schoolinfosystem.org
Annysa Johnson: After months of trying to get school administrators to deal with the racially charged climate at Westosha Central High School in Salem, Niccole Simmons took her concerns to the elected School Board. Simmons told the Journal Sentinel she intended to plead for resources that would help Principal Lisa Albrecht address the issues at […]
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, […]
Arnold Kling: Diversified knowledge required in the modern economy requires relying on experts, but imbuing these experts with political authority has disastrous consequences. The additional power that is being granted to experts under the Obama administration is indeed striking. The administration has appointed “czars” to bring expertise to bear outside of the traditional cabinet positions. […]
Tim Whewell: The case of a young couple in Norway whose five children were taken away by the state has fuelled mounting concern within the country and abroad over its child protection practices. Protesters around the world – and leading Norwegian professionals – say social workers are often too quick to separate children from their […]
Citizen Stewart: Maybe I shouldn’t have tangled with people who have advanced education. These folks with acronyms before and after their names are sensitive about their scholarship and they want recognition for their expertise. Since then I’ve met a stream of Doctors of education who see themselves as the producers of the tablets we should […]
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 […]
Mitch Henck. much larger forces are at play on Madison’s monolithic “we know best” K-12 world.
Caroline Bermudez: Education is a public good, funded by taxpayer money. But to some, weighing in on education policy is the exclusive purview of those with classroom experience. We venture down a slippery slope when we act as gatekeepers on issues with import on all our lives. Do you have to be a doctor to […]
Tom Nichols: Universities, without doubt, have to own some of this mess. The idea of telling students that professors run the show and know better than they do strikes many students as something like uppity lip from the help, and so many profs don’t do it. (One of the greatest teachers I ever had, James […]
Laura Waters: Everywhere I turn, Julia Sass Rubin seems to be talking for Camden’s poor. Just last week she told one of the state’s largest newspapers: “People in abject poverty don’t have the bandwidth to even evaluate charter schools. It’s just not going to be high on their list.” Excuse me? That deeply offensive comment […]
The Economist: THERE can scarcely be two words in Kenya that cause more resentment than “school fees”. It is now more than ten years since charges for state primary schools in east Africa’s biggest economy were abolished by law. Yet it is an open secret that education is not truly free. In fact, fees are […]
Riva Tez: If you had told me at my Year 13 graduation, that I would be standing here today, I would have been extremely amused. Let me start off by telling you a story. 18 years ago, at my own LHS graduation, the historian Robin Lane Fox was the guest speaker. If you don’t know […]
Samuel Z. Alemayehu We’ve seen this before. Scribes in medieval Europe once held monopoly power over the written word — until Gutenberg’s press flattened that hierarchy. Textile artisans were once the pride of cities — until industrial looms made their mastery irrelevant. In the 20th century, travel agents, typists, and retail stockbrokers all watched their […]
Jill Tucker: San Francisco school officials killed plans Wednesday to test out alternative ways to grade some high school students after politicians and parents panned the proposal in the wake of misinformation about it. An estimated 70 teachers in 14 high schools — about 10% of the educators in grades nine to 12 — were […]
John Trasviña Without seeking approval of the San Francisco Board of Education, Superintendent of Schools Maria Su plans to unveil a new Grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at 14 high schools and cover over 10,000 students. The school district is already negotiating with an outside consultant to train teachers […]
Fisher Derderian: The link between funding and the public has frayed. Federal programs have mirrored that drift. The NEA’s grant language in recent years emphasized “capacity building,” “access strategies,” and “administrative equity plans.” ArtsHERE, launched in 2023, directed over $12 million toward “equity-centered frameworks,” focused more on internal processes than public-facing work. The long-term cultural impact of these […]
Thomas Balazas: So, why do we teach English literature (or “language arts,” as some secondary schools now call it) at all? According to the nineteenth-century British literary critic Mathew Arnold, the purpose of studying and teaching literatureis “to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this […]
Eddie Scarry The best part, though, was when Sulzberger claimed that the Times is just as tough on Democrats as it is on Republicans, and as an example, he earnestly cited the paper’s coverage of Biden’s plainly disintegrating mental faculties. “President Joe Biden and his aides, for example, frequently lashed out at journalists and news […]
Alex Gough: For decades, American schools relied on reading programs influenced by educators Marie Clay and Lucy Calkins. Clay’s Reading Recovery program encouraged children to use pictures, context, and guessing strategies, known as three-cueing, rather than decoding words through phonics. Similarly, Calkins emphasized the idea that reading is a natural process that develops through exposure […]
