schoolinfosystem.org
open mind: The year was 1900 and the quantum mysteries inside atoms had begun to be unraveled. However, the sharpest minds on the planet could still not explain how it was possible that a person could have flat feet, but not his parents. Suddenly three scientists, a Dutchman, a German and an Austrian, believed that […]
Gina Caneva: Even if our state and city find a way to move forward and equitably fund education, inequities would still exist between states. This fractured way of funding public education will only lead to more inequity. Of course, the most comprehensive, equitable solution is also the most far-fetched and would take a constitutional amendment—the […]
Nikkole Hannah-Jones: I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, on the wrong side of the river that divided white from black, opportunity from struggle, and started my education in a low-income school that my mother says was distressingly chaotic. I don’t recall it being bad, but I do remember just one white child in my first-grade […]
Elizabeth Harris: There are supposed to be 27 children in Harold Boyd IV’s second-grade classroom, but how many of them will be there on a given day is anyone’s guess. Since school began in September, five new students have arrived and eight children have left. Two transferred out in November. One who started in January […]
Seymour Papert: Introduction Everyone in this room would agree that we are moving into something called “the computer future,” a future in which everything will be different because of the presence of computers and other new technologies. In some departments of life, the computer presence is already visible. Coming here from my home, I passed […]
The Economist: IN JULY 2012 a man calling himself Sam Bacile posted a short video on YouTube. It showed the Prophet Muhammad bedding various women, taking part in gory battles and declaring: “Every non-Muslim is an infidel. Their lands, their women, their children are our spoils.” The film was, as Salman Rushdie, a British author, […]
Helen Shen: Women earn nearly one-third less than men within a year of completing a PhD in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) field, suggests an analysis of roughly 1,200 US graduates. Much of the pay gap, the study found, came down to a tendency for women to graduate in less-lucrative academic fields — […]
Jillian Kay Melchior Mizzou’s vice chancellor for marketing and communications, Ellen De Graffenreid, received a disheartening email last fall at the pinnacle of the crisis on campus. A disgruntled parent wrote to the university’s Board of Curators, describing how her son, a sophomore, considered transferring out, while their two high-school-aged children “have all but eliminated […]
Kate Linebaugh: Third-grader Andrew Calabrese carries his backpack everywhere he goes at his San Diego-area school. His backpack isn’t just filled with books, it is carrying his robotic pancreas. The device, long considered the Holy Grail of Type 1 diabetes technology, wasn’t constructed by a medical-device company. It hasn’t been approved by regulators. It was […]
David Weinberger: The internet started out as the Information Highway, the Great Emancipator of knowledge, and as an assured tool for generating a well-informed citizenry. But, over the past 15 years, that optimism has given way to cynicism and fear — we have taught our children that the net is a swamp of lies spun […]
Ann Lukits: A new study challenges the notion that girls are better at reading than boys. The research, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, showed that boys outscored girls on reading tests if they were told the tests were a game. But boys scored significantly lower than girls when told the tests were assessments […]
Hanna Rosin: A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” Down a path and across a grassy square, 5-year-old Dylan can hear them through the window of his nana’s front room. He tries to figure out […]
Tim Harford: This statistical capitulation was a dismaying read for anyone still wedded to the idea — apparently a quaint one — that gathering statistical information might help us understand and improve our world. But the Guardian’s cynicism can hardly be a surprise. It is a natural response to the rise of “statistical bullshit” — […]
Abilash Gopal: Overparenting is widely recognized as a problematic approach to raising kids. For nearly a decade, studies have shown how the rise of the “helicopter parent” has been worsening children’s anxiety and school performance in the K-12 years. Now we’re witnessing what happens when the overparented child grows up, and it’s a trainwreck that […]
Esther Cepeda We’ve heard for years that when it comes to African-Americans, Hispanics and low-income minority communities in general, expectations for academic achievement are low. Indeed, the Center for American Progress found in 2014 that 10th-grade teachers thought African-American students were 47 percent, and Hispanic students were 42 percent, less likely to graduate college than […]
Motoko Rich: Opening a new front in the assault on teacher tenure, a group of parents backed by wealthy philanthropists served notice to defendants on Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging Minnesota’s job protections for teachers, as well as the state’s rules governing which teachers are laid off as a result of budget cuts. Similar to […]
