schoolinfosystem.org
Molly Beck: Madison school officials are weighing property tax increases, significant program cuts and requiring employees to pay a portion of health insurance premiums to help close a huge budget deficit. About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive changes to employees’ health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward health insurance premiums, […]
The Economist: Some of the toughest decisions Mr Emanuel had to make in his first term concerned schools. He demanded merit pay for teachers and a longer school day (Chicago’s was only 5 hours 45 minutes) and earmarked for closure 50 half-empty schools in poor districts. Teachers went on strike for the first time in […]
Tap to view larger versions.Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff: In support of the continued work of developing a thriving workforce, the HR team conducted a survey of the 10 largest districts in the State of Wisconsin as well as districts in Dane County to provide a picture of our current compensation standing. It is our intent to develop […]
Madison School District (PDF): A. Alignment to Strategic Framework- In our vision to make every school a thriving school that prepares every student to be ready for college, career and community, these budget resources support the district’s goals and priorities as defined in our Strategic Framework. B. More equitable use of resources- As opposed to […]
Jessica Arp: “My main concern is that right now we are at a 20-year low in funding for public education so our public schools are already in a state of crisis,” Moffit said. Sierra disagrees and said vouchers are really about choice. “We pay taxes also,” Sierra said. “Nothing against public schools, but we decided […]
Hamilton Nolan: The 1%-vs-99% inequality dynamic that plagues America’s economy as a whole extends to the world of higher education. And the richest universities in America had a great year last year. This is not all that surprising, considering the fact that prestigious universities play a key role in the creation and perpetuation of America’s […]
Karen Herzog: UW System leaders also lobbied for up to $200 million in one-time state money “until we have full tuition authority.” That would have reduced the cut to $100 million over two years, instead of the $300 million Walker will propose when he releases full details of his budget Tuesday. In mid-November, UW-Madison Chancellor […]
John Judis: Jerry is in his late 50s. He is a sales representative in Southern Maryland for a multinational corporation. He has a college degree and makes about $80,000 a year. He considers himself a “moderate Democrat.” He voted for Obama in 2008 and O’Malley in 2010. He says of Obama in 2008, “He was […]
Matthew M. Chingos: The cost of standardized tests, long assailed by testing critics as too high, has resurfaced in the debate over reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act currently underway in Congress. The National Education Association (NEA) has argued that funds spent on testing could be “better spent on high-quality early childhood education, […]
Robert P. George and Yuval Levin, via Will Fitzhugh: “If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.” This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear […]
Poets & Quants: The year-over-year changes in MBA programs at the best business schools tend to be minuscule, if there are any changes at all. MBA experiences never undergo revolutionary change. Truth is, they evolve over time, little by little. So it may come as a surprise when an annually published ranking that purports to […]
Words API: In the English language, the most common words are incredibly common. Though there are at least 1 million words in the English language, “you”, “I”, and “the” account for 10% of the words we actually use. By the time you reach “is”, at number 10, you’ve covered 20%. The top 100 most common […]
Jane Brody: The damning criticism she endured, including a threat of arrest for child endangerment, intensified her desire to encourage anxious parents to give their children the freedom they need to develop the self-confidence and resilience to cope effectively with life’s many challenges. One result was the publication in 2009 of her book “Free Range […]
Lisa Krieger: Researchers have identified several geographic hot spots in the Bay Area where parents are not vaccinating their children, triggering concern about potential outbreaks of dangerous and preventable infectious diseases. This unique study — which uses statistical software to match electronic medical records to home addresses of Kaiser patients — reveals precisely where physicians […]
Rose Eveleth: Remember the group project? That horrible amalgamation of weird middle school pressures combined with some random assignment meant to foster both learning and teamwork? Maybe you had to design and build a mini-terrarium for fish out of a plastic bottle. Or write a play exploring the history of Rome. Or simply work with […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: The Department of Public Instruction chooses an English Language Arts standard each week and posts resources and ideas for practicing in the classroom and at home. The standard for the week of January 5 is phonics. Follow this link to the site http://dpi.wi.gov/my-wi-standards/ela/1-6-15 As is usually the case […]
