schoolinfosystem.org
Yasmin Rios: I was born and raised in North Camden and still live here today. There are good people here who chose to stay and raise their families when they could have left for a better future. People here work hard and want what is best for their children so that they can have a […]
Jennifer McNamee Smarick said Catholic leaders have a choice: “Keep doing the things we’ve been doing that have led to our slow demise consistently for half a century. Or open your minds and do thing differently. We’re starting to see on the horizon sunlight for the very first time.” He said some church leaders are […]
Kelly Meyerhoffer:
Jonathan Zimmerman: Aware of such research, Green circles back to the education schools, where a zealous coterie of scholars has been trying to identify and inculcate the “habits of mind” that define the disciplines. They tend to follow the work of Stanford University’s Lee Shulman, who coined the term “pedagogical content knowledge” to describe the […]
Kristen Graham: The number couldn’t possibly be right, Marc Gosselin thought: $160. That was the total discretionary budget he was handed as the brand-new principal of Anna Lane Lingelbach Elementary, a public school in Germantown. That’s all he’d have to pay for a whole year’s books, supplies, staff training, after-school activities, and incidentals — small […]
Chris Rickert: Of course, public schools officials will never accept a rating system that includes a failing-grade option; some things are OK for students, but not for the people who educate them. None of these initiatives is any older than 2011, when Republicans took over complete control of the state government, but parents have been […]
Heather Staker: Each November our family has a tradition of listing things we’re grateful for on 100 colorful construction-paper leaves and taping them all over the windows by the kitchen table. The recent publication of Blended of course tops my list! Admittedly that’s in part because of the relief of a finished project, but the […]
Josh Dawsey & Sharon Terlep: Inside the Sayreville War Memorial High School locker room where prosecutors say younger football players were sexually abused as part of hazing rituals, older students ran the show. Adults rarely visited, according to former and current players. At high schools across the country, adult-free locker rooms aren’t uncommon. And Sayreville’s […]
Claudio Sanchez: What’s your first priority? Our first priority is to fix No Child Left Behind. The Republican proposal to fix NCLB would give states the option — not mandate — to take federal dollars and let those dollars follow children to the schools they attend. We want to expand choice, but my view is […]
Simon Burgess: Urban areas are often associated with poor educational attainment. But London is different. Recent analysis suggests that the attainment and progress of pupils in London is the highest in the country. A leading education policy commentator argues that: “Perhaps the biggest question in education policy over the past few years is why the […]
Laura Waters: For those of you who follow N.J.’s charter school wars within the circumscribed twitter universe, the last few days have been pretty hot. The backstory here is that Mark Weber (a popular anti-reform blogger known as Jersey Jazzman who studies with Bruce Baker at Rutgers) and Julia Sass Rubin (professor at Rutgers and […]
Alissa Quart: In the garden of Dee’s Tots Childcare, amid the sunflowers, cornstalks, and plastic cars, a three-year-old girl with beads in her braids and a two-year-old blond boy are shimmying. These are Deloris Hogan’s 6:45 p.m. pick-ups. Nearby, also dancing, are four kids who won’t be picked up until late at night, as well […]
Madison School District Administration (PDF): MMSD received a total of 3,081 responses to the online survey. However, only Question #1 received the maximum number of responses; Questions #2-13 averaged around 2,200 respondents. Normally, a response rate is calculated by dividing the number of responses by the number of invitations to complete the survey. However, it […]
Marlene Gonzalez and Hector Nieves: What wasn’t said in the Oct. 29th NJ.com story, “N.J. charter schools see smaller percentages of poor and special needs students than districts,” was the implication that charter schools are the creation of better-off, better-educated parents who want to make sure their children are spared the miserable education of the […]
Education News 3: The report suggests that these schools make a concerted effort to hire both veteran teachers and new teachers, with more incentives such as merit pay being offered to high performing teachers. The Legislature suggests allowing schools to use $5,000-$15,000 each year for this purpose. “Those teachers that are the best prepared to […]
Frances Schwartzkopff: Sex education in Denmark is about to shift focus after fertility rates dropped to the lowest in almost three decades. After years of teaching kids how to use contraceptives, Sex and Society, the Nordic country’s biggest provider of sex education materials for schools, has changed its curriculum to encourage having babies under the […]
Chris Rickert: It’s no surprise Democratic nominee for governor and Madison School Board member Mary Burke isn’t saying how she plans to vote Monday on a proposed school district budget that includes a $100 tax increase for the average homeowner. For purely political reasons, dropping that particular dime would be a pretty dumb thing to […]
Robert Reich: Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor. You can stop imagining. […]