Dave Baskerville (7 April 2016) Mr. Ed Hughes, Member, MMSD Board 4/7/16 Ed, I finally got around to reading your “Eight Lessons Learned” article in the 3/9/16 edition of CT. Interesting/thanks. As you know from our previous discussions, we have similar thinking on some of the MMSD challenges, not on others. For the sake of […]
Christine Campbell: Reform efforts in cities like New York City, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans have led to improved school options and better outcomes for more students. But the pace and shape of the reforms were wrenching for all involved and each of these cities carries some legacy of bitterness and mistrust around how reforms […]
Fraser Nelson: It’s comforting now to think of eugenics as an evil that sprang from the blackness of Nazi hearts. We’re familiar with the argument: some men are born great, some as weaklings, and both pass the traits on to their children. So to improve society, the logic goes, we must encourage the best to […]
Brennan Barnard: In 20 years of counseling students, I have witnessed a seismic shift in the approach towards college admission. As application numbers have increased, so has the collective angst around college admission. With sinking admit rates, high-stakes testing, rising tuition costs, unmanageable debt and an unhealthy fixation on the handful of most selective schools, […]
Matthew Albright and Saranac Hale Spencer: The success of those votes comes down to whether district officials can coax enough parents with children in public schools to go to the polls. They must outnumber those who don’t feel they have a stake in the schools or who feel districts should do more to prove they […]
Liz the Developer: work at a bootcamp. I’ve chosen to remain in this role long past the average bootcamp-lead-instructor burnout time – just one year. I’ve been doing this since 2012, the beginning of the bootcamp industry. Why haven’t I burnt out? I believe a whole helluva lot in this thing, and keeping it alive, […]
Jamie Doward: More than half a century of sweeping educational reforms have done little to improve Britain’s social mobility, according to one of the country’s leading experts on equality. Instead, young people from less well-off families entering today’s labour market have far less favourable prospects than their parents or even their grandparents, despite having gained […]
Claudio Sanchez: Before I became a reporter, I was a teacher. After 27 years on the education beat, I’ve met a few fantastic teachers and a few bad ones. So I’ve wondered, where would I have fit in? Was I a good teacher? Recently I went back to the site of the school where I […]
Japan Times: The education system is not taking adequate care of the increasing number of foreign children living in Japan. According to a recent Kyodo News survey, 41 out of 72 municipal governments have failed to confirm the whereabouts of more than 10,000 non-Japanese children not attending school. That lack of oversight does not happen […]
Maya Pope-Chappell: At the center of the fight is Oakland Unified Public School Superintendent Antwan Wilson. Besides making school choices easier and more transparent, Wilson argues that a single form would provide valuable data that could be used to scale up more options that parents want. (There are currently 40 different enrollment processes in Oakland, […]
Nick Cohen: On the face of it, there has never been a better time to break into the arts, television, music or journalism. Look at the universities, and you can think that all the bragging about London being the creative capital of Europe, and British cultural dominance replacing British imperial dominance, is a simple statement […]
Rebecca Mead: Seen from the outside, AltSchool Brooklyn, a private school that opened in Brooklyn Heights last fall, does not look like a traditional educational establishment. There is no playground attached, no crossing guard at the street corner, and no crowd of children blocking the sidewalk in the morning. The school is one floor up, […]
JimQ: stumbled across an article in the Financial Times the other day revealing why Philadelphia’s infrastructure is crumbling, with absolutely zero possibility of reversing the downward spiral. I find it fascinating a foreign publication had to uncover the ugly truth, while the liberal rag Phila. Inquirer is completely silent on the issue. They just spout […]
David Gelernter, via Will Fitzhugh: Donald Trump is succeeding, we’re told, because he appeals to angry voters—but that’s obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America’s fate under Obama, […]
Peggy Noonan: If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being […]
Alan Borsuk: I’ll focus here on responses from current or retired teachers. All but one agreed that conduct in school had declined. (The one said, in short, that kids hadn’t changed much and there are still a lot of great students in schools.) Many didn’t want to be named, and I’ll extend that to all […]
John King: But there are still so many young people out there like me, children whose paths to school have been marked by burdens no young person should have to bear. We owe it to those children to make school for them what it was for me. That’s why I feel such urgency about the […]
Mike Antonucci: A largely overlooked portion of the Friedrichs lawsuit is its fall-back argument. In the event the U.S. Supreme Court upholds agency fees, the plaintiffs ask that unions be required to get members to opt-in to paying for non-chargeable activities, rather than require fee-payers to opt-out. In other words, the default status of employees […]
