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David Blaska: I met many people throughout the city (and reconnected with sister Jane). Gratified at the many educators, teaching support staff, and mainstream Democrats who said they voted for me. Another shout-out to liberal downtown Madison blogger Greg Humphrey. That took courage. We started a long overdue conversation in this community. That will continue. […]
: It seems that the plan is to reduce University course selection to just one subject: Victim Group Studies. Mary Frances Williams is a courageous person. Reading about her experience tells us much about the modern Academy. Here is a long quote about the heart of the matter, but I recommend reading the whole thing […]
Mary Hudson: Aside from the history teacher from Texas, other Washington Irving educators stood out as extraordinary, and this in an unimaginably bad learning environment. One was a cheerful Lebanese math teacher who had been felled as a child by polio. He called himself “the million dollar man” because of his handicapped parking permit, quite […]
Anne Helen Petersen: Such responses are indicative of what writer John Thornton calls “the retributive view,” which assumes “students could have made different choices to avoid or mitigate their debt. They could have chosen majors that pay more or schools with higher rates of success in the market. They could have worked a second or […]
Gary L. Kriewald: It appears we are headed toward a School Board election that promises something new: a candidate whose voice will do more than add sound and fury to the liberal echo chamber that is Madison politics. David Blaska has the background, experience and most importantly the courage to expose the abuses and neglect […]
Simon Kuper and Emma Jacobs $$: Matt Smith, acting headteacher of Huntington School in York, is teaching a maths class. He projects a circle with three sectors on to the whiteboard. How many degrees is each sector? Twelve boys and girls, aged 15 and 16, in blue uniforms with knotted ties, stare at the board. […]
Will Fitzhugh: The extra-large ubiquitous Literacy Community is under siege from universal dissatisfaction with the Writing skills of both students and graduates, and this is a complaint of very long standing. The Community response is to request more money and time to spend on sentence structure, paragraphing, voice, tone, and other mechanical Writing paraphernalia. It […]
Alan Borsuk: But consider a couple other things that happened in Massachusetts: Despite opposition, state officials stuck to the requirement. Teacher training programs adjusted curriculum and the percentage of students passing the test rose. A test for teachers In short, in Wisconsin, regulators and leaders of higher education teacher-prep programs are not so enthused about […]
Alan Borsuk: Overall, the Read to Lead effort seems like the high water mark in efforts to improve how kids are taught reading in Wisconsin — and the water is much lower now. What do the chair and the vice-chair think? Efforts to talk to Walker were not successful. Evers said, “Clearly, I’m disappointed. . […]
Chester E. Finn, Jr. President, Fordham Foundation Academic Questions, Spring 1998e: What’s going on in the college curriculum cannot be laid entirely at the doorstep of the K-12 system. Indeed, as Allan Bloom figured out a decade or more ago, it has as much to do with our educational culture, indeed with our culture per […]
Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email: Many secondary teachers of History either do not have or do not take the opportunity to do serious research on a History topic of their own. The TCR Academy, modeled after the TCR Summer Program for secondary students, offers teachers a two-week workshop where they will receive encouragement, guidance, […]
Diane Ravitch: He writes: A few years ago, at a conference in Boston, David Steiner, then Commissioner of Education for New York State, said, about History: “It is so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.” Since then, David Coleman, of the Common Core and the College Board, have decided that any historical […]
Will Fitzhugh is founder and editor of The Concord Review, which publishes outstanding historical essays by high school students. I have long been an admirer of the publication and of Will for sustaining it without support from any major foundations, which are too engaged in reinventing the schools rather than supporting the work of excellent […]
2018 – Kansas City Star Editorial: Taylor was blunt in linking educational attainment with dollars spent. “The analysis finds a strong, positive relationship between educational outcomes and educational costs,” Taylor concluded. She also said a 1 percentage point increase in graduation rates is associated with a 1.2 percent increase in costs in lower grades and […]
Alan Borsuk: Every student and family is involved in programs aimed at good behavior, emotional control, and engagement in school. A smaller number of students with more needs get more attention. And a few students need and get individualized help. Kim Burg, one of the counselors who works at the school, said the school is […]
