schoolinfosystem.org
Melinda Anderson: For its most ardent champions, enthusiasm for coding comes close to evangelism. From Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt—“Let’s get the whole world coding!”—and the actor Ashton Kutcher, to the NBA player Chris Bosh and the rap royalty Snoop Dogg—“support tha american dream n make coding available to EVERYONE!!”—teaching kids to code has gained […]
Julie Beck: And a new paper by Omar Gillath at the University of Kansas and Lucas Keefer at the University of Dayton suggests that the more someone moves from place to place, the more likely they are to think of their relationships as disposable—because they’re used to thinking of things as disposable. Gillath and Keefer […]
Jason DeParle: Seeking distraction one winter afternoon, a Milwaukee boy takes to some old-fashioned mischief and hurls snowballs at passing cars. A driver gives chase and kicks in the door of the house where the boy lives with his mother and younger brother. The landlord puts the family out. Thus begins an odyssey that in […]
Gary Kasparov: I’m enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the […]
Hamilton Nolan: Phil Knight, the billionaire founder of Nike, is giving $400 million to Stanford—a school that already has an endowment of more than $22 billion, and that just last year received more donations than any other school in America. This is the academic charity equivalent of giving a donation to a Michael Bloomberg election […]
Swinn: Premiums for employment-based health insurance this year will average about $6,400 for single coverage and $15,500 for family coverage, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation. In a new report, the CBO says average premiums for individually purchased insurance are also high, although not quite as […]
Chris Fusco & Tim Novak: Karen Lewis is one of eight Chicago Teachers Union employees paid more than $100,000 a year by the union. Rich Hein / Sun-Times file photo The Chicago Teachers Union, having rejected a new teachers contract, is in a high-stakes battle with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration. And with more than $25 […]
Margaret Wente: When I was six, I had a dream. I dreamed of being a ballet dancer, floating across the stage in my white tutu and tights. I would dazzle the world! Alas, I never made it. I was built like a brick, and had no sense of rhythm. I had plenty of determination, but […]
Rick Noack: Tuition to U.S. universities has surged 500 percent since 1985 and continues to rise. But German universities offer free education to everyone — including Americans. The number of American students enrolled in German universities has risen steadily in recent years. Currently, an estimated 10,000 U.S. citizens are studying at German colleges — nearly […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter (PDF) 1.25.2016 Newsletter: MTI – Teachers who worked full-time in the Madison Metropolitan School District for the entire calendar year in 2015 (January through December) paid dues/fair share in the amount of $1,042.10. Of that amount, $260 was for WEAC, $183.60 for NEA, $570.00 for MTI, and $28.50 for MTI VOTERS […]
Mark Manson: When I arrived in Buenos Aires in the beginning of 2010, I could barely order food in a local restaurant. Two years later, I calmly explained the mechanics of Russian grammar to a Guatemalan friend… in her native Spanish. Today, I’m conversationally fluent in both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, and low conversational in […]
John Kramer: It is a major victory for the individual against the seemingly all-powerful IRS. In a single-page letter, sent this morning by fax, the IRS agreed to return a North Carolina convenience store owner’s entire live savings. The IRS seized $153,907.99 from Ken Quran in June 2014, without any warning or meaningful prior investigation, […]
Marina Marcou-O’Malley: New York State has a massive funding gap between rich and poor schools and it has grown rapidly since Governor Cuomo took office in 2011. The funding gap between the 100 poorest school districts and the 100 wealthiest is $9,796 per pupil. In a school of 300 students this amounts to $2.9 million […]
Molly Beck: While I do agree that there was some situations where some districts were gaming the system, and perhaps something needs to be done, it’s clear in talking with the Senate that there isn’t support to bring this bill all the way home,” he said, adding that he expected enough support for the original […]
Jennifer Brown: I wish I could say that this honor was for jovial purposes. It wasn’t. I appeared before the committee not to discuss the amazing job our teachers are doing in classrooms across the state, but instead to defend Alabama’s College and Career Ready Standards from the latest legislative attempt to reverse what the […]
Diane D’amico: Almost 200 employees under family-plan coverage received $18,500 each, according to information obtained by The Press of Atlantic City through an Open Public Records Act request. The annual premium cost for family coverage under the district’s private plan is almost $37,000 and includes medical, dental, prescription and vision coverage. By contrast, under a […]
Alexander Russo: School spending per student drops for a third year in a row Hechinger Report: Per-pupil spending in the nation’s public schools fell for the third straight year in 2012-13*, according to the most recent federal financial data, which was released on January 27, 2016. In that school year, U.S. public schools spent only […]
Javier Espinoza: The governing body of Oriel College, which owns the statue, has ruled out its removal after being warned that £1.5m worth of donations have already been cancelled, and that it faces dire financial consequences if it bows to the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign. A leaked copy of a report prepared for the […]