Steve Connor: Learning a second language can boost thinking skills, improve mental agility and delay the ageing of the brain, according to scientists who believe that speaking minority languages should be positively encouraged in schools and universities. Studies have found that children and adults who learn or speak another language benefit from the extra effort […]
The Advocate: Collins and Maxie are both mid-’90s graduates of Baton Rouge public schools — Lee and Capitol high schools, respectively. Both have school-aged children. Collins, 39, has two sons, 18 and 19 years old, who are recent graduates of Belaire and Scotlandville high schools and are now in college. Maxie, 37, has six children, […]
Eric Weiner: Urban planners the world over yearn to replicate the success of Silicon Valley: witness Thames Valley (England) and Silicon Oasis (Dubai), to name just two of these attempts. Invariably, these well-intentioned efforts fail for the simple reason that they’re trying to replicate the wrong model. Silicon Valley is too new, too now, to […]
Kevin Huffman: A Tennessee study found that students who attended the state’s pre-k program did worse by third grade than students who had been lotteried out. l As campaign issues go, promoting preschool for poor kids is about as close to a no-brainer as it gets among progressives. Indeed, when Hillary Clinton officially launched her […]
Steve Nuemann: The idea that schoolchildren should become philosophers will be scoffed at by school boards, teachers, parents, and philosophers alike. The latter will question whether kids can even do philosophy, while the former likely have only a passing familiarity with it, if any — possibly leading them to conclude that it’s beyond useless. Yet […]
Nicholas Tampio: From its inception in 1945, the United Nations has been involved with education on a global scale. The U.N. views education as crucial to eradicating poverty, building peace and fostering intercultural dialogue, and it remains committed to “a holistic and humanistic vision of quality education worldwide.” Yet there has been a dramatic shift […]
Natalie Coleman: Are we ready? This question is front-and-center in the conversation surrounding education in Tennessee. This is the question ringing in classrooms across the state, the question plaguing teachers working tirelessly to adjust instruction to more rigorous expectations, striving to help students reach heights monumentally higher than they’ve ever been asked to, much less […]
Brandon Stahl: Minnesota’s foster care system is falling short of state and federal standards meant to ensure that abused children are placed into stable and permanent homes, a Star Tribune review of state records has found. Those records reveal that too many abused foster children in Minnesota are returned to their parents too quickly, suffer […]
Reyna L. Gordon, Hilda M. Fehd and Bruce D. McCandliss: Children’s engagement in music practice is associated with enhancements in literacy-related language skills, as demonstrated by multiple reports of correlation across these two domains. Training studies have tested whether engaging in music training directly transfers benefit to children’s literacy skill development. Results of such studies, […]
Greg Richmond: Is it worth your time to consider the argument behind a new report that contrasts school choice with the subprime mortgage bubble? Yes, but dig beyond its face to the deeper ideology at its core. A new front has opened in the education reform wars and if you are reading this, you should […]
Economist: This study was a follow-up to one in which Dr Maestripieri had tested the existing theory of who makes a good dad, and found it wanting. This is that the more testosterone a man has, the less likely he is to hang around to help bring up baby. Using a questionnaire which asked things […]
Conor Boyack: Parents, ask yourself this question: who has stewardship over your child — you, or the government? Think it’s you? Apparently, the federal government disagrees. In a draft policy statement jointly issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Education, federal bureaucrats have — on their own […]
New York Times: Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. In reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to […]
Amy Dockser Marcus: It was a big decision, and Kathy Giusti saved the conversations about it for quiet moments. A phone call catching up with her mother. A car ride with her children. A backyard party celebrating a high-school graduation. Ms. Giusti wanted to discuss the complex, intimate and sometimes life-changing choice that many families […]
Alan Borsuk: In hopes of revving up readership, I invited Miley Cyrus to join in presenting the annual Wisconsin education awards. But she was busy lowering standards of public decency in America, so you’ll have to put up with me. How boring — but this year wasn’t boring for Badger state education, so let’s get […]
Annysa Johnson: A Marquette University summer reading program for children developed by former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and education reform advocate Howard Fuller would get a $1.25 million boost from the state under a bill making its way through the Legislature. The Assembly bill, proposed by Rep. Joe Sanfelippo (R-New Berlin), would require the state […]
Leonard Sax: Kyle was absorbed in a videogame on his cellphone, so I asked his mom, “How long has Kyle had a stomach ache?” Mom said, “I’m thinking it’s been about two days.” Then Kyle replied, “Shut up, mom. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he gave a snorty laugh, without looking up […]