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email: We’ve been quiet because we’ve been building. We have some exciting updates to share with you as we move forward to establish One City Early Learning Centers on Madison’s South Side. Since August, we have: Established a 15-member Board of Directors Filed for nonprofit recognition with the IRS Identified […]
Alan Borsuk: The service counter guy at the hardware store understood what he was looking at as soon as he saw the screw. “This is from some old, special chair,” he told my wife when she stopped in on Monday. Right. A chair with a special story that, I suggest, speaks to some of the […]
Sue Shellenbarger: It’s one of the most dreaded rites of child-rearing—teaching a teenager to drive. Many parents are riding shotgun with their teens for 40 hours or more to provide the supervised practice required to get a driver’s license in most states. Most do a good job of teaching steering, parking and controlling the car. […]
Gary Fields & John Emshwiller: A generation ago, schoolchildren caught fighting in the corridors, sassing a teacher or skipping class might have ended up in detention. Today, there’s a good chance they will end up in police custody. Stephen Perry, now 18 years old, was trying to avoid a water balloon fight in 2013 when […]
Davud Edwards: Are Americans getting dumber? Our math skills are falling. Our reading skills are weakening. Our children have become less literate than children in many developed countries. But the crisis in American education may be more than a matter of sliding rankings on world educational performance scales. Our kids learn within a system of […]
Alice Woodhouse: Almost 50 years ago, two-week-old Serena Sussex was found abandoned in a cardboard box in a Sai Ying Pun stairwell. Last week Sussex, now a 49-year-old artist, visited the building on Hing Hon Road where she was found and said she wanted to reassure local birth mothers that their children could lead happy […]
Douglas Quenqua: It has been nearly 20 years since a landmark education study found that by age 3, children from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than more affluent children, putting them at an educational disadvantage before they even began school. The findings led to increased calls for publicly funded prekindergarten programs and […]
Douglas Quenqua, via a kind reader: Clifford the Big Red Dog looks fabulous on an iPad. He sounds good, too — tap the screen and hear him pant as a blue truck roars into the frame. “Go, truck, go!” cheers the narrator. But does this count as story time? Or is it just screen time […]
The Economist: CALLIGRAPHY has been a revered art form in China for centuries. Children are taught to write with brushes; endless copying of characters is a rite of passage in their schooling. Writing is a feat of memory. Mastery requires learning thousands of unique characters. Despite these ordeals, literacy rates have increased from around 20% […]
The Economist: FOR decades vocational education has suffered from the twin curses of low status and limited innovation. Politicians have equated higher education with traditional universities of the sort that they themselves attended. Parents have steered children away from “shop class”. And vocational studies have been left to languish: the detritus of an industrial era […]
The Economist: LIKE many rural teenagers, Yan Jingtao, the lanky son of a watermelon farmer, did not have quite the stuff for a standard upper-secondary school. Last September, encouraged by his teacher, he and three classmates enrolled instead at a vocational school on the edge of the central city of Kaifeng to study computer animation. […]
Robin Lake: here is a backlash against accountability. Critics have legitimate concerns about imperfect measurement and unintended consequences. But the demand to drop performance measurement and remedies in case of school failure is unrealistic: Americans can’t be compelled to send their children to schools that don’t have to demonstrate results. That’s why we (CRPE and […]
A variety of notes and links on the planned 2015 Madison School District Property Tax Increase referendum: Madison Schools’ PDF Slides on the proposed projects. Ironically, Madison has long supported a wide variation in low income distribution across its schools. This further expenditure sustains the substantial variation, from Hamilton’s 18% low income population to Black […]
Sally Weale: Ian Mikardo High School, in London’s east end, is the end of the line, a special school for boys aged 11-16, who have been deemed unteachable. The boys, who have severe social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, are among the most troubled and troubling children in the country and have been excluded from their […]
Richard Adams: Tens of thousands of children from disadvantaged backgrounds could have their lives transformed if underperforming schools matched the results achieved by similar pupils in the most progressive schools in England, a report says today. The report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty (SMCP) commission, headed by former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn, […]
Jenny Stepanski: One year ago, retired Watertown Riverside Middle School teacher, Frances Milburn, wrote a children’s story that was featured in the Daily Times for Newspapers in Education use. Since then, Newspapers in Education newspapers around the country have chosen to publish her story, allowing teachers and children to benefit at no cost. Now she […]
