schoolinfosystem.org
Sam Schechner: Solal Paroux’s friends all have smartphones, and the 12-year-old Parisian has been needling his parents to get him one too. But his parents are resisting. And now they have the law on their side. When school starts up in September, a new French law will ban students ranging roughly from ages 3 to […]
Janie Har: Time and again, Chinese-American students consistently delivered top academic scores, only to be denied admission to their dream school. Parents bemoaned what they saw as an unfair racial advantage given to black and Latino children while their own children were overlooked. “Every year hundreds of Chinese-American parents would be in anguish,” said Lee […]
Bloomberg: China’s parliament struck “family planning” policies from the latest draft of a sweeping civil code slated for adoption in 2020, the clearest signal yet that the leadership is moving to end limits on the number of children families can have. A new draft of the Civil Code submitted Monday to the Standing Committee of […]
Angie Chan: For generations, Hong Kong’s prestigious international schools exclusively educated the children of wealthy Western expatriates. Today, placement in those schools is increasingly competitive and enrollment fees can exceed $1 million, making them some of the most expensive private schools in the world. Recent changes to the city’s demography — prompted by Chinese politics […]
Giorgos Christides: The school on the small Greek village of Kerasochori looks like the set of a disaster movie. Everything is still there: the black board, the math books, tables and chairs, the sports equipment, the map of Greece on the wall. Even the class registers are still in the corner. A layer of dust […]
: A mother in Sweden says she often didn’t know where her elementary-school-aged son went for the afternoon after school. A father in Paris says he sends his daughters outside to the playground nearby — alone. And a mother in the Netherlands says parents don’t feel compelled to stick around for children’s birthday parties — […]
Richard J. Murnane, Sean F. Reardon, Preeya P. Mbekeani and Anne Lamb: To explore these questions, we examine enrollment and family-income data from the past 50 years at Catholic, other religious, and nonsectarian private elementary schools (that is, schools serving grades K–8). Our analysis finds that private schools, like public schools, are increasingly segregated by […]
Keri Rodrigues: Here’s the executive summary: White children are not smarter than black and brown children. Parachuting white families into majority “minority” schools will not automatically improve academic performance. Black and Latino children ARE more than capable of achievement. Just because a school is majority “minority” does not make it a failing school. Student diversity […]
Abby Comerford: Walker is a first-generation college student from the south side of Chicago. She attended Oberlin College in Ohio before becoming a K-12 English teacher in Florida. Even though Walker is no longer in the classroom, her ongoing passion for education is prevalent in her work. Walker is joining the rigorous Studio 20 program […]
Joel Kotkin: In contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but much costlier Los Angeles and […]
The Economist: THE one-child-per-couple policy was horrific for women in China. Many were subjected to forced sterilisations or abortions. Newborn girls were killed, removed by family-planning officials or abandoned by parents desperate that their one permitted baby be a boy. Women from neighbouring countries suffered, too, as victims of human trafficking; a skewed sex-ratio made […]
Scoot Milfred and Phil Hands: Usual mumbo-jumbo, we do on this podcast. Why don’t we invite in today some experts to talk about our topic which is around school. Which Madison is finally going to give a try this fall to experts. I know very well we have all hands on deck here. We have […]
John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991: Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. What I teach is school, […]
Sidney Leng Kristin Huang: Parents say they have lost faith in the system after a major drug maker was found to be supplying inferior vaccines that were given to babies as young as three months old, in the latest public health crisis to grip China. The Jilin Food and Drug Administration revealed the vaccine safety […]
Amber Walker: Critics were also concerned about Madison Prep’s operating costs — totaling $11,000 per student — and its reliance on non-union staff in the wake of Wisconsin’s Act 10, a state law that severely limited collective bargaining rights of teachers and other state employees which passed early in 2011. Caire said despite the challenges, […]
Will Flanders: The Special Needs Scholarship Program (SNSP) represents an important new option for families of students with disabilities in Wisconsin. The SNSP provides a substantially larger voucher for families of students with disabilities who do not feel their needs are being met in the traditional public school setting to attend a private school that […]
Susan Dynarski: New York City is wrestling with what to do with its exam schools. Students at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech (the oldest exam schools) perform brilliantly and attend the best colleges. Their students score at the 99th percentile of the state SAT distribution (with Stuyvesant at the 99.9th percentile) and they account […]