Julie Lythcott-Haims: In order to understand why our children are making the decision to die, Silicon Valley parents need to be willing to examine what is perhaps our community’s most sacred cow: the false but tightly-held belief that students must attend a highly selective college to be worth anything in life, and that our worth […]
National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) PDF: Across America, there is much debate about charter schools. Some of that debate is about the existence of charter schools and whether there should be more or fewer of them. More of the debate is about the quality and oversight of charter schools. This publication is part […]
Jason Joyce: “Students in the alternative program have their classes on the third floor, separate from the elementary students,” said Rachel Strauch Nelson in an email. “I would note that we have already been considering other possible locations for these programs as our district works to strengthen our alternative program options.” Strauch Nelson added that […]
Jon Gabriel: More money for schools with no new taxes: What’s not to like? A lot, apparently. Mr. Ducey’s plan disrupted the usual coalition of teachers unions and public school districts, leading some in the K-12 establishment—those administrators and union officials who have a way of soaking up dollars while doing little for students—to take […]
Alan Borsuk: “For us, stability is key.” Mark Flaten, principal of Green Bay West High School, said that to 10 members of the state Assembly when they visited last week at the school as part of the work of a legislative task force on urban education. Flaten was talking about challenges faced at the school, […]
Nicholette Zeliadt: The latest estimate of autism prevalence in the U.S., released last week, suggests the condition is even more common than previously thought. But the apparent rise in autism coincides with a decline in other developmental disorders, highlighting the complexity folded into this seemingly simple statistic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention […]
Scott Jaschik: The Wall Street Journal couldn’t have been much more excited about what Mitch Daniels said Wednesday about the protests at Yale University and the University of Missouri. “We’ve been wondering all week what happened to the grown-ups on American university campuses, and it appears we have a sighting. Mitch Daniels, the president of […]
Noah Rothman: It has been said that college is where students go to learn how to learn. That is increasingly looking like an assumption based only in faith. The crisis of enforced intellectual homogeneity on America’s college campuses has been an acute one for several years. Despite the public’s growing concern for the integrity of […]
Sol Stern: Over nearly three decades fighting to improve the nation’s largest public school district, I have discovered a dispiriting but undeniable fact: The more things change, the more they stay the same. I started writing about public education because of what I saw, up close and personal, at PS 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West […]
Simon Mundy: The system was introduced in 2010 to replace a state monopoly on history textbooks that was introduced by the authoritarian leader Park Chung-hee in 1974, two years after he revised the constitution to suspend democratic elections. Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, is the sitting president and some of her political opponents have claimed that […]
David Dahmer: Two facts that we know to be true: One, children who can read, who love to learn, and who can work effectively with others will be best prepared to lead happy lives and raise happy and healthy families as adults. Two, many children of color in low-income families don’t start their learning in […]
David Kiro: There’s still no evidence that the children benefited cognitively from preschool. They may be better socialized to school life — a skill, emphasized in preschool, that may well bring long-term benefits — but many of them haven’t mastered the three Rs. That’s terrible news, since being a proficient reader by third grade is […]
Emma Jacobs One morning Madeleine Kasson received an email from an undergraduate, sent at 5am. Please write my essay — it is due in today, it requested. She declined the solicitation, as she does with all such requests from students. This is a common misunderstanding of her work as a private tutor to undergraduates. This […]
Marianne Lombardo: The Hibsty Map-when you’re given information that paints a rosier picture than what is the actual case – might be humorous if we’re talking about Match.com, but it isn’t when we’re talking about our children’s education. The Obama administration has fought hard, against extensive criticism, to address the discrepancies between what states have […]
Lucy Kellaway: Last week online readers of the FT, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal were accosted by this question in a big white banner advertisement paid for by UBS. As I glanced at it two further questions occurred to me: a) what business is that of a bank? and b) what about mothers? “For […]
Angela Hanscom: I still recall the days of preschool for my oldest daughter. I remember wanting to desperately enrich her life in any way possible – to give her an edge before she even got to formal schooling. I put her in a preschool that was academic in nature – the focus on pre-reading, writing, […]