Dmitri Mehlhorn: One of the most-hotly debated questions is how strong is the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers compared to the school reform movement. When it comes to the money that is key to political influence, there is no doubt: The NEA and AFT together spend roughly $700 million per year, […]
Ken Dixon: Parents who home-school children with significant emotional, social or behavioral problems would have to file progress reports prepared by special education program teams, under a proposal being considered by the governor’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission. Commission members acknowledged Tuesday that the proposal, contained in a tentative section of the panel’s final report, could […]
Robert Pondiscio & Kevin Mahnken, via a kind reader’s email: Among opponents of the Common Core, one of the more popular targets of vitriol is the standards’ focus on improving literacy by introducing higher levels of textual complexity into the instructional mix. The move to challenge students with more knotty, grade-level reading material represents a […]
Christopher S. Rugaber: Three years ago, Jason Prosser was stunned to discover the cost of child care for his newborn son — so much so that he and his wife postponed having a second child. The day care center they found near their Seattle home tops $10,000 a year. Next year, their son, now 3, […]
Laurie Rogers, via a kind email: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” – Voltaire “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” – George Orwell If I were to build a list of the worst systemic […]
Shannon Ralph: Years ago, when my children were nothing more than an unsuspecting twinkle in my eye, I had a vision of what parenthood would look like. In my vision, there were tea parties and tutus. There were hours spent quietly reading on the couch together. There were Disney princesses and Dora the Explorer. There […]
Tom Bennett: Finally, Ofsted address one of the most serious impediments to children’s learning in the UK: low-level disruption. It’s amazing how much time and money is invested in poking through the grisly entrails of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and school structures in order to establish how we can squeeze a carat or two more gold […]
Alan Borsuk: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – what’s more at the core of America’s identity than those words? But what do they mean if you’re living in the central city of Milwaukee? Robb Rauh, the CEO of Milwaukee College Prep, a set of four high-performing schools with about 1,900 students on the […]
Stephen Foley: Openings for graduate-level jobs have stalled over the past 18 months, while demand for less-skilled workers continues to improve Should you invest in equities, bonds or property – or a college education? The start of the university year has brought a new round of angst about whether a US university degree is worth […]
Lucy Kellaway: While it is depressing that vast riches are a socially acceptable status symbol for 18-year-olds, they are no worse than more traditional ways of lording it over others. Two of my children have recently graduated from two different British universities and tell me that to stand out, money helps a bit, though not […]
Steven Elbow, via a kind reader: Last year’s “Race to Equity” report set off an impassioned discussion about the vast disparities in the quality of life for African-Americans and whites. But that discussion was restricted to Dane County. Now the authors have issued a new report that they hope will take the discussion to the […]
Tutankhamun Assad, via a kind reader: I am a blue collar African-American man and the proud father of two black boys. I enjoyed reading the Rev. Alex Gee’s eloquent piece about racial disparities, and the many spot-on articles that have followed. While fully appreciating the concern exhibited by the white community for these very real […]
The Oklahoman: STUDENT achievement has surged dramatically in several countries around the world, surpassing the United States. Journalist Amanda Ripley convincingly suggests those nations’ experiences should inform education policy in Oklahoma. In writing “The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way,” Ripley reviewed other nations’ school systems and interviewed foreign-exchange students. […]
David Blaska: Teachers are some of our most dedicated public servants. Many inspiring educators have changed lives for the better in Madison’s public schools. But their union is a horror. Madison Teachers Inc. has been a bad corporate citizen for decades. Selfish, arrogant, and bullying, it has fostered an angry, us-versus-them hostility toward parents, taxpayers, […]
Madison 2005 (reflecting 1998): 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 […]
Richard Kallenberg & Halley Potter: ALTHOUGH the leaders of teachers unions and charter schools are often in warring camps today, the original vision for charter schools came from Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. In a 1988 address, Mr. Shanker outlined an idea for a new kind of public school where […]
The Economist: Philosopher John Locke warned that children should not be given too much “unwholesome fruit” to eat. Three centuries later, misguided ideas about child-rearing are still rife. Many parents fret that their offspring will die unless ceaselessly watched. In America the law can be equally paranoid. In South Carolina this month Debra Harrell was […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition via a kind email: With the beginning of a new school year, here is some timely information and inspiration. You can make a difference: At WRC, we are often focused on top-down systemic change that can improve reading outcomes for students across our state. However, bottom-up, individual efforts are equally important. A […]