Teresa Elms: This chart shows the lexical distance — that is, the degree of overall vocabulary divergence — among the major languages of Europe. The size of each circle represents the number of speakers for that language. Circles of the same color belong to the same language group. All the groups except for Finno-Ugric (in […]
: On Oct. 10, 2012, 11-year-old Colman Chadam was pulled out of class at his public middle school in Palo Alto, California, and asked if he wanted to say goodbye to his friends. According to Chadam’s parents, the teacher told him it was his last day at the school. Officials allegedly told the Chadams that […]
Mapping London: Here’s a real treat. The National Library of Scotland’s Map Department, supported by David Rumsey, have taken some very high-resolution scans of the Ordnance Survey 1:1056 (that’s 60 inches to the mile!) set of 500+ maps of London issued between 1893 and 1896 and, crucially, reorientated and stitched them together, so that they […]
Mary Shaw (editor), Jonathan Aldrich, Travis D. Breaux, David Garlan, James D. Herbsleb, Christian Kästner, Claire Le Goues, William L. Scherlis: To understand the context of current research, it is essential to understand how current results evolved from early fundamental papers. These classic papers develop timeless ideas that transcend technology changes, and the ideas embodied […]
Andrew Lih: This month, Wikipedia officially celebrates 15 years as the internet’s free encyclopedia, cataloguing humankind’s achievements in real time and, more importantly, rescuing desperate students facing assignment deadlines. In that time, it has hastened the end of Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia and supplanted Britannica as the dominant reference work in English. While the digital landscape […]
The Economist: THE world of “The Hunger Games” youngsters are forced to fight to the death for the amusement of their white-haired rulers. Today’s teen fiction is relentlessly dystopian, but the gap between fantasy and reality is often narrower than you might think. The older generation may not resort to outright murder but, as our […]
DJ Bernstein: Most rights can be voluntarily abandoned (“waived”) by the owner of the rights. Legislators can go to extra effort to create rights that can’t be abandoned, but usually they don’t do this. In particular, you can voluntarily abandon your United States copyrights: It is well settled that rights gained under the Copyright Act […]
Richard Askey, Ryota Matsuura, and Sarah Sword (PDF): Given three numbers a, b, and c, we can find their mean (or average) as (a + b + c)/3. More precisely, this expression yields the arithmetic mean of a, b, and c. A different kind of mean, however, uses the product of these numbers instead of […]
Reyna L. Gordon, Hilda M. Fehd and Bruce D. McCandliss: Children’s engagement in music practice is associated with enhancements in literacy-related language skills, as demonstrated by multiple reports of correlation across these two domains. Training studies have tested whether engaging in music training directly transfers benefit to children’s literacy skill development. Results of such studies, […]
Scott Jaschik: The study’s initial results suggest that one can prove that a liberal arts-style education can be associated with greater odds, compared to others with bachelor’s degrees, on such qualities as being a leader, being seen as ethical, appreciating arts and culture and leading a fulfilling and happy life. How the Analysis Was Done […]
Georgina Kenyon: Proctor found that ignorance spreads when firstly, many people do not understand a concept or fact and secondly, when special interest groups – like a commercial firm or a political group – then work hard to create confusion about an issue. In the case of ignorance about tobacco and climate change, a scientifically […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. PDF Newsletter On his pending retirement, Matthews said, “I never thought this day would arrive, but I provide this notice knowing we have accomplished so much for MTI members, that while I leave with a heavy heart it is one filled with great satisfaction.” He added that he would remain available to […]
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 […]
Today’s Zaman: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continued with his criticism of more than 1,000 academics who have been subject to prosecution and administrative penalties from their institutions after signing a statement criticizing the government’s actions in the Southeast, calling them “despicable” and “cruel.” “They are cruel, they are despicable because those who are together […]
The Beaver Dam, Wisconsin School District embraces direct mail with a glossy postcard: Tap for a larger version. It appears that the District is preparing for the financing and construction of a new high school facility. The website is attractive and information discovery is not too bad. That said, Beaver Dam, like Madison, could make […]
Daniel Araya: Although the current unemployment rate now stands at just 5.0 percent, many economists concede that the real figure is much higher. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U-6 rate (total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons) […]
Statista: Recent research from the Kaiser Family Foundation has revealed that just over a quarter of American adults (ages 18-64) say they or someone in their household struggled to pay their medical bills over the past 12 months. These payment problems impact all kinds of people, regardless of household income or insurance status.