Melissa Korn: Houston Baptist University found a new way to appeal to prospective graduate students: boats. The university hired higher-education consulting firm EAB to analyze a vast consumer database aiming to identify potential applicants the same way retailers find shoppers. EAB created a demographic and psychographic profile of Houston Baptist’s enrolled students and found a […]
straight talk on evidence: In this report we discuss newly-published findings from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Tennessee’s voluntary prekindergarten (pre-k) program for low-income children (Lipsey, Farran, and Durkin 2018). We are highlighting this study for two reasons. First, the effectiveness of state and local pre-k programs is a topic of high policy importance. […]
Bloomberg News: Chinese health authorities are studying the possibility of financial incentives to encourage child birth, local media reported, after decades of population controls left the country with a shrinking workforce. China’s National Health Commission has organized experts to explore using tax breaks and other benefits to reduce the cost of having children, the Paper, […]
Melissa Korn: Top colleges have pledged to become more socioeconomically diverse, but the admissions edge many give to children of alumni may make that goal harder to achieve. At the University of Notre Dame, the University of Virginia and Georgetown University, the admission rate for legacies is about double the rate for the overall applicant […]
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt: Overprotecting children hinders them from confronting physical, emotional, and intellectual challenges. Noting a rise of anxiety and depression among teenagers and threats to free speech on many college campuses, Lukianoff (Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, 2012), an attorney and president of the Foundation for Individual […]
Alan Borsuk: But consider a couple other things that happened in Massachusetts: Despite opposition, state officials stuck to the requirement. Teacher training programs adjusted curriculum and the percentage of students passing the test rose. A test for teachers In short, in Wisconsin, regulators and leaders of higher education teacher-prep programs are not so enthused about […]
Alan Borsuk: Overall, the Read to Lead effort seems like the high water mark in efforts to improve how kids are taught reading in Wisconsin — and the water is much lower now. What do the chair and the vice-chair think? Efforts to talk to Walker were not successful. Evers said, “Clearly, I’m disappointed. . […]
Rock the schools: This below is one of the nicer email I received from constituents when my board was attempting to make boundary changes so we could improve school integration. “Because of your changes, there is a very good possibility that he will have to move from a top 5% school to a bottom 5% […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition E-Alert: We have sent the following message and attachment to the members of the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules, urging modifications to the proposed PI-34 educator licensing rule that will maintain the integrity of the statutory requirement that all new elementary, special education, and reading teachers, along with reading specialists, […]
Nicola Davis: Children whose parents are over-controlling “helicopter parents” when they are toddlers, are less able to control their emotions and impulses as they get older apparently leading to more problems with school, new research suggests. The study looked at to what degree mothers of toddlers dominated playtime and showed their child what to do, […]
Emily Dreyfus: Gil and Ahmed, a historian at Columbia, assembled a team of what Gil calls “digital ninjas” for a “crisis researchathon.” These volunteers were professors, graduate students, researchers, and fellows from across the country with varied academic focus, but they all had two things in common: an interest in the history of colonialism, empire, […]
Susan Pendergrass & Nora Kern: Improving the quality of public education in our nation’s cities is a top priority for civic leaders. Beyond its impact on property values, the availability of safe, high-quality schools can have a substantial effect on the quality of life in urban neighborhoods, much like grocery stores, parks, and jobs that […]
Jenny Abamu: Zuberi, like many parents across the country, felt he could have been a better advocate for his child had data about the school been more explicit and easier to find. Data has become particularly relevant for parents whose children attend low-performing schools. It can answer questions about school safety, disciplinary actions taken against […]
Shane Vander Hart, via a kind Will Fitzhugh email: Last week, Long Island Business News reported that yet another billionaire philanthropist will be throwing more money at what ails K-12 education, this time focusing on social-emotional learning. Adina Genn reporting for the publication wrote: Billionaire T. Denny Sanford visited a Rockville Centre elementary school Wednesday […]
Chester E. Finn, Jr. President, Fordham Foundation Academic Questions, Spring 1998e: What’s going on in the college curriculum cannot be laid entirely at the doorstep of the K-12 system. Indeed, as Allan Bloom figured out a decade or more ago, it has as much to do with our educational culture, indeed with our culture per […]
Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh: This book is about this country’s efforts to educate and raise the achievement level of large numbers of low-achieving students—students who perform academically below average for their age or grade level. It suggests alternatives to what educators over the past century and a half have done (especially in reading or […]