Hurryet Daily News: Turkey’s secondary education examination row has deepened, amid reports that thousands of students, including some non-Muslims, have been placed in Islamic vocational schools for the upcoming school year. After the results for the national primary to secondary education (TEOG) examination were announced earlier this month, there were a number of reports that […]
Molly Beck, via a kind reader: One in three black students was chronically absent from school during the 2013-14 school year, according to a Madison School District report. Thirty-six percent of the district’s black students have an attendance rate lower than 90 percent. That corresponds to missing, on average, one half day of school every […]
Bill Glauber “I’m a conformist,” said Henry Tyson, superintendent of St. Marcus Lutheran School. “I like rules and I like order.” To hear that Tyson considers himself a conformist is a surprise, given his background and his mission. How this British-born educator came to Milwaukee is the stuff of chance, circumstance and an intense personal […]
Robin Lake, via aaa kind Deb Britt email: This commentary was originally published in Education Week on August 18, 2014. It’s a truism in public policy that every solution breeds a new problem. School choice has created new possibilities for families desperate for better options, but it can also create serious access challenges for disadvantaged […]
Erin Richards But after Tyson made his offer, an MPS teacher who also is a teachers’ union employee submitted a plan to reopen Lee as a district-run charter school. The School Board was said to be considering both options. It was scheduled to discuss the potential sale or lease of several empty buildings, including the […]
Patrick Jakeway The classic novel Brave New World describes a future in which people have lost all of their liberty and in which they have become drugged robots obedient to a central authority. It also details how this control was first established. First, the rulers had to erase all history and all the people’s memory […]
Liz Bowie: As principal of a small Southeast Baltimore school, Anthony Ruby has guided an array of first-year teachers, from the stars who seem to have an innate sense of how to handle a class to those who were so ineffective he declined to renew their contracts. When teachers aren’t effective, he said, “it is […]
Hannah Gold: By the time I was 7 years old I knew drugs were bad. I didn’t need a parent to sit me down on their knee and tell me this because Saturday morning cartoons were frequently interrupted by an advertisement brought to me by Partnership for a Drug-Free America in which an 18-year-old Rachael […]
Sarah Jaffe: Carolyn Hill still remembers the night, two years ago, when the Philadelphia Department of Human Services (DHS) came to take her nieces away. The girls, ages 1 and 2, had been placed with her about a year earlier, after being removed from their mother’s custody due to her mental health issues. Hill thought […]
Faiz Siddiqui Unpopular books flying off branch libraries’ shelves Some bridle as Boston trims collections in effort to update offerings. At the Dudley Branch of the Boston Public Library, clustered volumes fill only half of many long, red shelves; the rest stand empty. In the adult nonfiction section, some shelves are completely barren. The library, […]
Matthew Richmond (PDF), via several kind readers: Why do American public schools spend more of their operating budgets on non-teachers than almost every other country in the world, including nations that are as prosperous and humane as ours? We can’t be certain. But we do know this: » The number of non-teachers on U.S. school […]
Greg Lukianoff: I’ve rarely heard that argument made so directly. Essentially, just to summarize it, the way I’ve heard it made in the past is essentially that what we’re really saying is that 18- to 22-year-olds are children. And they must be therefore treated the same way as K through 12 are. They can’t handle […]
James Richardson When public school administrators and teachers in Washington, D.C., recently laced up their sensible shoes and launched an unprecedented canvassing campaign to goose slumped enrollment rates, the panicked affectation was unmistakable. Short of horse-drawn carriage makers, few industries have suffered such a pronounced decline in market share than government-run schools in America’s urban […]
Richard Adams: The government’s free schools programme has proved to be popular with non-white families, according to the first academic analysis of the policy, which also found free schools attracted brighter and slightly better-off primary-aged pupils compared with the national average. “Free schools have emerged most strongly in neighbourhoods with high proportions of non-white children, […]
Rebecca Ratcliffe: England’s “unimaginative” exam system is little changed from Victorian times and fails to prepare young people for modern working life, Eton’s headmaster has said. Tony Little said there was a risk that “misleading” test scores may become more important than education itself, and warned against a narrow focus on topping rankings. “There is […]