Ed Krayewski: The math is way off. Divided among 300 million Americans, the $1.2 billion Powerball jackpot, even before taxes and the cut taking it as lump sum (as most people do) comes with, would amount to just $4.00 per person, not $4 million. That’s not a minor error, it’s off by six orders of […]
Kellie Woodhouse: There’s good news and bad news when it comes to how much of a financial burden students and families are shouldering for a college education. The good news? The share of tuition that covers educational costs at institutions didn’t go up much in 2013, the most recent year studied by the Delta Cost […]
Annysa Johnson: They do not include individual district- and school-level data for public schools or the scores for private schools participating in the state-funded voucher programs. Among the highlights: The composite score for juniors who took the ACT was 20 on a scale of 36. That’s below the 22.2 reported in August 2015. Again, DPI […]
Aarian Marshall: provision tucked deep within a gargantuan education bill passed in December clarifies the murky legal standing of free-range parenting—sort of. Advocates for the practice—that is, encouraging kids to build self-reliance skills by traveling their neighborhoods solo—are hailing the 101-word section as a victory, though the law still leaves parents and journeying kiddos subject […]
Mark Perry: Here’s another look in the two charts above showing how America’s lower-income and middle-income households have declined as a share of all US households between 1967 and 2014, while the share of high-income households keeps increasing. 1. The top chart shows the three income groups: a) low-income households with income of $35,000 and […]
Dean Mosiman: In Madison, the tax bill for a fair market home valued at $200,000 was $4,690. Outside Madison, the tax bill for a fair market home with the same value ranged from $2,815 in the town of Christiana in the Stoughton School District to $4,736 in the village of Brooklyn in the Oregon School […]
New York Times: Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. In reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to […]
Jeff Guo: Tuesday in October and Terrell Kellam is running late. He usually wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to catch the first of two buses that will take him from southwest Baltimore to Morgan State University, just north of the city. With a good connection, making it to his college classes might take an hour […]
Samita Thapa: Today, on Human Rights Day, we focus on the importance of digital safety for human rights defenders around the world. In an increasingly digitally connected world, it is even more crucial for human rights defenders – whether activists, journalists or aid workers, to be safe online as they fight for the rights of […]
Alan Borsuk: This just in: Every child in America will not be reading and doing math on grade level by the end of 2014. You know that. You knew that years ago. But as 2015 headed toward its end, it was the law of the land. My actual focus today is on the new federal […]
Jake New: Northeastern University is arming some members of its police force with semiautomatic rifles, despite the apprehensions of the nearby Boston Police Department and critics who worry about an increasing militarization of campus law enforcement. The decision — motivated by a string of recent shootings on campuses and elsewhere — has proven to be […]
Susan Ferriss and Amy Isackson His girlfriend walked off, and Muniz saw the officer approaching again and directing him to go with him. The cop reached out and “put his hand on my throat,” Muniz said. “That’s when I start freaking out. He tells me to stand up. And that’s when his grip on my […]
Martin Kich: Academic Analytics, a private database contracted to measure faculty productivity at Rutgers, may undermine our tenure process, while narrowing the range of scholarship. If you belong to SASNB [School of Arts and Sciences—New Brunswick], please attend the School’s faculty meeting on Monday, 14 December from 2:00-4:00 p.m. in Voorhees 105 (College Ave.) to […]
Jackson Geller: When looking at the data, it’s clear that about 6-7 of the top 10 prospects carve out legitimate NBA careers every year. Some don’t always live up to expectations, but they find a spot in the league and make plenty of money. There are only a few prospects billed as “can’t miss” who […]
time Imagine you are green, and most of the people in your country, particularly people in positions of power, are blue. Your first week as a freshman at one of the most powerful institutions in your country, you walk into the huge hall, called Commons, with its colossal blue and white banner bearing a single […]
Mamie Hall: My 10 years teaching in the public schools can best be described as a roller coaster of inspiration, innovation and disappointment. After college, I began working in a pilot year-round middle school program. We had smaller class sizes and a lot of freedom. We set our own schedule, made our own policies and […]
Brad Wolverton, Ben Hallman, Shane Shifflett and Sandhya Kambhampati: A river of cash is flowing into college sports, financing a spending spree among elite universities that has sent coaches’ salaries soaring and spurred new discussions about whether athletes should be paid. But most of that revenue is going to a handful of elite sports programs, […]