Jenny Abamu: When Mosi Zuberi learned that his 18-year-old son, Kaja, might not graduate from McClymonds High School in Oakland, he anguished over his parenting missteps, wondering where he had gone wrong. Yet, after seeing school data from the California School Dashboard and learning that close to one-fifth of McClymonds’ students were not graduating, he […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: Thanks to everyone who contacted the legislature’s Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) with concerns about the new teacher licensing rules drafted by DPI. As you know, PI-34 provides broad exemptions from the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test (FORT) that go way beyond providing flexibility for […]
Elizabeth K Ruzzo, Laura Perez-Cano, Jae-Yoon Jung, Lee-kai Wang, Dorna Kashef-Haghighi, Chris Hartl, Jackson Hoekstra, Olivia Leventhal, Michael J. Gandal, Kelley Paskov, Nate Stockham, Damon Polioudakis, Jennifer K. Lowe, Daniel H. Geschwind, Dennis P Wall : Genetic studies of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have revealed a complex, heterogeneous architecture, in which the contribution of rare […]
National Graphic: Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas— and likely in world history—has been discovered on Peru’s northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic. More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on […]
Jonathan Kay: In a development that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago, when video games were poised to take over living rooms, board games are thriving. Overall, the latest available data shows that U.S. sales grew by 28 percent between the spring of 2016 and the spring of 2017. Revenues are expected […]
Sarah Karp: Chicago Public Schools — the nation’s third largest school system — must turn over control of nearly every aspect of its special education program to the state, the Illinois State Board of Education said Wednesday. The board voted to appoint a monitor who will have final say on all policies and budget plans […]
Neal McCluskey: Polling reveals that parents, especially African Americans, want school choice. Studies show choice students pulling even with public school kids even in laggard programs, and often surpassing them. And states keep expanding choice initiatives as families flock to them. Perhaps because of all this good news, opponents of expanding the options available to […]
Alan Borsuk: As someone recently put it to me, improving Wisconsin’s overall results in reading will not come from pushing one button. It will require pushing maybe 10 buttons. A lot needs to be done. Some of the buttons that should be pushed connect to what goes on in school. Some connect to things beyond […]
Annysa Johnson: “Eighty-eight cents of every dollar we spend is in the schools, so every reduction we make will impact schools directly,” said Driver, who had brought forward a number of potential cost-saving measures, including changes to employee benefits and busing, that were rejected by board members. “It’s very difficult to make those choices. But […]
Christian Boer Katie Wudel: 30 years ago, when Christian Boer was first learning how to read while growing up in the Netherlands, he made a lot of mistakes. His teacher didn’t attribute his challenges to what would eventually be diagnosed as dyslexia — she just told Boer to try harder, occasionally even calling him lazy […]
Matthew Walther: Baring-Gould was born in Exeter in 1834 to the daughter of an admiral and a former lieutenant in an Indian cavalry regiment. Much of his early life was spent in continental travel with his family. A sickly child, he attended school for two noncontiguous years and was otherwise instructed by private tutors. After […]
Neerav Kingsland: Below is an email (pasted with permission) from Scott Pearson, the head of the Washington DC Public Charter School Board. On this blog, as well as on twitter, we debate a lot about regulation. We have a lot to figure out and these debates help me get smarter. But leaders on the ground […]
Radley Balko: It’s a convenient diagnosis for prosecutors, in that it provides a cause of death (violent shaking), a culprit (whoever was last with the child before death) and even intent (prosecutors often argue that the violent, extended shaking establishes mens rea.) According to a 2015 survey by The Washington Post and the Medill Justice […]
Sirin Kale: To prepare, students from across India travel to the historic northern city of Kota, spending months or even years away from their family and home. Whether the children of manual labourers or business tycoons, all have travelled to Kota for one reason: academic glory. Kota is the epicentre of India’s private coaching industry. […]
Daniel Willingham: What Should Teachers Know? Is my experience representative? Are most teachers unaware of the latest findings from basic science—in particular, psychology—about how children think and learn? Research is limited, but a 2006 study by Arthur Levine indicated that teachers were, for the most part, confident about their knowledge: 81 percent said they understood […]
Paul Sperry: Broward County, Fla., school officials portray as a great success their Obama administration-inspired program offering counseling to students who break the law, instead of having them arrested or expelled. They insist that it played no role in February’s school massacre by Nikolas Cruz. They also claim that in fact juvenile recidivism rates are […]
