, showed up at the Rockland County Courthouse, looking, in their draped layers and comfortable shoes, like any PTA from Park Slope or Berkeley. They were virtually vibrating with expectation and stress. For […]
Negassi Tesfamichael: “Given that Mary will not be attending any future meetings, I do feel a sense of urgency in getting this filled,” Reyes said. “I don’t want to move forward through some of the important discussions and decisions we’ll have to make … so i think it is going to be imperative that we […]
John Otis: At a primary school in a middle-class neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela, the students’ parents play an outsize role. Gasoline shortages have collapsed public transportation, making it hard for teachers to get to work. Others skip class to scrounge for food and medicine, both of which are in short supply in Venezuela. Due to […]
Jessica McCrory Calarco: The marshmallow test is one of the most famous pieces of social-science research: Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell her that she can have a second one if she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room. Whether she’s patient enough to double […]
Bill Murphy, Jr.: My poor daughter. She’s happy and healthy, and has loving parents and a stable home. But, she also has a dad who scours scholarly articles to find the modern consensus on best practices in raising kids. I hope we’re not treating her like a guinea pig. But I do think we’re careful […]
Steven Pinker, via a kind reader: What is one thing wrong with the world that you would change, and why? Too many leaders and influencers, including politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and academics, surrender to the cognitive bias of assessing the world through anecdotes and images rather than data and facts. Our president assumed office with a […]
LOUISE S. ROBBINS, via a kind reader: As the Madison School District decides which organizations and partners to fund, it should embrace — and support — the Simpson Street Free Press. The Simpson Street student newspaper, unlike some of the district’s attempts to bridge the achievement gap between students of color and white students, has […]
Max Royer: One of the big lessons from the demographic history of countries is that population explosions are temporary. For many countries the demographic transition has already ended, and as the global fertility rate has now halved we know that the world as a whole is approaching the end of rapid population growth. The visualization […]
Casey Newton: For the six months after he was hired, Speagle would moderate 100 to 200 posts a day. He watched people throw puppies into a raging river, and put lit fireworks in dogs’ mouths. He watched people mutilate the genitals of a live mouse, and chop off a cat’s face with a hatchet. He […]
Kaleem Caire, writing within Facebook’s walled garden. Via a kind reader: The Capital Times published my editorial below on March 12, 2019. I then posted the article on my FB page the same day. This terrible, awful and destructive generational disease didn’t get nearly the same rise out of people as me imploring our children […]
Adam Harris: The motto of Sidwell Friends School, the hyperselective “Harvard of Washington’s private schools,” is simple and lofty. “Eluceat omnibus lux”—Latin for “Let the light shine out from all.” But bright lights sometimes illuminate the worst in people. Last month, shocking behavior by parents may have led two of the school’s three college counselors […]
Negassi Tesfamichael: Under a newly proposed contract between the city and the Madison Metropolitan School District, MMSD has the ability to move away from having an officer in each of the city’s four high schools starting in the 2020-21 school year. Under the new language in the contract, MMSD would have until Sept. 15 to […]
Kay Hymowitz: Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness. The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof. A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement: “Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions.” […]
James Chapman, via a kind reader: Children are encouraged to use pictures or other cues to guess unknown words. This approach is supported by the use of predictable books rather than decodable books. Predictable books have sentences that are repetitive and have words that many beginner readers cannot read by themselves. Learning to read is […]
Dianna Douglas: Public schools in gentrifying neighborhoods seem on the cusp of becoming truly diverse, as historically underserved neighborhoods fill up with younger, whiter families. But the schools remain stubbornly segregated. Nikole Hannah-Jones has chronicled this phenomenon around the country, and seen it firsthand in her neighborhood in Brooklyn. “White communities want neighborhood schools if […]
Jenny Peek: Mark Seidenberg, a UW-Madison professor and cognitive neuroscientist, has spent decades researching the way humans acquire language. He is blunt about Wisconsin’s schools’ ability to teach children to read: “If you want your kid to learn to read you can’t assume that the school’s going to take care of it. You have to […]
John Nye: On March 12, news of a massive admission scandal broke in the world of higher education. At least 50 people, including several celebrities, stand accused of paying a consultant named William Rick Singer to get their children into particular colleges by any means necessary. His alleged tactics included falsifying standardized test results and […]
David Blaska: Over the last few days since I voiced my concerns about the poor language being used towards adults by our children and youth in our public schools (and at several school board meetings). I have received mostly positive feedback. However, I have also read comments by people who feel my concern about our […]
Beth DeCarbo: “I think in hindsight, I wish we would have charged everybody rent and given it back to them after they left,” says Ms. Hantjis, 62, a retired nurse. “It would have been so positive,” adds Mr. Hantjis, 61 and retired from the Navy. He and his wife were able to financially support them […]
Noelle Mering: The promise of the sexual revolution was that sex can be meaningless. Indeed, it has to be meaningless to preserve our autonomy. If it has intrinsic meaning, independent of whatever we desire it to mean, then that might signify that we have duties that affect our autonomy. This revolution has thrown human relationships […]