Jonathan Chait: On February 17, 2009, Barack Obama signed one of the most sweeping federal education reforms in American history. You may not have heard of it. His program was a federal grant, called “Race to the Top,” which was doled out on a competitive basis. If states wanted the money, they needed to implement […]
Cameron McWhirter: High-school students are planning marches and school walkouts across the country in the coming weeks and months as the number of protesters on social media grows, galvanized by last week’s school shooting in Florida that left 17 dead. Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.—using various social-media platforms and hashtags […]
Peg Grafwallner: The Power of Directions First, the teacher distributed the programming directions and read them aloud. Next, we asked students to highlight direction words (review, write, create) on the handout so that they would see the number of direction words necessary to complete the programming sequence. Then students were asked to discuss the function […]
Michael Phillips: Quick and eager, she was labeled a gifted student, only to discover, she said, that meant receiving less attention from teachers. When she asked for challenging work or encouragement, she said, some teachers warned her about being too big for her britches. Beginning in middle school, her parents sent her to summer academic […]
Gu Liping : The Jack Ma Foundation on Monday announced a new plan to invest at least 300 million yuan (45 million U.S. dollars) to encourage graduates of normal schools to teach in rural areas in the next 10 years. The first 10 million yuan will be invested in selecting 100 fresh graduates from normal […]
Kevin Stennard: Who are the enemies of higher-order thinking? For a start, there’s Twitter, with its character limit, and before that there was PowerPoint, with its bullet-point format. Not to mention emojis. Digging further back, the indictment includes email and even – let’s show our age – telegrams. Stop. Complex thinking is inextricably intertwined with […]
Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh: “Advocates of a writing process tended to stress autobiographical narrative writing, not informational or expository writing.” It sounds excessively dramatic to say that Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) standards threaten the study of history. In this essay we show why, in the words of a high school teacher, “if […]
Derek Bok: Many colleges provide a formidable array of courses, majors and extracurricular opportunities, but firsthand accounts indicate that many undergraduates do not feel that the material conveyed in their readings and lectures has much relevance to their lives. Such sentiments suggest either that the courses do not in fact contribute much to the ultimate […]
Paul Bloom, Nicholas Christakis, Carlos Eire, Maria E. Garlock, Robert P. George, Mary Ann Glendon, Joshua Katz, Thomas P. Kelly, Jon Levenson, John B. Londregan, Michael A. Reynolds, Jacqueline C. Rivers, Noël Valis, Tyler VanderWeele and Adrian Vermeule: We are scholars and teachers at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale who have some thoughts to share and […]
Rod Dreher: Raising little ones is hard these days, particularly because — even by ages five and six — kids on the playground are educating them about topics I didn’t even know much about until I was a preteen. Consequently, my wife and I began talking to the girls about sexuality in age-appropriate ways last […]
Tyler Cowen: Tenure systems don’t always mesh well with potential professors’ child-bearing plans. Let’s say a person starts graduate school at age 26, finishes at 32, and then faces a six- or seven-year tenure clock. That intense period of study, and the resulting race to publish, comes exactly during prime child-bearing years. And many individuals […]
Siobhan Roberts:: The Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died on Friday, at the age of forty, was known to her colleagues as a virtuoso in the dynamics and geometry of complex surfaces—“science-fiction mathematics,” one admirer called it—and to her young daughter, Anahita, as something of an artist. At the family’s home, near Stanford University, Mirzakhani […]
Liana Loewus, via Will Fitzhugh:: [FIRST: make sure students read nothing, so they will have nothing to write about. SECOND: focus on skills, so they will not care about what they are writing. THIRD: repeat until they hate writing and remain unable to do it well—WF] ============== Students have a lot of free-writing in journals. […]
Natasha Singer: CHICAGO — The sixth graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here with a classic red brick facade, know the Google drill. In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a […]
Will Fitzhugh: Will Fitzhugh, Founder, The Concord Review, Inc. 23 March 2017, Harvard Faculty Club Thanks, Bill, [Bill Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Harvard College] for the kind introduction, and for decades of encouragement and support. You know, in addition to managing 40,000 applications, he also runs marathons… Thanks also to our High […]