John Higgins: After nearly a year of deliberation, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 late Friday afternoon that charter schools are unconstitutional, creating chaos for hundreds of families whose children have already started classes. The ruling — believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country — overturns the law voters […]
Dr Hurd: Schools have long since lost sight of what education actually is. Government schools are particularly guilty. Public schools are government schools. If we called them what they are — government schools — many of us might not be so prone to defend them. By their very definition, the purpose of nationalized, federally subsidized […]
Washington policy center : New research finds that some justices on the state supreme court have received political contributions from a lead party in a key lawsuit now before the court. Parties in the case, League of Women Voters, Washington Education Association, et al vs State of Washington, are asking the court to strike down […]
State Senator Jennifer Shilling: It’s clear that we need to take a close look at how student funding cuts and increasing poverty rates are affecting classroom learning. Instead of taking more resources away from Wisconsin children, we must work together to invest in local schools, reduce student hunger and improve student achievement. For too long, […]
Brentin Mock: Referring to New Orleans as anything like a “laboratory” during the first weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters receded would have been a bad move. As displaced residents trickled back into the city, they were first and foremost seeking help with piecing their old lives back together: How were they going to […]
The Economist: Complicating the politics, school buses have their roots in a very different philosophy. More than just machines for moving children around, they have often been tools for social engineering. Busing took off in the 1930s, as progressive education officials sought to close one-room rural schoolhouses and move kids to “modern” township schools. Visitors […]
Jonathan Knee: Watching the $200 million iceberg (Mr. Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation was contingent on raising a matching amount) slowly melt into an ocean of recrimination over the course of 256 brisk pages can be a sometimes painful exercise. The union boss, Joe Del Grosso, demanded a ransom of $31 million to compensate for what […]
Robert Pondiscio: Every sentence in Sir Ken Robinson’s Creative Schools begins with a capital letter. There is also a punctuation mark at the end of each, without exception. I have made a careful study of his nearly three-hundred-page manuscript, and can now report conclusively that its author employs—precisely and exclusively—the twenty-six letters of the standard […]
Caroline Bermudez: A growing amount of scrutiny is paid to the roughly $4 billion private philanthropies give to public K-12 education annually. Such attention is understandable—even if the amount is dwarfed by the $600 billion in local, state, and federal dollars taxpayers spend every year on public schools. We should be talking about the sway […]
Matthew Hennessey: For Wade and her husband, and for city dwellers with concerns ranging from classroom environment to the Common Core, public school is out of the question. And for them, as for many urban middle-class families, paying hefty private school tuition is not a realistic option, either. “It wasn’t so much a decision of […]
Erik Gilbert Last year the younger of my two sons went off to college. As we went through the search process, we looked at university and department websites, checked faculty research interests, looked for evidence of faculty involving students in their research, flinched at the prices, marveled at the climbing walls, and considered quality of […]
Jessica Lahey I’ve known the mother sitting in front of me at this parent-teacher conference for years, and we have been through a lot together. I have taught three of her children, and I like to think we’ve even become friends during our time together. She’s a conscientious mother who obviously loves her children with […]
Tim Scott and Deborah Keisch: Education systems in all societies are designed to serve as the primary institutions that reproduce dominant social and economic orders, customs and beliefs systems. In U.S. public education, this makes schooling a function of capitalism, white supremacy and their intrinsic restraints on democracy and social equality. Current efforts to reform […]
Rose Hackman: “Dad, can you please teach me how to swim?” Goodson’s answer to his daughter broke his heart. It was no. “I told her I don’t know how to swim myself.” This summer, the pleas have started again. Goodson, who’s 37 and works in the restaurant industry, says he would do anything for his […]
copaa: I am an African-American mother of two children in Virginia public schools. Both of them have a learning disability. My husband and I have very high expectations for our children. It has been a struggle to make sure their schools share our high expectations. One day my son Justin’s speech pathologist told me that […]
Audrey Gillan: ‘I still have my life force’ Ivan Roitt, 87, is emeritus professor at Middlesex University’s Centre for Investigative and Diagnostic Oncology. He lives in Finchley, north London, with his wife, Margaret. They have three daughters and six grandchildren. There was no conscious decision – I just went on working. When I finished as […]