Malcolm Harris: But what is a “safe space” and why shouldn’t a university be one? This tweet from Dawkins would have been a psychotic response to a school shooting or campus rape, but that’s not the kind of safety he’s talking about. The safe spaces that Dawkins doesn’t like are encroachments onto his turf by […]
Chana Schoenberger: Many parents and grandparents love “529” accounts to save for college. But like anything involving money and taxes, not everyone uses them in the most efficient way. These state-sponsored savings plans, which typically invest in mutual funds, hold a record amount of assets—$258.2 billion in 12.3 million open accounts, says the College Savings […]
Julie F. Mead & Preston C. Green III This policy brief addresses the challenge of using charter school policy to enhance equal educational opportunity. Three overriding assumptions guide the brief’s recommendations: (1) charter schools will be part of our public educational system for the foreseeable future; (2) charter schools are neither inherently good, nor inherently […]
Charles Smth: In the history of higher education in our nation, today was gut check time. Both the president and the chancellor at the University of Missouri have now bitten the dust. This incredibly consequential event is being widely interpreted as a victory for a college football team. No question, the actions taken by the […]
Michael Rothfeld: Educators in this Oklahoma City suburb jumped into action when state leaders in 2010 adopted the Common Core academic standards that were sweeping states across the country. The Edmond school district has a big military population that moves frequently, so officials liked the idea of using the same standards as other states. They […]
Chris Taylor: Friends, a proposal: Let’s stop using the phrase “school-to-prison pipeline.” It’s misleading. When going to school looks not a little like being in a prison, we’re no longer talking about a subject’s itinerary through discrete times and spaces—the narrative geography wherein a student, routed through a school that can only fail her, finds […]
Victor Davis Hanson: The urban ideal tends to be just the opposite. Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive Web ad, “The Life of Julia.” Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance — a […]
Malcolm Harris: If you visit collegedebt.com, that’s exactly what you find. It’s a stark display, black on white, with an ominous ticker counting up. “Current student loan debt in the United States.” Right now it’s at $1.339 trillion, but by the time you read this, the sum will be larger. The site is owned and […]
Julian Francis Park Today at the “Student Forum” discussing the glowing technofuture of the 21st century curriculum at Mills College there was something fundamental mentioned twice, but only in passing – a driving assumption behind the proposed curricular “revisions.” As the reader may know, these “revisions” include proposals to close the American Studies and Book […]
Glenn Reynolds: As former Labor secretary Robert Reich recently noted, Ivy League schools are government-subsidized playgrounds for the rich: “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 […]
Michael McGough: A recent poll of college students’ attitudes toward free speech (in general and on campus) is a mixed bag. The survey by McLaughlin & Associates for the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale shows that 87% of respondents agreed with this statement: “There is educational value in listening to and understanding views […]
Matt Bruening: Conor P. Williams has a piece at 74 million that purports to be a simulation of what critics of Teach for America must be like. Apparently, in Wiliams’ view, they are coffee shop elite hipsters. As far as this genre of writing goes, Williams’ piece is not particularly funny, insightful, or well-executed. It […]
Aviva Stahl: This past April, four years after Mel’s public act of faith, two Queens residents, Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui, were arrested and charged with allegedly planning to build a bomb. The US Justice Department issued a release stating that the women were linked to members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the […]
Matt McGue & Irving I. Gottesman: Arguably, no psychological variable has received more attention from behavioral geneticists than what has been called “general cognitive ability” (as well as “general intelligence” or “g”), and for good reason. GCA has a rich correlational network, implying that it may play an important role in multiple domains of functioning. […]
psmag: After a century of insisting that the secure, benefits-laden job was the frictionless meritocratic means of rewarding society’s truly valuable work and workers, today we find that half the remaining jobs are in danger of being automated out of existence. Of the 10 fastest-growing job categories, eight require less than a college degree. Over […]
Victoria Clayton: “Persistence is one of the great characteristics of a pitbull, and I guess owners take after their dogs,” says Annetta Cheek, the co-founder of the D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Plain Language. Cheek, an anthropologist by training who left academia in the early 1980s to work for the Federal Aviation Commission, is responsible for […]