Erin Currier, Joanna Biernacka-Lievestro Diana Elliott, Sheida Elmi, Clinton Key, Walter Lake, Sarah Sattelmeyer: The principle of equal opportunity holds so distinguished a place in U.S. history that it even appears in drafts of the country’s founding documents.1 This idea has been interpreted in various ways, but it is typically understood to mean that success […]
Brian A. Jacob and Joseph Ryan: This report presents findings from a unique partnership between the University of Michigan and the State that allowed us to match the universe of child maltreatment records in Michigan with educational data on all public school children in the state. We find that roughly 18 percent of third-grade students […]
BBC: The teen who built a prosthetic arm for his dad Robbie Frei is passionate about the potential of 3D printing. After all, he’s seen its potential first-hand. Robbie’s father is a Marine veteran who lost part of his right arm in Iraq. One challenge was that he couldn’t play video games with his children. […]
The Guardian: Andria Zafirakou has been functioning on three hours’ sleep a night for weeks, but looks radiant. “It’s adrenaline, it’s excitement, it’s everything.” Nominated by current and former colleagues for the Varkey Foundation’s annual Global Teacher prize, dubbed the Nobel for teaching, last month Zafirakou learned she had been shortlisted from a field of […]
Kate Stringer: he rage was palpable. Oakland community members packed the district room waving signs. They shouted over school board members, screaming, “No cuts!” and “Chop from the top!” They stood in line for four hours to make public comments, voices laced with emotion, all asking the same thing: Why were millions of dollars being […]
Andrew Van Dam: The decrease of birthrates in countries where we operate could negatively affect our business. Most of our end-customers are newborns and children and, as a result, our revenue are dependent on the birthrates in countries where we operate. In recent years, many countries’ birthrates have dropped or stagnated as their population ages, […]
The Rhode Show: If you notice your child may have some learning obstacles in school, but you are not sure where to begin or what will be best the support you can give your child, there are numerous options. Tracy from The Children’s Workshop give us some tips and tricks to help you sort through […]
Alan Borsuk: Every student and family is involved in programs aimed at good behavior, emotional control, and engagement in school. A smaller number of students with more needs get more attention. And a few students need and get individualized help. Kim Burg, one of the counselors who works at the school, said the school is […]
Annysa Johnson: That is troubling for Oconomowoc parent Amanda Hart, whose online petition calling on the district to maintain programming like the MLK Day assembly had attracted almost 1,000 signatures as of Friday. “I don’t know how you can have a discussion about race without also discussing (privilege) to give our students a complete picture,” […]
CBC News: A commission looking into child protection cases involving the Motherisk test lab says bad science removed vulnerable children from more than 50 families based on now-discredited hair analysis, but few parents have a chance of finding a satisfactory legal remedy. The Motherisk Commission was set up by the Ontario government to analyze legal […]
Glennon Doyle Melton: Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student […]
Michael McShane: Almost any article on Catholic schooling today will have at least one paragraph in it describing the last five decades’ decline in both the number of Catholic schools and the number of students attending them. At this point, the factors are well known: fewer priests and religious staff working in schools, Catholics becoming […]
Michael Hall: When Gabby Sones was fifteen, she would often lie awake at night, restless, replaying memories in her head, watching them roll by like scenes from a movie. Many involved her father, Jimmy. The two were inseparable when she was little. He was a tall, burly, redheaded good ol’ boy who loved to hunt […]
Alan Borsuk: But look at other aspects of all this. Mental health for students, running the spectrum from more routine problems to the extremes of the Florida shooter, have been getting more attention recently than in previous years. The bad news is that the overall problem appears to have grown. The good news is that […]
Karen Rivedal: More than 150 people — most of them parents, many of them worried and frustrated — filled the cafeteria at La Follette High School Tuesday night to share their concerns about school safety, security, students fighting and the student behavior code with Madison School District Superintendent Jen Cheatham and Principal Sean Storch. “It’s […]
Via a kind email: Dear Friends. Last night, we learned that our application to establish One City Senior Preschool as a public charter school serving children in 4 year-old and 5 year-old kindergarten was approved by the University of Wisconsin System. We are very excited! This action will enable us to offer a high quality, […]
David Brady, Ryan M. Finnigan and Sabine Hübgen: No group is as linked to poverty in the American mind as single mothers. For decades, politicians, journalists and scholars have scrutinized the reasons poor couples fail to use contraception, have children out of wedlock and do not marry. When the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings […]