Ana Tintocalis: Van Zandt admits he has high expectations for his children. He also has high expectations for San Francisco Unified, which is why he and many parents like him were outraged when they learned Algebra 1 will no longer be taught in middle school under Common Core, the state’s new academic standards. Instead, all […]
Andy Hawf: That is not to say we haven’t achieved great things. We have expanded and protected parents’ right to choose their children’s schools through a citywide unified enrollment system. We have created a city in which independent charter schools and charter management organizations are enthusiastically and successfully serving a population much more at risk […]
Sylvia By Sylvia Pagan Westphal: JENN MCNARY KNOWS ANGER. It has overcome her often, and with the ravaging might that only a mother knows when her child is dying. Except in her case, it’s not one son but two who face a death sentence. At 34, McNary’s face still has the glow of youth, and […]
Marguerite Roza & Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email: When the Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Lamar Alexander (R-TN), recently released a draft bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (otherwise known as the No Child Left Behind Act), reaction was swift. At issue is the […]
Wheeler Report (PDF): For this reason, many of us were initially encouraged when you indicated that you would defund Wisconsin’s participation in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) via your proposed 2015-2017 biennial budget. We hoped for substantive movement, at long last, on an issue that affects most children, parents, and teachers in Wisconsin. However, […]
John Wagner: Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley on Wednesday put forward an ambitious five-year goal of allowing students to graduate debt-free from public colleges and universities across the country. The proposition is deeply personal for O’Malley: Aides say he and his wife have already incurred $339,200 in loans to put the two eldest of their […]
Larry Cuban: School reformers seek to fix problems. Many of these “solutions” appear and disappear again and again–as the previous post argued. Yet some past reforms do stick. How come? In investigating school reforms that have taken place over the last century and a half, I have divided them into incremental and fundamental changes (see […]
Erika Sanzi: Parents prefer relationships to data. Most of us enjoy people more than numbers and like parent teacher conferences better than bar graphs. We take comfort in knowing that our kids are being educated in a safe space and worry very little about the high school profile or SAT participation rate in our town. […]
Campbell Brown: Former CNN host Campbell Brown went from a career in journalism to a second life as an education-reform advocate. Now she is looking to combine the two. Next month, Ms. Brown will be launching a non-profit, education-focused news site called The Seventy Four, which she says refers to the 74 million school-age children […]
Timothy Ready: The Promise abruptly reversed the district’s long-running enrollment slide, as the previous blog in this series showed. School enrollment has increased by nearly 25 percent and the city’s population once again has begun to grow. College-going rates have increased significantly, as Brad Hershbein will show later this week. However, there has been no […]
2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last […]
Michael Lewis: To: Harvard Management Company From: Harvard Admissions It’s been several painful weeks since Steve Schwarzman revealed that we denied him admission to the Harvard Class of 1969. As we now all know, the private equity billionaire (net worth: $13 billion and climbing) appeared on the Bloomberg channel and said that the dean of […]
Brian Zorn: The mission of American education is “No Child Left Behind.” For me as a special-education teacher in New York state, that means making my students feel worthwhile and giving them the confidence they need to succeed—academically and socially. Yet New York’s statewide English language arts (ELA) and mathematics exams unduly humiliate children in […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email: Governor Walker’s proposed Budget and the gamesmanship being played in the legislature has been compared to the game “whack-a-mole”. Representative Melissa Sargent, a champion for public education, teachers and progressive causes, said of the Budget proposals, “Just when you think we’ve averted one […]
Michael Grunwald: Most parents will do just about anything for their children, especially when it comes to education. Predictably, at a time when college costs are exploding and students are staggering under more than $1 trillion in debt, one opportunistic lender is making huge profits on loans to their doting moms and dads. Less predictably, […]
BBC: Even the pit ponies were blasted to oblivion in the Peckfield explosion and 90 children, mostly from one village, were left fatherless. When it went wrong down a pit, it went wrong big time and every member of every family involved in the industry was acutely aware of it. Who in their right mind […]
Possible de-regulation of Wisconsin charter school authorizations has lead to a bit of rhetoric on the state of Madison’s schools, their ability to compete and whether the District’s long term, disastrous reading results are being addressed. We begin with Chris Rickert: Madison school officials not eager to cede control of ‘progress’: Still, Department of Public […]