Paul T. Hill and Georgia Heyward: The first few localities to adopt the four-day school week hoped to save money on transportation, heating, janitorial, and clerical costs. The idea was to add roughly 30 to 90 minutes to each day that students are in school, then on the fifth day (usually Friday) to assign projects […]
Frank Furedi: Some months back I read a circular issued to Oxford University postgraduate students on the potentially traumatic consequences of social science research. Promoting the availability of “Vicarious (Secondary) Trauma Workshops for post-grads participating in the university’s ‘Social Sciences Research and Skills Training’ programme,” the blurb explained that: It is increasingly recognised that some […]
Mitchell Chester and John White: But without exception and irrespective of the policies involved, the radical changes we’re describing happened because local leaders had the courage to insist that schools operate in conditions politically difficult to achieve, but essential to success. Those conditions include: * Leadership: Every success we’ve seen involves empowering a new leader […]
Thomas Lin: When did you first fall in love with math or start to hate it? What about science? Did a particular class or subject in school thrill or frustrate you? Did your teachers inspire or discourage you? Part four of Quanta Magazine’s Pencils Down series invites you to share your story and explore everyone’s […]
Maureen Kelleher: SYSTEM-GAMING HAS EXISTED FOR DECADES Ways to make hard-to-serve young people disappear from high school rolls have existed since well before Michelle Fine’s groundbreaking study on this problem, Framing Dropouts, was published in 1991. In the early 1980s, Fine discovered that only 20 percent of the freshmen who entered one of New York […]
William Deresiewicz It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and […]
Add an additional training day for new teachers (for a total of 3) to better meet the needs of and provide information to staff new to the District. Eliminate the language requiring a 10 day winter break and a 6 day spring break in order to provide flexibility when determining the school calendar. Provide the […]
New Schools for New Orleans When I was growing up, my biggest obstacle to academic success was my self-esteem, which held me back from trying hard in school. Although my parents taught me about the impact of a good education, I didn’t believe I could do well, so I never put in the effort I […]
Erin Hinrichs Bob Walser’s induction into Minneapolis school board politics has been pleasant, so far. A newbie to the campaign trail, he secured the endorsement of the DFL Party and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers last spring and has been encouraged by the well-wishes he’s received from constituents in District 4. “When the community comes […]
Heather Mac Donald: American employers regard the nation’s educational system as an irrelevance, according to a Census Bureau survey released in February of this year. Businesses ignore a prospective employee’s educational credentials in favor of his work history and attitude. Although the census researchers did not venture any hypothesis for this strange behavior, anyone familiar […]
Annie Holmquist Last week the Nation’s Report Card announced that no more than 40% of America’s 4th and 8th graders are proficient in reading and math. Those are scary numbers, but the numbers for writing are even more frightening: only 27% of American 8th and 12th graders attained proficiency. Why are American students such terrible […]
Jillian Follert: Whitby mom of two Elaina Daoust says she was “infuriated” last year when her son, then in junior kindergarten at Romeo Dallaire P.S. in Ajax, was told he was not allowed to eat a small piece of banana bread for his morning snack, because it contained chocolate chips. Instead he was instructed to […]
Robby Soave A student has taken advantage of the opportunity afforded by University of Michigan’s new pronoun policy, which allows students to list their chosen pronouns on the official bios that are sent out to their teachers. The student, Grant Stroble, has listed his pronoun as “His Majesty.” He is stunning and brave. Applaud his […]
Maggie Angst The educational opportunities for students include: A Black Cultural Center in the Red Gym. Inclusivity and diversity training for teaching assistants. A new ethnic studies course to be launched next year. Three new mental health staff members in the University of Health Services. Additional training for housing fellows. Instructional materials for faculty and […]
Jane Robbins, via a kind Will Fitzhugh email: The U.S. Department of Education (USED) longs to plumb the psyches of our children (as its own reports reveal – see here and here), and it enjoys the eager complicity of state education establishments. As reported by Education Week, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning […]
Laura Waters: Would New Jerseyans rather have a governor who sucks up to special interests or a governor with courage and integrity? Our choices at the ballot box rarely split into such neat dichotomies but, if today’s news is any indication, we may have it easy in November 2017. Today Phil Murphy, gubernatorial hopeful, released […]