James Suroweicki: Today, the for-profit-education bubble is deflating. Regulators have been cracking down on the industry’s misdeeds—most notably, lying about job-placement rates. In May, Corinthian Colleges, once the second-largest for-profit chain in the country, went bankrupt. Enrollment at the University of Phoenix has fallen by more than half since 2010; a few weeks ago, the […]
Melanie Trottman: The decline, which follows a longer-term slide in union membership rates in many countries, reflects a variety of factors. Legislation allowed some financially troubled companies to opt out of their bargaining agreements. The recession also made it more difficult to renew existing pacts. Meanwhile, some governments made it harder to negotiate national and […]
Beth Hawkins: In 2013, the education programs at Minnesota State University-Moorhead boasted a 100 percent employment rate for its graduates. A big, round number indeed — and only an incremental uptick from 2012 and 2011, when rates were 99 percent and 98 percent, respectively. That’s a higher rate than the one posted by Harvard Law. […]
Stephen Nichols: In more than 20 years of personal experience with coding, interacting with kids trying to learn code and observing users learning GameSalad, I’ve noticed that the vast majority of folks hit a wall early in the process. Academies like Code Academy boast 24 million+ users, but have few success stories, likely for the […]
Jeffrey Frderick: None of us like to be wrong. I’ve tested this with many audiences, asking them “how does it feel when you’re wrong?” “Embarrassing”, “humiliating” or simply “bad” are among the most common answers. Stop now and try and think of your own list of words to describe the feeling of being wrong. These […]
Kimberly Beltran: , according to a new analysis of scores from this year’s Common Core-aligned assessments. In a brief report that underscores large achievement gaps between student subgroups on the state’s new standardized tests, the non-profit Education Trust-West study revealed that on lists of the top 10 highest performing schools in English language arts and […]
Alexander Russo: While the NewsHour regrets the decision to include that particular mother and child without providing Ms. Moskowitz with an opportunity to respond, the NewsHour stands by the report.” As I wrote a couple of days ago, the emails posted between Merrow and Moskowitz seem to provide reassurance that she would be able to […]
NJ Education Aid: Unfortunately, New Jersey is bankrupt even without having to pay COLA benefits. The state pension funds are only 38% funded, the worst in the United States. In absolute terms, New Jersey’s debt is usually estimated at $85 billion, although some measures put New Jersey’s debt at twice that. New Jersey’s debt per […]
Elizabeth Woyke: the middle of LinkedIn’s Education Connect event last week, the company flashed a message across a big screen. It read: “We are committed to higher education and investing in its future.” It’s a message the professional networking site has spent the past 10 months preparing to deliver. It did so in-person at a […]
Laura Waters: The New Jersey Department of Education released the state’s first PARCC results yesterday afternoon. No surprises here: student proficiency scores were lower because the tests are actually aligned with grade-appropriate content, unlike N.J.’s now-defunct ASK and HSPA assessments. As NJ Spotlight reports, “The numbers were stark: Just 44 percent of third-graders and 36 […]
Jim Tankersly: According to new research, states with a high concentration of married couples experience faster economic growth, less child poverty and more economic mobility than states where fewer adults are married, even after controlling for a variety of economic and demographic factors. The study, from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for […]
Molly Worthen: BEFORE the semester began earlier this fall, I went to check out the classroom where I would be teaching an introductory American history course. Like most classrooms at my university, this one featured lots of helpful gadgets: a computer console linked to an audiovisual system, a projector screen that deploys at the touch […]
Michael Roth: Last week, I traveled to Singapore to attend the opening of a new liberal-arts college campus. That college is Yale-NUS—the product of a partnership forged about seven years ago between Yale and the National University of Singapore. Students and faculty have been working at the institution for a few years already, but this […]
Alan Borsuk: The key to the heated controversy: Carmen is a charter school. That means war. Carmen operates a high school a couple miles from Pulaski with a record of academic success. Carmen’s four-year graduation rates have been around 70% in recent years. Its most recent five-year graduation rate was 96%. By the way, the […]
David Brooks: Friends of mine have been raving about the documentary “Most Likely to Succeed,” and it’s easy to see what the excitement is about. The film is a bold indictment of the entire K-12 educational system. Greg Whiteley’s documentary argues that the American school system is ultimately built on a Prussian model designed over […]
Alfred Thompson: Garth Flint is one of my favorite bloggers. Garth teaches computer science in a smallish private Catholic school in Montana. This week he wrote a pair of articles that I REALLY like. In fact I think they are a must read for a lot of people. If you are the only teacher in […]