Janesville Gazette: Is it good policy? Perhaps Act 10 was an overreach with its union-busting provisions, but it addressed a fiscal need in Wisconsin and the school districts and municipalities that receive state aid. Public employee benefits had become overly generous and burdensome on employers, and Act 10 addressed that by requiring employees to contribute […]
Daniel Carroll and Amy Higgins: Many parents believe their children must get a college degree—especially if they want to have at least as comfortable a lifestyle as their parents had; yet the price of a college degree has been rising rapidly over the past three decades. As costs have risen, more and more students and […]
Rabbi Jason Miller: Dani Gillman was a single mom in Metro Detroit with an autistic daughter, Brodie, who ran a popular blog detailing her daughter’s challenges and successes as a way to help other parents of autistic children. Using a pencil and paper, she vigilantly kept track of her daughter’s daily regimen, including diet, medications […]
David Lee: A router that only allows internet access after household chores have been completed is being developed in the US. Kudoso allows parents to set a list of tasks that unlock minutes to be used online. The device’s makers hope to eventually incorporate fitness apps into the system to reward children who regularly exercise. […]
“Decisions about what content is to be taught,’ they insist, ‘are made at the state and local levels.’ At the same time, we read that Common Core’s “educational standards are the learning goals for what students should know.” Is what students should know different from content?” [That is the question. WHF] Andrew Ferguson: The logic […]
Alan Borsuk: Here’s a suggestion for something to include in Wisconsin-specific education standards for Wisconsin children: By the end of first grade, children will know that two Badgers plus two Badgers equals four Badgers. You want Indiana-specific standards for Indiana kids? By the end of first grade, children will know that two Hoosiers plus two […]
Rena F. Subotnik, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius and Frank C. Worrell: The U.S. education policy world—the entire country, for that matter—is on a quest to increase the ranks of future innovators in science and technology. Yet the programs that get funded in K–12 education do not support students who are already good at and in love with […]
Megan McArdle: You can argue that driving is necessary, but it seems to me that raising independent children is also necessary. Arresting parents who allow any child younger than a college freshman to spend time alone amounts to a legal mandate to keep kids timid and tethered. This should not be an object of public […]
Chris Rickert: The Madison School District has decided to stop telling children with overdrawn meal accounts that they can’t have the same meals the district gives to children of parents who are keeping up with their bills and to children who are enrolled in the free and subsidized lunch program. Providing overdrawn children with a […]
Reid Wilson: That’s according to the Education Week Research Center, a nonpartisan group that measured indicators such as preschool and kindergarten enrollment, high school graduation rates, and higher education attainment. The yearly study also considered family income and parental employment, which are linked to educational achievement. In almost every category, the Bay State beats the […]
Kirsten A. Herrick, Ph.D., M.Sc.; Tala H.I. Fakhouri, Ph.D., M.P.H.; Susan A. Carlson, Ph.D.; and Janet E. Fulton, Ph.D.: Were there differences by sex in the percentage of youth who watched TV or used a computer for 2 hours or less daily? Were there differences by race and Hispanic origin in the percentage of youth […]
Richard Adams: Children who qualify for free school meals for just one year become “invisible underachievers” who receive little government support but achieve similar results to those who remain on free school meals during their entire school career. Research from education data analysts FFT found that the group makes up around 7% of year 11 […]
Francis Green , Stephen J. Machin, Richard Murphy & Yu Zhu : Despite its relatively small size, the private school sector plays a prominent role in British society. This paper focuses on changing wage and education differentials between privately educated and state educated individuals in Britain. It reports evidence that the private/state school wage differential […]
Michael Gove: We don’t put up many statues these days. Ours is a post-heroic age, and it is assumed that no one really deserves to be put on a pedestal. But I know of many people who deserve to be remembered for acts of overlooked heroism. The teachers who dedicate their lives to helping children […]
Wayne Barrett: I am a progressive, have been one since the 1960s, when I became a New York City public school teacher for a few years and learned that my union, the United Federation of Teachers, was much better at representing my interests than those of the kids I taught. It shouldn’t have come as […]
Richard Adams: England’s education system is wasting young talent “on an industrial scale” because of poor progress made by the brightest disadvantaged children once they leave primary school, Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, said after publication of a report detailing the educational differences that emerge by the age of […]
at Rees Shapiro The kindergartners of the Class of 2026, who finished their first year in Fairfax County schools Wednesday, constitute the largest and one of the most ethnically, culturally and socioeconomically diverse groups of students the county has seen, a fact that school system administrators say could pose significant challenges in the decade to […]