Donald Clark: For Papert, school is a process of regimentation through age segregation, a fixed view of knowledge, of what is ‘right’, too teacher-led and too much focus on academic, abstract thinking and reading, pushing what he calls the ‘epistemology of precision’. For Papert, children should play and personalise their learning through play, improvisation and […]
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email: One City Early Learning Centers of Madison, Wisconsin will be the first U.S. pilot site for the groundbreaking AnjiPlay curriculum. One City will feature environments and materials designed by AnjiPlay program founder Ms. Cheng Xueqin, and One City teachers and staff will receive training from Ms. Cheng and Dr. […]
Roberta Michnick, Ph.D. Golinkoff and Kathy, Ph.D. Hirsh-Pasek: “Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?” When a child asks you a question like this, you have a few options. You can shut her down with a “Just because.” You can explain: “Red is for stop and green is for go.” Or, you can turn […]
Rolf Wegenke: The report is critical of private, nonprofit colleges’ and universities’ six-year graduation rates. By excluding certain students from the calculations, the study makes these graduation rates appear worse than they are. So what are the facts (derived from the same data used by Third Way) about graduations in Wisconsin? In 2015, the four-year […]
Karen Farkas: The board of trustees agreed to slow the rate of tuition increase from 3.9 percent to 2.8 percent in the 2016 fiscal year, which will result in $2.1 million in reduced gross income, the Review said. Annual tuition and fees total $50,636. Standard room and board costs are $13,630. But last year, approximately […]
Jeffrey Selingo: It’s graduation season at high schools and colleges around the country, the time of year when students are honored for their accomplishments from the classrooms to the athletic fields. Teachers and counselors have long encouraged students to be “well-rounded.” But the problem with well-rounded students is that they usually don’t focus on any […]
Alexander Russo: Another notable finding is that 70 percent of education reporters list press releases/events/PR person as a source for stories — the most frequent response for reporters asked about the source of story ideas in the last month. “Public relations efforts are an important part of education coverage,” notes the report introduction language.” News […]
Hamilton Nolan: I got my PhD in Classics, which maintains a bit of an old school appeal to pedigree (and white males). Our PhDs are being churned out at an alarming rate (not as bad as English, though), and there are few tenure track jobs. If you look at the Classics wiki, which goes back […]
Eun Kyung Kim: When he decided against going to a traditional high school, Warner Adams got teased. But now he’s getting the last laugh. “People always make fun of vocational schools, but now they’re like, ‘Oh man, I wish I went there,’” said Adams, now a junior at Pathfinder Regional Vocational Technical High School, where […]
Blake Neff: A professional education consultant and teacher trainer argued at the White Privilege Conference (WPC) in Philadelphia that great teachers must also be liberal activists, and described in detail her goal for destroying the “white supremacist” nature of modern education. Heather Hackman operates Hackman Consulting Group and was formerly a professor of multicultural education […]
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 […]
Robby Soave: A Maryland high school student who obeyed the parameters of the assignment he was given is now facing widespread outrage because it wasn’t politically correct—even though the point of the assignment was to write something inflammatory. Here’s a modest proposal: in order to protect students’ rights and encourage their imaginations, let’s murder all […]
John McDermott: Such is the case with his latest work. At a quiet table in the cavernous Hawksmoor Seven Dials, a branch of the high-end restaurant chain in central London, where the decor is brown and the meat is red, Fryer tells me how he spent two days last year on the beat shadowing cops […]
Alan Borsuk: Until Thursday evening, I never dreamed I would write a “profiles in courage” piece about Wendell Harris. I apologize, Wendell. You earned it, and here it is. Of course, an example of political courage can also be seen as an example of betrayal and broken promises. Harris will get those reactions, too. I […]
Josh Giesbrecht: ecently, Bic launched a campaign to “save handwriting.” Named “Fight for Your Write,” it includes a pledge to “encourage the act of handwriting” in the pledge-taker’s home and community, and emphasizes putting more of the company’s ballpoints into classrooms. As a teacher, I couldn’t help but wonder how anyone could think there’s a […]
John Reitmeyer: Gov. Chris Christie has taken an aggressive approach to dealing with public workers and their unions since taking office in early 2010. He’s encouraged voters to reject school budgets in communities where teachers weren’t accepting pay freezes, pushed to change civil-service rules, and signed legislation that forced employees to pay more toward to […]