mosaic: When Velveth Monterroso arrived in the USA from her hometown in Guatemala, she weighed exactly 10 stone. But after a decade of living in Oklahoma, she was more than five stone heavier and fighting diabetes at the age of 34. This friendly woman, a mother of two children, is a living embodiment of the […]
: The article that turned Ms. Rice into an amateur researcher was by the legendary polymath Martin Gardner. His “Mathematical Games” series, which ran in Scientific American for more than 25 years, introduced millions worldwide to the joys of recreational mathematics. I read him in Mumbai as an undergraduate, and even dug up his original […]
Merve Emre This year alone, there have been close to 100 certification sessions in cities ranging from New York to Pasadena, Minneapolis, Portland, Houston, and the Foundation’s hometown of Gainesville, where participants get a $200 discount for making their way south to the belly of the beast. It is not unusual for sessions to sell […]
Dan Dempsey, via a kind email: Fact: Indian Schools cannot fill 10% of teaching positions with highly qualified teachers. It seems that the US Government is violating treaties. Recalling Arizona and wars and war settlements let us recall the “Long Walk of the Navajo” in 1864. Navajos were forced to walk up to thirteen miles […]
Barton Gellman Eugene Spafford, a Purdue professor of computer science who has held high clearances himself, wrote to me afterward. “We have a number of ‘junior security rangers’ on faculty and staff who tend to be ‘by the book.’ Unfortunately, once noted, that is something that cannot be unnoted.” Sure enough, someone filed a report […]
Kate Walsh: Writing in his always-entertaining blog a few weeks ago, Whitney Tilson gave a nice nod to Dan Willingham’s New York Times op-ed addressing the sorry state of American teacher preparation. Amid effusive praise of the piece, Whitney writes, “I think morphemes and phonemes matter too but maybe not as much as Willingham does.” […]
Jason Meisner and Juan Perez Jr.: The 23-count indictment alleges that almost immediately after Mayor Rahm Emanuel installed her as public schools chief in 2012, Byrd-Bennett began scheming with Gary Solomon and Thomas Vranas, co-owners of SUPES Academy, to secure the contracts to train principals and school administrators. In return, Byrd-Bennett was promised a “signing […]
Valerie Strauss: Striking Seattle School District teachers and other educators walk a picket line Sept. 10 near Franklin High School in Seattle. (Ted S. Warren/AP) Seattle teachers went on strike for a week this month with a list of goals for a new contract. By the time the strike officially ended this week, teachers had […]
Tim Walker: “The changes to kindergarten make me sick,” a veteran teacher in Arkansas recently admitted to me. “Think about what you did in first grade—that’s what my 5-year-old babies are expected to do.” The difference between first grade and kindergarten may not seem like much, but what I remember about my first-grade experience in […]
Rosa Brooks: If I had to pinpoint the single most important reason recent U.S. train-and-equip efforts have failed, I’d say it’s this: We consistently fail to understand that other people want to pursue what they see as their interests and objectives, not ours. We go into complex foreign conflicts with a profound ignorance of history, […]
James Stewart: While Scorecard adds potentially valuable information to the dizzying array that is already available, it suffers from many of the same flaws that afflict nearly every other college ranking system: There is no way to know what, if any, impact a particular college has on its graduates’ earnings, or life for that matter.
Laura Waters: But you have to understand where I’m coming from. My parents were both UFT members (my dad was a high school teacher and my mom was a high school social worker) and we practically davened to Albert Shanker, AFT’s founder. I knew all the words to Woody Guthrie’s labor hymn, “There Once was […]
Phillip Compeau, Pavel A. Pevzner: Three years ago, Moshe Vardi published an editorial in Communications expressing concerns about the pedagogical quality of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and including the sentiment, “If I had my wish, I would wave a wand and make MOOCs disappear.”9 His editorial was followed by studies highlighting various limitations of […]
Laura Waters: KIPP elementary schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on three of four measures of reading and mathematics skills. Consistent with prior research, KIPP middle schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on student achievement in math, reading, science, and social studies. Average impacts of middle schools were positive […]
Susie Cagle: Over the last few years, America’s for-profit college industry has come under increasing scrutiny, and in some cases, legal action. According to critics, programs offered by schools like Corinthian and its subsidiaries, scam students into expensive but ultimately worthless degree programs that leave them with high rates of loan default and low rates […]
Ian Vásquez: shows that in 1896, income per person in the United States and Argentina, two of the richest countries in the world, was about identical. Argentina subsequently eschewed the free market, replacing it with trade protectionism and other corporatist policies intended to help the poor by redistributing wealth. By 2010, Argentine income was a […]