Madison Teachers, Inc., via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF): For nearly 115 years, The University League of University of Wisconsin-Madison has provided opportunities for people with similar interests to get together to learn, to share information, and to form lasting friendships through interest groups, volunteer groups, social gatherings and scholarship benefits. They give more […]
Anna North: Self-control, curiosity, “grit” — these qualities may seem more personal than academic, but at some schools, they’re now part of the regular curriculum. Some researchers say personality could be even more important than intelligence when it comes to students’ success in school. But critics worry that the increasing focus on qualities like grit […]
Lani Guinier: A special lottery is to be held to select the student who will live in the only deluxe room in a dormitory. There are 100 seniors, 150 juniors, and 200 sophomores who applied. Each senior’s name is placed in the lottery 3 times; each junior’s name, 2 times; and each sophomore’s name, 1 […]
NY Times: This is not an easy problem to solve. But the state cannot just throw up its hands. It has a moral obligation to ensure that as many children as possible escape failing schools for ones that give them a fighting chance. And history has shown that districts can dramatically improve educational opportunities for […]
In 2013, Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said “What will be different, this time“? The Superintendent further cited Long Beach and Boston as beacons in her Rotary speech. However, based on recently released 2015-2016 budget slides (PDF) and Molly Beck’s summary, it appears that the same service, status quo governance model continues, unabated. A focus on […]
Via a kind reader’s email. Despite spending double the national average per student and delivering disastrous reading results – for years – Madison’s Superintendent pushes back on school accountability: The Wheeler Report (PDF): Dear Legislators: Thank you for your efforts to work on school accountability. We all agree that real accountability, focused on getting the […]
Matt Connolly In 1925, one of college football’s biggest stars did the unthinkable. Harold “Red” Grange, described by the famous sportswriter Damon Runyan as “three or four men rolled into one for football purposes,” decided to leave college early in order to play in the National Football League. While no fan today would begrudge an […]
The Economist: DR BOB SEARS, a paediatrician from Orange County, California, does not like to call his patients “free-riders”. True, he specialises in treating vaccine-sceptics, those families who resent being told to immunise their children against nasty diseases, from measles to whooping cough. It is also the case that, as a trained doctor, he believes […]
The Economist: The main reason for the closures is financial. Catholic schools used to be financed by tuition payments, with help from the parish and archdiocese to fill the gaps. But demography has undermined this model. In 1950 76% of all Catholics lived in the north-east and the Midwest, which is where most of the […]
Tim Damos: The number of Wisconsinites who received a high school equivalency certification plummeted by 92 percent this year, in part due to more rigorous standards and an increase in testing fees. Officials say the switch to a new General Education Development test this year was necessary to better prepare graduates for today’s workforce, and […]
Wisconsin State Journal: Last month, Yvette Updike coached the Platteville girls volleyball team to its first WIAA state tournament appearance in 20 years. Last week, Updike lost her coaching job. On Dec. 10, the Platteville School Board decided against renewing Updike’s contract, adding another chapter — perhaps not the final one — to a long-running […]
Anthony Cody: There is growing evidence that the corporate-sponsored education reform project is on its last legs. The crazy patchwork of half-assed solutions on offer for the past decade have one by one failed to deliver, and one by one they are falling. Can the edifice survive once its pillars of support have crumbled? Teach […]
Keith Oatley & Maja Djikic: As parents, for example, we urge our children to discover what will engage them, in a career perhaps, or in a relationship. And although we may wish that a spouse would be a bit more like this or that, we also know that the best kind of love enables someone […]
Data is Beautiful: [–]captainskybeard 1752 Punkte 6 Monate zuvor I love how, with a simple visualization, it’s immediately and completely obvious what is happening in the data. To those who don’t get it: graders are bumping up students who are just below the 30% pass line. Essays are subjective so they have some grading flexibility. […]
Michael Dannenberg (PDF): Teacher Preparation explains more of the variance in K-12 achievement than all other teacher characteristics. Unfortunately, teacher education programs do not have especially high entry standards. Worse, traditional teacher education programs appear to have relatively low performance standards. Related: When A stands for average.