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, […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. The Joint MTI/MMSD Safety Committee is charged with evaluating the “implementation of and compliance with the District’s Behavior Education Plan(s) (BEP)” and periodically reporting to the Superintendent and MTI Board of Directors. Over the course of the 2014-15 school year, the Committee met multiple times and designed, conducted and analyzed a Survey […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF): It is important for all to review the District’s social media policy before using electronic media to interact with families, students, colleagues and/or the general public. The District policy permits communication with parents and students via District-sanctioned electronic media and accounts, and cautions against […]
Diane Ravitch writing in Educational Excellence Network, 1989: Futuristic novels with a bleak vision of the prospects for the free individual characteristically portray a society in which the dictatorship has eliminated or strictly controls knowledge of the past. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the regime successfully wages a “campaign against the Past” by banning […]
David Hill: Silander said about 70 percent of Finnish high school teachers have already received training in the “phenomenon-based” approach, which began testing two years ago. So far student outcomes have improved and teacher response has been positive. Marjo Kyllonen, Helsinki’s education manager, who leads the initiative said, “We really need a rethinking of education […]
Gorman Lee, via Will Fitzhugh: The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision to indefinitely suspend the History and Social Science MCAS in 2009 has placed social studies education in a high risk of marginalization in K-12 public school districts across the Commonwealth. The problem has only exacerbated with increased emphases of English language […]
<A href=”http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/25/guest-opinion-the-sorrows-of-young-palo-altans”>Carolyn Walworth</a>: <blockquote>We are not teenagers. We are lifeless bodies in a system that breeds competition, hatred, and discourages teamwork and genuine learning. We lack sincere passion. We are sick. We, as a community, have completely lost sight of what it means to learn and receive an education. Why is that not getting through […]
Mariko Oi: A few hours later, they queue quietly before being served their lunch. Towards the end of their education this conformist attitude is still evident. Each year, more than half a million university students start looking for work together. The first step is to perfect a handwritten resume, or CV, because many in Japan […]
Max Ehrenfreund: Finland’s classrooms are very different from America’s — far more permissive, with less of an emphasis on academics. There are no standardized tests until high school, and children get 15 minutes of recess in between lessons — more than an hour of recess a day. “Play is important,” one Finnish teacher told the […]
Simona Chiose: “With the current funding regime, we cannot afford for the university to have all courses taught by tenure-track appointments, although the research is important,” York University president Mamdouh Shoukri said in an interview. The shift is changing the undergraduate experience. Most students at large and medium-sized universities will have limited contact with their […]
Jonathan Dishoff: An interesting method by which I found out that people were cheating on my final exam. Background I use different versions of midterm examinations to discourage cheating in my population biology class (~200 students). When the course started, I used to do the same thing for the final exam, but it was a […]
Samantha Wesner, via Will Fitzhugh: s a junior in high school taking American history, my class had two options for the final project: a PowerPoint presentation or an extended research essay. To many it was a no-brainer; the PowerPoint was definitely going to involve more pictures, fewer hours of work, and less solitude. But some […]
Susan Frey: During Daisy Montes Cabrera’s final week of her first quarter at UC Davis, her father, who was terminally ill, died. Cabrera, a first-generation college student, wanted to leave Davis to be closer to her family in San Jose. But her high school college adviser, principal and teachers all encouraged her to stay, she […]
Maggie Severns: The president may be hard-pressed to veto even a very conservative bill, though the administration has signaled in the past it will take a hard line when it comes to preserving annual tests and other provisions that focus on equal access to education in NCLB. The Obama administration ushered in what has been […]
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 […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. PDF Newsletter via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF): Over the past few weeks, discussions have been occurring throughout the District about MTI’s upcoming MTI Recertification Elections. One of the most frequently asked questions by newer staff, those who are not aware of MTI’s many accomplishments over the years is, “what is […]