Sean Sullivan: In the face of this, I am going to try to write more. A lot more. I think you should too. Here are some reasons why:
Hollis Robbins: California’s 34 million residents are served by the largest public higher education network in the world: 116 community colleges, 23 California State University (CSU) campuses, and 10 University of California (UC) campuses. For decades California has mandated that undergraduates complete a broad slate of lower‑division general education (GE) courses before advancing to upper‑division […]
“Hilarius Bookbinder”: I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been a while since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The […]
“Hilarious Bookbinder” I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem […]
Tony: In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Others, which he coauthored with William P. Berlinghoff. I had not come across this book before, as I noted in my post I […]
Sai Gaddam: We are 25 years into the MOOC era. We have near unlimited access to the world’s best teachers on YouTube, and yet our education system isn’t producing independent thinkers. How is this possible? It struck me that our education system is not just “useless” it is actively hurting all learners. We keep devising […]
Quinton Klabon: This is 1 of the coolest things I have done. We did an unbiased, deep poll of Black and Latin Milwaukee parents to see how and why they pick the schools they do. 🧵 In short, parents lack the information they need to make the best match for their children. We were shocked […]
meritfirst.us American companies are in a crisis of broken talent filters. We reflexively screen for the same stale credentials: Ivy League degrees, FAANG experience, “prestigious” employers. It’s a modern version of the credentialist bureaucracy that has crept into every American institution. And just like in government, this risk-averse checkbox mentality is making our companies dumber […]
Jill Barshay: In a paper that reviews more than 50 years of research, Douglas Fuchs of Vanderbilt University and the American Institutes for Research, along with two other researchers, argues that the academic benefits of including students with disabilities in general education classrooms are not settled science despite the fact that numerous studies have found […]
Ye Sun, Fabio Caccioli, Xiancheng Li and Giacomo Livan; Rankings are ubiquitous: every week, lists of best-selling records, movies, and books are released, and in sports like tennis, athletes are ranked based on their performance in major tournaments. While we know there is more to a song, book, or movie than its sales figures, we […]
Pamela Snow: There’s no such thing as a quiet year in education, but 2024 has been a notably non-quiet year, especially for reading instruction in the state of Victoria, Australia. On June 13, the Victorian Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, the Hon. Ben Carroll MP released a media statement signalling a new direction of travel for Victorian […]
Miles Kruppa: Record labels have the Billboard Hot 100. College football has its playoff rankings. Artificial intelligence has a website, run by two university students, called Chatbot Arena. Roommates Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang never imagined the graduate school project they developed last year would quickly become the most-watched ranking of the world’s best AI […]
Quinton Klabon: Oh, BROTHER.The Wisconsin Education Department ruled Reading Recovery is not banned under science of reading laws and gave De Pere a cookie for having to justify its use.We are a Stone Age state.@kymyona_burk @ehanford @karenvaites @KJWinEducation @MichaelPetrilli @rpondiscio —— Nadia Scharf: Niffenegger’s complaint stated that the district was using unapproved curriculum and “three-cueing,” […]
educhatter For a country that once prided itself on being a “world class” superpower in education, the latest math scores on an International Education Association (IEA) test were met with total shock and a deafening silence. Our national education agency, the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) and all provincial ministries of education looked the other way. […]
Corrinne Hess Changes to UW-Madison’s School of Education math requirements Steffen Lempp, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says over the last decade, the School of Education has changed how prospective K-8 teachers are taught math content to fully prepare them to teach children in the subject. The UW-Madison math department used to […]
Frederick Hess: It’s been a helluva fall. But it’s finally Thanksgiving, which means it’s time for some gratitude. Indeed, those in and around American education should be steeped in gratitude for the legacy that’s been gifted to us. Now, I know how old school that sounds—especially in an era when just a third of Gen-Z says the U.S. […]
Mark Judge: Baron spends a good part of Collision of Power writing about the Kavanaugh nomination. He mentions me when he cites a letter that Blasey Ford had written saying that Kavanaugh “with the assistance of a friend, Mark G. Judge,” had been involved in her assault. Had Baron read my book or any of the many […]