dog Lederman: Universities are awarding doctoral degrees at an accelerating pace, despite the fact that the career prospects of those who receive their Ph.D.s appear to be worsening. That dichotomy is among the starker findings of the annual data on doctorate recipients from the National Science Foundation, drawn from a survey sponsored by the foundation […]
Dave Umhoefer: So we did our own look at reading scores at all Milwaukee schools fitting the 80/80 description, including high schools and separate elementary and middle schools that include smaller groupings of grades. Our main data source: the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Why are officials focusing on these schools at all? High-poverty schools […]
Luisa Kroll, via a kind Erich Zellmer email: A vision for the future of education sits within a converted church in the heart of a working-class neighborhood in northern Houston, abutted by auto parts stores and a heat treatment plant. At YES Prep North Central, homogeneity reigns: Of the 953 middle and high schoolers at […]
LA School Report: Following the most recent bargaining session last Thursday, the teachers’ union, UTLA, has reportedly rejected a pay increase offer from LA Unified negotiators that fell short its goal of a 10 percent salary increase. The latest district offer included a 2 percent salary increase retroactive to July 1, a 2 percent lump-sum […]
UK Secretary of Education: It is a persistent undercurrent in English educational debate, but it is peculiarly English: should academic selection at the age of 11 be restored? Boris Johnson, perhaps in response to perceived UKIP pressure, has declared himself in favour of more grammar schools, and Teresa May, more cautiously, has welcomed plans for […]
Erin Richards: When it comes to how fast teachers can climb the salary ladder, Milwaukee Public Schools is a better than average place to work, according to a new report that studies the nuances of teacher compensation in more than 100 large districts. After adjusting for cost-of-living, the report ranked Milwaukee 16th among the big-city […]
Jordan Weissman: OK, slight exaggeration. But with applications in free fall, schools are locked in a brutal competition to attract students who might theoretically one day be qualified to sit for a bar exam. And that, the New York Times reports today, has meant slashing tuition and dolling out discounts. At Northwestern University School of […]
priceonomics: The speakers at TED conferences give the type of presentations that public speaking coaches use as examples of effective presentation skills. They open with arresting images or stories that engage the audience, speak clearly and passionately, and illustrate each of their points with concise evidence or examples. TED Talks are also slick productions. The […]
Rishawn Biddle: The National Education Association just filed its 2013-2014 LM-2 filing with the U.S. Department of Labor, and once again, it spent big to preserve its declining influence over education policymaking. The nation’s largest teachers’ unions spent $132 million on lobbying and contributions to what are supposed to be like-minded organizations, a slight increase […]
Leslie Anne Jones: It obviously wouldn’t be ethical to test for the effects of a whole childhood spent in front of screens on children. A few years ago, researchers came up with perhaps the next best thing. Affixing colorful lights and speakers broadcasting Cartoon Network sounds to mouse cages, they subjected young mice to six […]
Virginia Postrel: Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world. It’s the quickest way to get the lowdown on the Battle of Nashville, find out exactly how old Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, or discover who invented Hot Pockets. You can find more authoritative specialized resources online—from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to IMDb— […]
Tom Bennett: I want to talk about a topic so volatile and delicate it could be a kitten made of nitroglycerin: subject knowledge. And, for once, I don’t mean looking at what children know, because that’s a discussion that can currently be enjoyed on channels 1-100 on your Sky box (other cable providers are, of […]
Janet Lorin: In 2013-2014, the number of Chinese students in the U.S. rose 8.1 percent from a year earlier, while those from India swelled by 17 percent, the IIE said. Foreigners are attractive to colleges because they bring diversity to campuses and many pay full freight. That’s a boon to schools, which doled out about […]
Molly Hensley-Clancy Not long ago, Amber Brown, a student at Everest University, saw an article on Facebook about one of the many lawsuits against her school. The story, she wrote to BuzzFeed News, “dumbfounded” her: It mentioned former students facing mountains of debt for their degrees, but that didn’t seem to apply to her. Brown […]