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. […]
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 […]
JD Tuccille: I can’t say it was the stress-induced puking that caused my wife and I to finally pull our son from his brick-and-mortar charter school. We’d been contemplating yanking him from a classroom setting for the past year or so. Over the summer, we ran him through a battery of academic tests and encouraged […]
JD Tuccille: I can’t say it was the stress-induced puking that caused my wife and I to finally pull our son from his brick-and-mortar charter school. We’d been contemplating yanking him from a classroom setting for the past year or so. Over the summer, we ran him through a battery of academic tests and encouraged […]
Mary Dooe & Genevieve Wilson: How do we reinvent American education? An Unconventional Education Toolbox You can start at the very beginning, with preschoolers and kindergarteners. Dr. Roberta Ness, author of “Genius Unmasked” and Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Texas, explains why Maria Montessori’s method for teaching was so […]
Lolly Bowean: As a student in the first class of Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, Tyler Beck found himself enveloped in a nurturing environment where teachers came in early and stayed late to help tutor struggling students. There, the boys formed a brotherhood and learned affirmations that kept them pumped up to achieve. […]
Average GPA in Core Subjects in 8th and 9th Grades and Percentage of Students Receiving a D or F in a Core Course in 9th Grade, by Feeder School, 2010 – 2013: Madison School District 1.3MB PDF Presentation: In focus groups, several teachers noted what they perceived to be a lack of adequate preparation their […]
Elizabeth Green: When Akihiko Takahashi was a junior in college in 1978, he was like most of the other students at his university in suburban Tokyo. He had a vague sense of wanting to accomplish something but no clue what that something should be. But that spring he met a man who would become his […]
Professor Michael F. Shaughnessy 1) Will, you have been editing The Concord Review for ages. When did you begin, and what are you trying to accomplish? Since 1987, when I got started, the goals have been to: (1) find and celebrate exemplary history research papers by secondary students from the English-speaking world, and (2) to […]
“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 […]
—No, the humanities should step up and proudly proclaim: “We are the purveyors of beauty more lethal than you may possibly be able to bear and knowledge more profound than you can yet fathom. We are your vehicle into the past and into the minds of other human beings. Within our precincts are works of […]
Jay Matthews: Walter Fields’s 15-year-old daughter is a sophomore at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J. She scored advanced proficient on state math tests in middle school and received an A in algebra in eighth grade. For reasons that mystify Fields and his wife, their daughter was not recommended for the ninth-grade geometry course that […]
Reihan Salam: Rather than shift the tax burden from households with children to relatively high-earning households without children, Felix Salmon of Reuters proposes increasing federal education funding. This strikes me as ill-conceived for a number of reasons. If anything, I would suggest that we move in the opposite direction. Though federal spending represents a relatively […]
Al Shanker via Will Fitzhugh: Usually when I write this column, I’m trying to convince thousands of people about something. This time, I’m trying to reach one or two people. I don’t even know who they are, but they’ll have to be people receptive to spending some money on a good cause. Here’s the story. […]
Peggy Noonan: What a small and politically vicious man New York’s new mayor is. Bill de Blasio doesn’t like charter schools. They are too successful to be tolerated. Last week he announced he will drop the ax on three planned Success Academy schools. (You know Success Academy: It was chronicled in the film “Waiting for […]
Michael Meranze: ONE OF THE GREAT CLAIMS of American higher education is that it protects and encourages something called “academic freedom,” a guarantee of protection for teachers and students to engage in free inquiry and exchange no matter how inconvenient or unpopular the ideas they express in their scholarship, teaching, or studies. In contrast to […]
Jim Zellmer: Good afternoon, Leigh Let’s begin with your education. Leigh Turner: Like increasing numbers of people in today’s modern world, I grew up in several countries, in Nigeria, in Britain, then again in Lesotho, in southern Africa, and then again in Britain. I went to several different, as we would say in English, schools […]
Jay Tokasz: You might say the Buffalo Chesterton Academy is going old school. Local public school districts and the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo are moving to shut down schools throughout Erie County, because the area has fewer and fewer children. But the demographic trends haven’t discouraged a small group of Catholics from planning a new […]
These kids should learn write from wrong.