Colin Wright: The president of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcia McNutt, has published welcome an essay promising to remain politically neutral and mitigate the political polarization of science. Some notable quotes from the article: “[S]cientists need to better explain the norms and values of science to reinforce the notion—with the public and their elected […]
via Anna Stokke: Distressing changes Re: Teachers need subject expertise (Think Tank, Nov. 12) I’m writing, as a parent and as an educator, in support of my colleague Anna Stokke’s Monday op-ed. Having spent two decades teaching post-secondary students in Manitoba, I am distressed, to say the least, to hear about the revisions to Manitoba’s […]
Matthias Bastian OpenAI’s best model, o1-preview, achieved only a 42.7 percent success rate. GPT-4o followed with 38.2 percent correct answers, while the smaller GPT-4o-mini managed just 8.6 percent accuracy. Anthropic’s Claude models performed even worse. Their top model, Claude-3.5-sonnet, got 28.9 percent right and 36.1 percent wrong. However, smaller Claude models more often declined to […]
Jessica Grose: On Election Day, Massachusetts voters will have a chance to get rid of the state’s high school exit exam, which involves standards-based tests in math, sciences and English. The ballot measure is known as Question 2, and voting yes “would eliminate the requirement that students pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System in order to graduate […]
www All too often whole school approaches to literacy are bolt-ons or blanket strategies. These are implemented with the best of intentions, but lack the nuance needed to meet subject, phase or student needs. Often these are linked to an approach that expects the English department to teach literacy. In my talk at ResearchEd, and […]
Graham Hillard: Earlier this year, the Martin Center’s Ashlynn Warta wrote convincingly that faculty opposition to academic cuts at UNC Greensboro was best understood as an act of self-preservation. We stand by that analysis. Nevertheless, the Martin Center has since learned that the cuts in question may well have been unethical in part. If that is the […]
Jeff Horwitz and Aaron Tilley: “Age verifying app by app is a case of whack-a-mole,” said Chris McKenna, founder of advocacy group Protect Young Eyes, who also advises Apple on digital-safety issues for children. “Every device knows the age of its user. We give our devices an enormous amount of our identity.” An Apple spokesman […]
Holly Korbey The problem is that none of the boys know how to play the instruments. Don’t worry, Hill assures families—they don’t have to actually learn music. He’s come up with a brilliant innovation, a new way of learning music, the “think system,” where all you have to do is think the “Minuet in G,” or the […]
Alan Borsuk: “Instead of focusing on declining academic achievement in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction is working to hide the problem,” wrote Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm and think tank. “Unfortunately, changing standards for political correctness and to avoid accountability will hurt students today, […]
Brook Silva-Braga Only about one-third of elementary school students in the U.S. are reading at grade level, according to the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. In response, many schools are rethinking how they teach kids to read. In one New York City first grade classroom, Melissa Jones-Diaz goes letter by letter, teaching the specific […]
Zvi: As a bonus, here are two sections that would have been in my next childhood roundup: Ban Phones in Schools England to give the power to ban mobile phone use on primary and secondary school grounds, students will have to switch them off or risk confiscation. Reactions like this always confuse me: However, teachers’ […]
Amber Duke: We have a long cultural tradition of free speech in this country that is an unwritten but near-universally understood extension from the First Amendment protection of speech from the government. Our Founders and other enlightened thinkers from the time reasoned that “bad speech” is best countered with more speech. Censoring “bad” ideas would […]
Wall Street Journal: From tech to tractors, companies are dialing back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Instead, a DEI alternative endorsed by Elon Musk could alter the fate of your next job application. It’s known as MEI, short for merit, excellence and intelligence. As described by Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang, who helped popularize the term, MEI means hiring the […]
John Sweller, Richard Clark, and Paul Kirschner Problem solving is central to mathematics. Yet problem-solving skill is not what it seems. Indeed, the field of problem solving has recently under- gone a surge in research interest and insight, but many of the results of this research are both counterintuitive and contrary to many widely held […]
a letter to a friend Benedict: Last year you asked me for my best reason why you should have a kid. I gave you the answer that was true for me at the time, even though I knew it would be unpersuasive. I said that it was the right thing to do for the continued […]
University of California The faculty Workgroup on Mathematics (Area C) Preparation, convened by UC’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) in fall 2023, has concluded their work and issued their Stage 2 report. The report focuses on which mathematical coursework is most appropriate and necessary to prepare students for success at UC, including courses recommended […]