Clint Smith: Since the Puritans set up the first public schools in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, local school districts have largely relied on property taxes for funding. In 1973, Demetrio Rodriguez sued the state of Texas, accusing it of violating the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment on the grounds that his children in the […]
Larry Kummer: Marriage has been an institution in flux for centuries, but the rate of change accelerated after California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the revolutionary Family Law Act of 1969, retroactively abolishing the “traditional” binding contract of marriage and replacing it with no-fault divorce. The feminist revolutions which followed forced further changes in marriage. The […]
Corey DeAngelis: The potential benefits of increased access to private school choice programs in the United States remain a hot topic in educational policy. According to economic theory, private schooling should improve student achievement by increasing competitive pressures on educators to provide high-quality educational experiences. In addition, since children have differing interests, abilities, and learning […]
Steve Coll: On March 29th, in Pontiac, Michigan, Sergio Perez appeared in a county courtroom to seek sole custody of his son and two daughters, who were between eleven and seventeen years old. The children lived with Sergio’s estranged wife, Rose, and, he told me recently, he was concerned about them. His wife had taken […]
Oliver Burkeman: Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other […]
ParentsRightsinEd : You entrust your child to the care of your district teachers and leaders each and every time they step into the halls of the school. Teaching is not an easy profession, but can be extremely rewarding; educators supporting the efforts of parents and guardians by teaching children skills and knowledge that will hopefully […]
Sarah Kliff: A child born in the United States has a 70 percent greater chance of dying before adulthood than kids born into other wealthy, democratic countries, a new study has found. The research, published in the journal Health Affairs on Monday, shows that the United States lags far behind peer countries on child health […]
Ni Dandan: When Li Mengyuan walked out of the labor arbitration office on a Monday in October, the 32-year-old didn’t feel like a winner — even though the dispute with her former employer over maternity benefits had been decided in her favor. Now with a 1-year-old in tow, Li belongs to a group that Chinese […]
Sarah Kliff: A child born in the United States has a 70 percent greater chance of dying before adulthood than kids born into other wealthy, democratic countries, a new study has found. The research, published in the journal Health Affairs on Monday, shows that the United States lags far behind peer countries on child health […]
Rod Dreher: There’s another paradox in your analysis: that the more liberalism liberates us as individuals, the more dependent it makes us on the state. What do you mean? The political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel once wrote that “state of nature” scenarios were obviously the imaginings of “childless men who had forgotten their own childhood.” […]
Kristen Brown: In Saudi Arabia, if you’re planning to tie the knot, there’s a step you must go through that doesn’t happen anywhere else: You have to get a test for genetic disease. Hereditary blood diseases like sickle cell and beta thalassemia are prevalent in this part of the world, where marriage between cousins is […]
Claudia Rowe: A longtime advocate for public education has taken the reins of the state’s charter-school association, weathering vigorous opposition and bitter legal challenges — all in his first seven months on the job. After a long career advocating for traditional public education, Patrick D’Amelio recently stepped up to lead the Washington State Charter Schools […]
Jean Twenge: Kevin and I sit down at two desks just outside his third period class at a high school in northern San Diego. He is 17 years old and Asian American, with spiky black hair, fashionable glasses, and a wan smile. He is the oldest of three children, with his parents expecting another child […]
Erin Richards: In 2015-’16, Wisconsin was home to just over a million school-aged children. About 860,000 attended public schools. About 123,000 attended private schools: about 90,000 who paid tuition, and about 33,000 who used vouchers. About 20,000 children were home-schooled. Vouchers are taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies that help children attend private schools, the vast majority of […]
Michael Savage: Ministers are being urged to fine schools that are informally excluding poorly performing pupils, amid mounting evidence that some institutions are attempting to game the exam system. Hundreds of cases of children being removed from schools on tenuous and potentially illegal grounds have been reported to a charity offering legal advice to parents. […]
Howard Blume: Leilany Medina, 11, loves books so much that she’d like to become a librarian. But even she sometimes forgets to return books on time, especially if she hasn’t quite finished. And she’s racked up some late fines. But local libraries are providing a way out for such book lovers, and creating new lures […]
Laura Battle: u see, I have this skipping rope, and I just wave it around, and I let my imagination go free,” says Alma Deutscher, trying to explain the inexplicable. “Before this I would pick up sticks and wave them around, and some sticks were better than others but this was the best.” She brings […]