Earlier this month, The Post exposed a scheme at Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers in which failing students could get full credit without attending class, but instead watch video lessons and take tests online. One social-studies teacher had a roster of 475 students in all grades and subjects.
Red-faced administrators encouraged a student letter-writing campaign to attack The Post and defend its “blended learning” program. Eighteen kids e-mailed to argue that their alma mater got a bad rap.
Almost every letter was filled with spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.
A junior wrote: “What do you get of giving false accusations im one of the students that has blended learning I had a course of English and I passed and and it helped a lot you’re a reported your support to get truth information other than starting rumors . . .”
Another wrote: “To deeply criticize a program that has helped many students especially seniors to graduate I should not see no complaints.”
In the United States, our media are not allowed to report on or discuss exemplary student academic achievement at the high school level. For example, in the “Athens of America,” The Boston Globe has more than 150 full pages each year on the accomplishments of high school athletes, but only one page a year on academics–a full page with the photographs of valedictorians at the public high schools in the city, giving their name, their school, their country of origin (often 40% foreign-born) and the college they will be going to.
The reasons for this media blackout on good academic work by students at the secondary level are not clear, apart from tradition, but while high school athletes who “sign with” a particular college are celebrated in the local paper, and even on televised national high school games, the names of Intel Science Talent Search winners, of authors published in The Concord Review, and of other accomplished high school scholars may not appear in the paper or on television.
Publicity offers encouragement for the sorts of efforts we would like our HS students to make. We naturally publicize high school athletic achievements and this helps to motivate athletes to engage in sports. By contrast, when it comes to good academic work, we don’t mention it, so perhaps we want less of it?
One senior high school history teacher has written that “We actually hide academic excellence from the public eye because that will single out some students and make others ‘feel bad.'”
Does revealing excellence by high school athletes make some other athletes or scholar-athletes or high school scholars feel bad? How can we tolerate that? I know there are some Progressive secondary schools which have eliminated academic prizes and honors, to spare the feelings of the students who don’t get them, but I don’t see that they have stopped keeping score in school games, no matter how the losers in those contests may feel.
SAMPLE MEDIA COVERAGE OF HS ATHLETES
Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Signing Day Central–By Michael Carvell
11:02 am Wednesday, February 5th, 2014
“Welcome to the AJC’s Signing day Day Central. This is the place to be to catch up with all the recruiting information with UGA, Georgia Tech and recruits from the state of Georgia. We will update the news as it happens, and interact on the message board below.
University of Georgia’s TOP TARGETS FOR WEDNESDAY…AND RESULTS
Lorenzo Carter, DE, 6-5, 240, Norcross: UGA reeled in the big fish, landing the state’s No.1 overall prospect for the first time since 2011 (Josh Harvey-Clemons). Isaiah McKenzie, WR, 5-8, 175, Ft. Lauderdale (Fla.) American Heritage: This was one of two big surprises for UGA to kick off signing day. McKenzie got a last-minute offer from UGA and picked the Bulldogs because of his best buddy and high school teammate, 5-star Sony Michel (signed with UGA). Hunter Atkinson, TE, 6-6, 250, West Hall: The Cincinnati commit got a last-minute call from Mark Richt and flipped to UGA. I’m not going to say we saw it coming, but … Atkinson had grayshirt offers from Alabama, Auburn and UCF. Tavon Ross, S, 6-1, 200, Bleckley County: The Missouri commit took an official visit to UGA but decided to stick with Missouri. He’s signed. Andrew Williams, DE, 6-4, 247, ECLA: He signed with Auburn over Clemson and Auburn. He joked with Auburn’s Gus Malzahn when he called with the news, saying “I’m sorry to inform you….. That I will be attending your school,” according to 247sports.com’s Kipp Adams. Tyre McCants, WR-DB, 5-11, 200, Niceville, Fla.: Turned down late interest from UGA to sign with USF.”