Nikki Forrester: I’m a developmental biologist who secured a tenure-track position at a university in the southern United States. I spent eight years building my laboratory, training graduate students, applying for grants and publishing papers. At the end of the eight years, when I went up for tenure, I felt confident. My research was in […]
Quinton Klabon Nancy Carlsson-Paige, former Lesley University education professor/Matt Damon’s mom from that 1 Reason video: “I could barely stand [Sold A Story]…full of false information, misconceptions, and distortions of 3-cueing. She didn’t even understand it.” More from Dr. Tim Slekar: Mary Kate McCoy: We’re concerned about equity in education. You will never achieve equity […]
Joe Gabriel Simonson Whenever I read stories about journalists attacking their new bosses, who point out that no one reads their work and the publication is losing money, I’m reminded of a meeting I sat in as an intern for a major publisher. Christopher Rufo: We will see if losing half your audience and $77 […]
Mike Kerrigan: C.S. Lewis made the case for moral absolutes in his 1946 essay “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans.” “A better moral code can only mean one which comes nearer to some real or absolute code,” he observed. “One map of New York can be better than another only if there is a real New […]
Daniel Nuccio: A group of professors is using taxpayer dollars doled out by the federal government to develop a new misinformation fact-checking tool called “Course Correct.” National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according […]
Doug Lederman: The stagnation and disinclination to experiment that many critics believe is rife in higher education may loom over some gatherings of campus leaders. The College-in-3 event here this week wasn’t among them. Several dozen college administrators, faculty leaders, accreditors and others gathered at Merrimack College to share progress reports on, and commiserate about, common roadblocks […]
Julie Burchill: Boyish girls, climb the nearest tree and give a Tarzan whoop of victory – girly boys, fashion a floral crown and caper copiously. Thanks to the Cass Report, failing to follow sexist stereotypes (which decree that girls play with dolls and boys play with themselves) will no longer get you marched off to […]
Milwaukee Teachers Union, via Debbie Kuether: Fascinating maps of referendum results! Support for the referendum was moderately correlated with race (won in most majorty white wards) but even more strongly correlated with (not) having kids. In wards where 20% or less of residents have children, the referendum overwhelmingly passed with ~2/3 of the vote. Wards […]
Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean Michael Osterholm, the prominent epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, also doesn’t think lockdowns did any good. “There is actually no role for lockdowns,” he says. “Look at what happened in China. They locked down for years, and when they finally relaxed that effort, they had a million deaths in two weeks.” […]
Alan Borsuk: The approach is best known for emphasizing phonics-based instruction, which teaches children the sounds of letters and how to put the sounds together into words. But when done right, it involves more than that — incorporating things such as developing vocabulary, comprehension skills and general knowledge. More:What is phonics? Here’s a guide to […]
Robin Hanson: There is a big literature on the ages at which intellectuals peak in life. The rate of publishing papers peaks about tenure time. Physical sciences peak earlier than social sciences. And per paper, each one has an equal chance to be a person’s best paper, regardless of at what age it was written. Being a polymath, I’ve posted lots […]
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Kate Archer Kent interviews Laura Adams: mp3 audio. Transcript. Literacy momentum stalls in Wisconsin (DPI): Why would Wisconsin’s state leaders promote the use of curriculum that meets “minimal level” criteria, instead of elevating the highest-quality: Karen Vaites: Last week, the nine-member ELCC submitted its recommendations: four curricula widely praised for their quality […]
Karen Vaites: All eyes have been on Wisconsin, where politics threaten to stall promising curriculum improvement efforts. The Badger State’s Act 20 literacy bill was one of the bright spots in a flourishing national legislative phase. The bill had a refreshing focus on all aspects of literacy, and recognized the importance of curriculum in fostering change. Act 20 called […]
Erin Geary: The letter of the day is B: Bureaucracy, benefits, and billions The school reading wars have raged since the 1800s and consists of two camps: Those who believe that children learn to read through phonics and those that believe that children read using a whole language approach. A third recent addition to the […]
Kelly Meyerhofer: This is quite the parting email from Richard Brunson to the Goshen College student orchestra. jsonline.com/restricted/?re… Richard Brunson: I wanted to take a moment and tell you how sorry I am. I am sorry my time with you ended so abruptly. I loved my time at Goshen College and will miss it. I […]
Anna Hansen: For 13-year-old word whiz Vincent Bautista, the traditional Mexican soup represented a final hurdle, six letters, three of them vowels, separating him from cementing a family legacy at Madison’s All-City Spelling Bee on Saturday morning. It wasn’t until Bautista sealed his victory with the final “o” that the white-knuckled crowd exhaled. Bautista could […]