Juliana Miner: I have three kids, and they all swim on a swim team every summer. I decided to capture my experience at a morning swim meet, for those of you not in the water cult. 6:00 a.m.: Wake up, drink coffee. Wake up grouchy children. 6:45 a.m.: Arrive at pool. Parking lot is already […]
Drew Magary: Children, in general, suck at sports. And as a parent, watching them suck evokes all kinds of emotions—fierce protectiveness, embarrassment, self-loathing (Oh God, I gave them those genes)—which many of us have difficulty handling. My kid played second-grade basketball this winter, and when she failed to make a shot the entire season, it […]
Chris Rickert: Madisonians usually aren’t too keen on doling out public subsidies to people who don’t need them. There’s that old saw about “tax breaks for millionaires,” of course, but also past outrage over a proposed taxpayer loan for Edgewater hotel renovators and brewing discontent over a potential taxpayer loan for the Judge Doyle Square […]
Geoff Ralston: Silicon Valley holds a certain mystique among entrepreneurs and investors. More cool technology was born here, more wealth created, and more technology revolutions begun, than anywhere else on the planet. The Valley’s formula for success has been the subject of debate and business school cases for decades. It certainly helps to have excellent […]
Nat Hentoff: Having organized a labor union at a Boston candy store when I was 15, during the Depression — where students worked nights and weekends for 35 cents an hour — I am not anti-labor union. Threatening a strike as Christmas business neared, we won our 50 cents an hour. But in recent years, […]
Andrew J. Cherlin Elizabeth Talbert and Suzumi Yasutake: Recent demographic trends have produced a distinctive fertility regime among young women and men in their teenage years and their twenties — a period sometimes called early adulthood. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, show that by the time the cohort had reached […]
OneCity Early Learning Centers by Kaleem Caire and Vivek Ramakrishnan (PDF), via a kind reader In the fall of the 2013-14 school year, public school children across Wisconsin completed the state’s Knowledge and Concepts Exam, an annual test that measures their knowledge, ability and skills in reading and mathematics in grades 3 through 8 and […]
Marc Tucker: War appears to be imminent. A California judge has ruled that tenure, seniority rights and other core provisions of the typical teachers’ contract are unconstitutional in the state, because they subvert students’ constitutional right to competent teachers. The teachers will, we presume, appeal. On the other side is a determined and very well […]
Jessica Lahey: Most schools across the nation have marked the end of another academic year, and it’s time for summer. Time for kids to bolt for the schoolhouse doors for two long months of play, to explore their neighborhoods and discover the mysteries, treasures, and dramas they have to offer. This childhood idyll will hold […]
Stephen Buzrucha: The life-course perspective in particular is out of the public eye. Looking more deeply into research on the effects of early life, it is possible to estimate that roughly half of our health as adults is programmed from the time of conception to around two years of age. The importance of these “first […]
Zoë Heller: The reputation of parenthood has not fared well in the modern era. Social science has concluded that parents are either no happier than people without children, or decidedly unhappier. Parents themselves have grown competitively garrulous on the subject of their dissatisfactions. Confessions of child-rearing misery are by now so unremarkable that the parent […]
Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah: Nerves were a little shakier than usual when the 2013-14 school year started in Chicago, as parents and city officials anxiously watched thousands of children heading off to classrooms in unfamiliar neighborhoods because of the district’s move to close almost 50 elementary schools. But when classes let out Friday, most of the […]
Katie Osgood: Like so much else in education and beyond, we are seeing the familiar pattern of defunding, claiming crisis, and then calling for privatization in special education. This past week in Chicago, our unelected Board of Education recently voted to expand contracts with private, for-profit organizations to meet the growing needs of our children […]
Christian Schneider: If asked to identify the most urgent problem with Milwaukee Public Schools, few people would likely say “too much parental involvement.” In fact, over the years, public schools have been forced to take on more of the duties normally reserved for pupils’ parents. For this, MPS deserves some sympathy — as more children […]
Reviewed by: Moira McLaughlin: In Washington, D.C., about 43 percent of students attend charter schools, and only 25 percent attend their assigned neighborhood schools. Washington parents have choices. What does all this choice mean for public education, local author Sam Chaltain wonders in his new book, “Our School.” “In this new frontier,” Chaltain asks, “will […]
The Economist: WHO killed Edgar Allan Poe? The mysterious death of the 19th-century author features in a new online school curriculum from Amplify, the education arm of News Corp. Pupils follow clues that require close reading of Poe’s stories (the assassin’s identity varies, to prevent cribbing), and take machine-graded comprehension and vocabulary tests along the […]