This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, of course, in the coverage of high school athletes that goes on during the year. I hope readers will email me any comparable examples of the celebration of exemplary high school academic work that they can find in the media in their community, or in the nation generally.
[The Prentice Hall Common Core literature textbook for the tenth grade:]
….Teachers may (or may not) ask interested students (two, four, or half a dozen?) to read a segment of the book (presumably a brief one only describing the monster) that will lead to two silly compare-and contrast-assignments, one involving “similar novels they have read.” (Have they read any? They haven’t read Frankenstein yet.) What about the students who are not “advanced readers”? What is being done to help them become better readers? And why should even the advanced readers read only a few pages out of this classic? What should students be doing if not reading Frankenstein?
According to the notes in the margins of the Teacher’s Edition, they should begin by offering to the class “classic examples of urban myths, tales of alien abductions, or ghost stories. (Examples include stories of alligators in the sewers, a man abducted for his kidneys, and aliens landing in Roswell, New Mexico).” (The word “classic” is being used very loosely.) To reinforce the findings of this “brainstorming activity,” students should also “write a paragraph based on one of these modern urban myths.” The class will also discuss Mary Shelley’s introduction in various ways. Helping out, Elizabeth McCracken offers several more “scholar’s insights,” including one informing us of another ghost story about a man who buried his murder victim at the base of a tree “only to find that the next year’s apples all had a clot of blood at the center of them.” On the following page, we learn that Elizabeth McCracken did read the book, which she found better than the movie because, she tells us, in the book the monster can actually talk. Teachers are prompted to ask students why they think the film version would choose to keep the monster silent. Since the class will not be diverted enough with all this talk of movies, the Teacher’s Edition also recommends that talented and gifted students “illustrate one aspect of Shelley’s imaginings that is especially Gothic in its mood” and “display their Gothic art to the rest of the class.”
Do the editors realize that all this extraneous discussion of monsters and ghosts only serves to preserve the silly Halloween caricature of Frankenstein? Apparently this caricature is what they want. On page 766, students are encouraged to “write a brief autobiography of a monster.” The editors point out that monster stories are usually told from the perspective of “the humans confronting the monster.” The editors of The British Tradition want to turn the tables and have students ask themselves “what monsters think about their treatment.” Now there’s a great exercise in multiculturalism! Those poor, misunderstood monsters. Thus, students are being asked to write a monster story. What good could come from this? Without reading the novel Frankenstein itself (which does in fact tell much of the story from the monster’s perspective), students have no way of knowing how human this Gothic tale really is. After a mere three and a half pages of Mary Shelley’s introduction, the book offers a series of questions under various headings: Critical Reading, Literary Analysis, and so forth. Some of these questions are steeped in two-bit literary criticism. Others require students to delve into the moral realms of science and creation. One is a question asking students to interpret a modern cartoon about Frankenstein–funny, but out of place in this literature book. Notwithstanding whether the questions are good or bad, the enterprise is as false as the worst Hollywood versions of Frankenstein. The questions offer the façade of learning without genuine learning having taken place. That is for a very simple reason. My wife, the former English teacher who recognizes pretense when she sees it, took one look at these pages and put it very simply:
“They (the editors) are requiring students to have opinions on something they know nothing about.”
Moore, Terrence (2013-11-29).
The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against the Common Core (pp. 176-177). Kindle Edition.
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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
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www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
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IN THE old days parents followed a simple rule: spare the rod and spoil the child. These days less violent forms of discipline are favoured. Supernanny, a television toddler-tamer, recommends the “naughty step”, to which ill-behaved brats are temporarily banished. Yet even this is too harsh, some psychologists say. Putting Howling Henry on the naughty step may interrupt his tantrum; but advocates of “positive discipline” say it does nothing to encourage him to solve his own problems (and thus build character).
Some even suggest it may be psychologically damaging.
Positive discipline, which is becoming a grassroots fashion in America, aims to teach children self-control and empathy. Rather than screaming at them to pick up the toys they have strewn on the floor, parents or teachers ask them to suggest their own way of tackling the problem. Adults are encouraged to think harder about the causes of bad behaviour. Families meet regularly to discuss all of the above.