by Carolyn Jones • CalMatters An Assembly bill introduced this week would require all California schools to teach students to read using the “science of reading,” a phonics-based approach that research shows is a more effective way to teach literacy. AB 2222, introduced by Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, a Democrat from West Covina, is backed by Marshall Tuck, who ran […]
Lauren Gilbert: In a discrete choice experiment in which bureaucrats in education were asked to make trade-offs between foundational literacy, completion of secondary school, and formation of dutiful citizens, respondents valued dutiful citizens 50% more than literate ones. For many policy makers, the goal is not the production of knowledge, but the fostering of nationalism. This may […]
Esther Dyson: People worried about AI taking their jobs are competing with a myth. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans. We should automate routine tasks and use the money and time saved to allow humans to do more meaningful work, especially helping parents raise healthier, more engaged children. We should know enough […]
Ruy Teixeira: Claudine Gay is out as president of Harvard. It’s tempting for Democrats to simply ascribe her fall to the nefarious activities of the right and, of course, to racism as Gay herself alleges in her resignation letter. If so, no rethinking of Democratic positions is necessary, just a ringing affirmation of the party’s noble […]
Ann Althouse: I’m reading “How a Proxy Fight Over Campus Politics Brought Down Harvard’s President/Amid plagiarism allegations and a backlash to campus antisemitism, Claudine Gay became an avatar for broader criticisms of academia” by Nicholas Confessore, in The New York Times. Dr. Gay’s defenders… warn[ed] that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and imperil academic […]
Michael Segal: Even support for Hamas’s Islamic supremacist ideology didn’t surprise anyone reading student newspapers. The most significant change in students’ moral philosophy in recent years has been the popularity of an identity-based ideology known as “intersectionality” that demands special privileges for all groups deemed oppressed. Intersectionality creates a pecking order with blacks, Muslims, and […]
Tyler Cowen: 1. Harvard is by no means “wrecked.” In 2023, as in every other single year, Harvard along with MIT had the best and most interesting job market papers in economics. That isn’t about to change. I see good evidence that Harvard remains excellent in many other fields as well. Perhaps the humanities are […]
Jessica McBride & Jim Piwowarczyk “The majority’s outcome-focused decision-making in this case will delight many. A whole cottage industry of lawyers, academics, and public policy groups searching for some way to police partisan gerrymandering will celebrate. My colleagues will be saluted by the media, honored by the professoriate, and cheered by political activists. But after […]
James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley: The Jehovah’s Witnesses have long preached that going to college is a waste of time because the world as we know it is going to end soon. “No doubt, school counselors sincerely believe that it is in your best interests to pursue higher education,” advised the faith’s official publication […]
Tyler Cowen: This is not the kind of argument many on the political left find appealing. In tax policy, for example, such reasoning — the idea that short-run inequality can bring longer-run benefits — is often derided as “trickle-down economics.” And yet virtually any fan of the Ivies has to embrace this idea. The best […]
M-J Metcanti-Anthony: The thing that surprised me most about my teacher preparation program was that we never talked about how kids learn. Instead, we were taught how to structure a lesson and given tips on classroom management. I took “methods” classes that gave me strategies for discussions and activities. I assumed that I would eventually […]
Alexander Russo: The big education story of the week is the negative effects of inadequate literacy instruction on parental trust — and the lack of sufficient coverage needed to cover the literacy reform effort. What’s being attempted in NYC and many other parts of the nation is one of the biggest education stories of the […]
Kendra Hurley: Call it the end of an era for fantasy-fueled reading instruction. In a move that has parents like me cheering, Columbia University’s Teachers College announced last month that it is shuttering its once famous—in some circles, now-infamous—reading organization founded by education guru and entrepreneur Lucy Calkins. For decades, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project […]
Elizabeth Heubeck: In an era where humans have managed to create an artificial intelligence toolsophisticated enough to churn out an essay on Shakespeare, it seems unlikely that there would still be ambiguity about how best to teach kids how to read. But the “reading wars” continue to incite differences of opinion in various forums, from school […]
Jill Varshay: Amid the growing debate over how best to teach math, there is another ballooning problem: grades. They’re becoming increasingly untethered to how much students know. That not only makes it harder to gauge how well students are learning math and catching up from pandemic learning losses, but it’s also making math grades a […]