The Economist: For new parents, it is a terrifying moment. The hospital doors close behind them, leaving them with a new and helpless human being. The baby’s survival into adulthood seems impossible. What if it will not eat? What if it is allergic to water? What if an owl carries it off? Probably, few parents […]
Adam Harris: Last fall, Lanus ran for school board and won. His campaign was criticized for receiving outside funding, but his central message resonated with voters: The schools in Baton Rouge had been inequitable for too long, and it was time for a change. “If you look anywhere south of Florida Boulevard in Baton Rouge—which […]
Gillian Tett: This aversion to unfair influence is so deeply ingrained at some colleges that when I applied to Cambridge, three decades ago, my schoolteachers sternly warned me to avoid mentioning that my father had attended the same institution. Having a parental link was seen as a potential black mark, not a help. To US […]
Maggie Fergusson : Tom remembers the day he decided he wanted to be a theoretical astrophysicist. He was deep into research about black holes, and had amassed a box of papers on his theories. In one he speculated about the relationship between black holes and white holes, hypothetical celestial objects that emit colossal amounts of […]
Lauren Camera: An investigation by U.S. News later found that 20 percent of all Title I money for poor students – $2.6 billion – ends up in school districts with a higher proportion of wealthy families because those districts are frequently so much larger that they can have larger numbers of poor students than even […]
Julia Belluz: But, Oster finds, who you are before you have kids heavily influences the likelihood that your marital bliss will drop off a steep happiness cliff. “In general, people tell you that you will not be happy with your marriage after you have kids,” she said. “That’s on average true — marital satisfaction declines […]
: “This is the Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin report — it’s the empirical evidence of that,” he added, referencing the college admissions bribery scandal, which has busted the notion that premier universities were admitting all students on the basis of merit alone. Huffman pleaded guilty this month to fraud conspiracy. Loughlin and her husband […]
Andrew Zaleski: On the eve of my wife’s 30th birthday—a milestone I, too, will soon hit—she posed a troubling question: Are we adults yet? We certainly feel that way: We hold our own jobs, pay our own rent, cover our own bills, drive our own cars. Our credit is in order. But we don’t yet […]
Gabriela Borter: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 9.8% increase in measles cases as of May 10, a resurgence that public health officials have attributed to the spread of misinformation about the measles vaccine. Data are updated every Monday. In New York, 66 cases were reported according to CDC spokesman Jason […]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2019/05/12/the-biggest-education-news-story-youve-never-heard-of/: The answer, unfortunately, is all of the above—and more. But perhaps the place to begin is with the last point. The education establishment, including schools of education and textbook publishers, have largely “pooh-poohed” the idea of knowledge, observed panelist Sonja Santelises, chief executive officer of the Baltimore public schools. “It doesn’t take the place […]
Curt Anderson: Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday signed into law a bill creating a new voucher program for thousands of low- and middle-income students to attend private and religious schools using taxpayer dollars traditionally spent on public schools. The $130 million Family Empowerment Scholarship program was a top priority for the Republican-led Legislature […]
Karen Vaites: “Thank you so much to EWA, congratulations to my fellow finalists, and there’s so much great reporting, education reporting going on right now–I’ve been coming to this conference and I’ve been a part of this community for a long time, and I’m just so grateful to be in the profession that all of […]
Logan Wroge: In a previous attempt at a charter school, Caire proposed the Madison Preparatory Academy, which would have served a similar population as One City Schools, but would have been for grades 6-12. The Madison School Board rejected the idea in December 2011. Caire sought to bring his “change-maker” approach to the Madison School […]
D. Hobbs: Joshua and Britten Wahrer wanted their 6-year-old son Joshua Jr., who is nonverbal, to use the device at school after his teacher was accused of beating him with a wooden pointer stick and arrested. The Clark County School District in Las Vegas rejected the request, saying the listen-in function could be intrusive to […]
Kevin Kelly: The shocking news is that the developing world is not far behind. This is not the stereotypical image. While developing countries are above replacement level, their birthrates are dropping fast. Much of Africa, South America, the Mid-East and Iran have fertility rates that are dropping fast. The drop in fertility in has recently […]
Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz: One Chinese family allegedly paid $6.5 million to William “Rick” Singer, the California-based college counselor who has admitted to masterminding the scheme, according to a person familiar with the matter. Another was the family of a student—referred to in court filings as “Yale Applicant 1”—who paid $1.2 million to secure […]
Natalie Wexler: Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation’s Report Card. Officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the data reflect the results of reading and math tests administered to a sample of students across the country. Experts generally […]
Chris Rickert: Billed as a question-and-answer session on the use of physical restraint of students and special education services in the Madison schools, a forum Tuesday showcased the deep suspicion many local racial justice activists have about the school district’s ability to serve children of color. Brandi Grayson, who has been active in local Black […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition: A bill is circulating in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature that would permanently exempt special education teachers from having to pass the Foundations of Reading Test (FORT). Prospective special educators would merely have to take one course in reading and reading comprehension, receive some unspecified coaching, and compile a portfolio. There […]
Tobias Smith: As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children’s way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to […]