Philissa Cramer: Who should succeed Carmen Fariña as New York City schools chief? Eva Moskowitz, the charter school CEO who runs a small-district-sized network within the city, has some ideas. Less than a day after news broke that Fariña would step down in early 2018, Moskowitz distributed a list of 14 people she sees as […]
David Dayen: The Beginning of a Backlash “I think you do enormous good … but your power sometimes scares me,” said Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana in October to the general counsels of Facebook, Google, and Twitter at the first major congressional hearing on Big Tech in years. The topic was Russian interference with […]
Rachel Cohen: Let’s talk a little about “human capital.” What does that mean? Malcolm Harris: Generally speaking, human capital is the skills, abilities, talents, accomplishments, and resumes that go with you when you work. It refers to the relationship between workers and owners. What some people get wrong is thinking that we own our human […]
Wenxin Fan and Natasha Khan: Schoolchildren in a bucolic region in western China famed for steam trains and jasmine flowers thought little of it when police interrupted classes and asked all the boys to spit into small plastic boxes. They weren’t told why, according to the accounts of several children involved. From kindergartens through high […]
Stephane Kasriel: I contemplate the future of work on a daily basis in both my professional and personal life. As a father of four children from four to 14 years old, and as a citizen of the world, I care about our future. As CEO of freelancing website Upwork, I am witnessing firsthand not only […]
Michael J. Petrilli : Regular readers know that I’m somewhat obsessed with the topic of screen time. Maybe it was my Catholic upbringing, or the years our kids spent in a Waldorf pre-school, but I can’t help feeling a little guilty about letting my boys watch stupid Disney TV shows or play mindless video games […]
Lucy Kellaway: My favourite party of the season — almost my only party — was with my fellow middle-aged teaching novices, who have spent the past four months in assorted London secondary schools. Everyone looked a bit different. Thinner. Tougher. But also, I fancied, a bit younger. Given how tired we all were, this might […]
Chris Stewart: Here comes a shocker, not everyone is on board. The Wisconsin Education Association Council have slammed the program because they say it doesn’t “meet the needs of all students,” and “elected officials should provide stable funding for public schools and include educators in developing solutions instead of fragmented approaches that siphon more from […]
Rebecca Mead: One of the most celebrated educational experiments in history was performed by James Mill, the British historian, on his eldest son, John Stuart Mill, who was born outside London in 1806. John began learning Greek when he was three, and read Herodotus and other historians and philosophers before commencing Latin, at the age […]
Ni Dandan: Yuan Honglin’s career as one of China’s foremost homeschooling advocates began when his daughter’s kindergarten teacher said 3-year-old Xiaoyi didn’t interact much with the other children, and might need psychological care. Feeling both shocked and skeptical, Yuan decided to take his daughter out of school and teach her himself. Afraid that being away […]
Reuters: The major company whose kindergarten in Beijing is under investigation over child abuse allegations, has said it is aware of more complaints by parents at some of its schools elsewhere in China. The comments from company RYB Education on Wednesday came a day after police said they had detained a teacher suspected of using […]
Let Grow: From the Policy Studies Institute work on “children’s independent mobility” in Britain comes this: 1971: *Approximately half of children’s journeys were made on foot *80% of 7- and 8-year-old children got to school unaccompanied by an adult . 1990: • 30% of children under ten years old are allowed to travel alone to […]
David Dagan: Sitting in a classroom one day in September, a police officer studied a passage from James Baldwin’s 1966 essay on policing in Harlem, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” and read a few lines out loud: “Some school children overturned a fruit stand in Harlem. This would have been a mere childish prank if […]
Salim Furth: Old Town Road traces a choppy, swerving path that marks the southern edge of Trumbull, Connecticut. It is shaded by maples and oaks that frame the sensible New England homes of an affluent suburb. Across the double yellow lines of Old Town Road are similar homes in the city of Bridgeport, one of […]
Nick Bilton: Many people imagine 19th-century antebellum America as a frontier fantasia: men with handlebar mustaches sitting in dusty saloons, kicking back moonshine whiskey, as a piano player picks out tunes in the background. In reality, though, life was a little more sordid: Americans spent their time after work in fully legal heroin dens; in […]
Graham Cluley: German parents are being told to destroy smartwatches they have bought for their children after the country’s telecoms regulator put a blanket ban in place to prevent sale of the devices, amid growing privacy concerns. Jochen Homann, president of the Federal Network Agency, told BBC News that the so-called smartwatches, typically aimed at […]
Melia Robinson: Max Ventilla, a Google executive who left the search giant to launch AltSchool in 2013, wooed parents with his vision to bring traditional models of elementary education into the digital age. AltSchool has raised $175 million from Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and others, and the startup is closing a Series C […]