Ted Balaker: It’s back to school time, and for some of us that means back to home school. In recent years homeschooling has enjoyed a fairly well-publicized upswing. But the surge in interest has also sparked some narrow-minded backlash. Like the other areas I cover, education suffers from plenty of groupthink. My family of three is a […]
Ray Dalio: It is an ominous picture because these conditions are classic symptoms of stage 5 of the internal order- disorder cycle, which is just before stage 6 which is when there are great internal conflicts—typically some form of civil war. That is because most people willingly follow rules and laws rather than fight for what […]
James Freeman: The best way to prevent politicians and bureaucrats from ever again inflicting on American kids the learning losses, social isolation and staggering financial burden of the Covid lockdowns is to ensure a just reckoning for the destruction they caused. Perhaps this is beginning to happen. John Fensterwald reports in the Bakersfield Californian: This […]
Matthew Guariglia: We all deserve privacy in our communications, and part of that is trusting that the government will only access them within the limits of the law. But at this point, it’s crystal clear that the FBI doesn’t believe that either our rights nor the limitations that Congress has placed upon the bureau matter […]
Chuck Ross: Elias alleged that “irregularities” in voting machines switched votes from Brindisi to Tenney. The case drew some national attention because the argument mirrored Republicans’ baseless claims that voting machine irregularities were responsible for Donald Trump losing to President Joe Biden in some states. A judge ruled in favor of Tenney on Feb. 5 after finding […]
Melissa Korn, Andrea Fuller and Jennifer S. Forsyth The nation’s best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. Then they passed the bill along to students. […]
Philip Greenspuni: At least five of the folks with whom I chatted in the San Francisco Bay Area recently noted that the ocean water near Florida had been heated up to more than 100 degrees. When I asked them what part of the Florida shoreline was plagued with this scalding water, they couldn’t answer precisely. […]
Spencer Jakab: “Everybody who reads the newspaper knows that the United States has a very serious long-term fiscal problem.” That wasn’t a quote by some financial talking head in the aftermath of Fitch’s downgrade of America’s credit rating on Tuesday. It was a reaction by then chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke the last […]
Maya Bodnick: Every year, hundreds of thousands of students around the U.S. participate in competitive debate. Most start competing at a young age (early high school or even middle school), eager to learn about politics. At its best, the activity teaches students how to think critically about the government and the trade-offs that policymakers face. They are […]
Michael Bailey: I am a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. I have been a professor for 34 years, and a researcher for 40. Over the decades, I have studied controversial topics—from IQ, to sexual orientation, to transsexualism (what we called transgenderism before 2015), to pedophilia. I have published well over 100 academic articles. I […]
Ann Althouse: Umaretiya’s observation is based on what he saw colleges and applicants doing before the Supreme Court’s new decision came out. After the decision, there will be even more emphasis on the applicant’s personal essay, and what can students do but tell the best story of their life as a victim of society? Even before the […]
Lindsay Ellis: Many members of the class of 2023 were freshmen in college in the spring of 2020, when campuses shuttered due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They spent the rest of their college years partially in virtual mode with hybrid internships and virtual classes. Students didn’t learn some of the so-called soft skills they might […]
Andrew Hill and Andrew Jack Francesca Gino is one of HBS’s best-known behavioural scientists and author of Rebel Talent, a 2018 book with the subtitle “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life”. The controversy, which centres on the use of allegedly fraudulent data in published papers, is the latest to hit […]
Alliance for education Waukesha: The School District of Waukesha is doing harm to the students, but it’s not as simple as the School Board blaming pride flags, or disaffected teachers blaming the Superintendent. The system itself is a cancer that has metastasized and crept into every classroom across this massive district, and we know it’s […]
Michael F. Shaughnessy, via email: 1. Rick, COVID came, it saw, and it conquered, and it impacted a lot of schools. In your new book, The Great School Rethink, you discuss the pandemic’s effects and the aftermath. Can you talk a bit about the consequences of COVID-19 on the education system? Look, during COVID-19, […]
Stephen J. Ceci, Shulamit Kahn, and Wendy M. Williams We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media outlets, which influence many people’s opinions about sexism, bias is frequently portrayed as an omnipresent factor limiting women’s progress in the tenure-track […]
Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Journalism School (along with Marquette University), the formation, affiliation(s) and funding sources of Wisconsin Watch have generated some controversy. Jim Piwowarczyk noted in November, 2022: “Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization that disseminates news stories to many prominent media outlets statewide and is housed at the taxpayer-funded UW-Madison campus, has […]