Dropout Nation, via a kind reader: Yesterday’s revelation by Washington Free Beacon of documents detailing how secretive progressive outfit Democracy Alliance coordinated its unsuccessful efforts to elect Democratic candidates during this year’s election cycle have certainly stirred discussion. After all, for all the carping of progressive groups (especially education traditionalists) this year over the role […]
Open Culture: This summer, we revisited a literacy test from the Jim Crow South. Given predominantly to African-Americans living in Louisiana in 1964, the test consisted of 30 ambiguous questions to be answered in 10 minutes. One wrong answer, and the test-taker was denied the right to vote. It was all part of the South’s […]
National Council on Teacher Quality: Using evidence from more than 500 colleges and universities producing nearly half of the nation’s new teachers annually, this report answers two questions that go to the heart of whether the demands of teacher preparation are well matched to the demands of the classroom: Are teacher candidates graded too easily, […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: IDA Dyslexia Handbook: What Every Family Should Know is now available online Free Open LETRS Training An overview of the professional development program Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling. This session is especially for district administrators: superintendents, curriculum directors, special education directors, reading specialists, principals, etc. […]
Patrick L. Baude, Marcus Casey, Eric A. Hanushek, Steven G. Rivkin: Studies of the charter school sector typically focus on head-to-head comparisons of charter and traditional schools at a point in time, but the expansion of parental choice and relaxation of constraints on school operations is unlikely to raise school quality overnight. Rather, the success […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF): AFL-CIO Wisconsin President Phil Neuenfeldt presented MTI activist Michele Ritt with the State Union’s Public Sector Organizer of the Year Award, at last Tuesday’s MTI Faculty Representative Council meeting. Neuenfeldt commented that in spite of Governor Walker’s pledge to “divide and conquer” public […]
Madison School District Administration (PDF): MMSD received a total of 3,081 responses to the online survey. However, only Question #1 received the maximum number of responses; Questions #2-13 averaged around 2,200 respondents. Normally, a response rate is calculated by dividing the number of responses by the number of invitations to complete the survey. However, it […]
James Suroweicki: The arms race centers on an obsessive scrutiny of every aspect of training and performance. Trainers today emphasize sports-specific training over generalized conditioning: if you’re a baseball player, you work on rotational power; if you’re a sprinter, on straight-line explosive power. All sorts of tools have been developed to improve vision, reaction time, […]
Jason Grotto and Heather Gillers,: Fresh from the world of high-stakes trading, David Vitale arrived at Chicago Public Schools a decade ago with a plan to transform the way it borrowed money. With the district thirsty for cheap cash, plain old municipal bonds weren’t good enough anymore, and banks were standing by with attractive new […]
Meg Bernhard: STANFORD, Calif.—Stanford buzzes. Walk across any of the 8,000-plus acres of earthy-red tiles and dusty, rolling hills of the university’s grounds and you’ll find yourself dodging hundreds of bicycles, whose moving gears and wheels make the campus hum. More than 13,000 bikes belonging to students and faculty traverse campus daily, according to the […]
Richard Fry: Share of College Graduates From High-Income Families who Borrow Has DoubledIn 2012, a record share of the nation’s new college graduates (69%) had taken out student loans to finance their education, and the typical amount they had borrowed was more than twice that of college graduates 20 years ago. A new Pew Research […]
Steve Cohen: College-application season is shifting into high gear, and with it comes anxiety and abuses—on both sides of the admissions desk. Some wealthy parents will pay private counselors more than $40,000 for “tweaking” their kids’ essays, on the implicit promise that these consultants have connections inside admissions offices, where many once worked. For their […]
Jenna Pizzi: For students from third to eighth grades, achievement has remained stagnant over the last five years. Last school year, the district had 26.9 percent of third graders ranked as proficient or above in language arts. That proficiency stayed in the low 20 percent range for grades four through seven. In eighth grade, 42.2 […]
PBS Newshour: JOHN TULENKO: Last month, about 1,000 ninth graders marched to the football field at Northeast High School for a very different kind of kickoff ceremony. WOMAN: We are doing a mock graduation. It’s an opportunity for our incoming ninth grade class to make a commitment. We want to put the urge in them […]
Caroline Porter: The campaign for California’s top education post, typically a low-wattage contest, has become this state’s hottest race because of a division among Democrats over tenure rules and other policies that diminish teachers’ union power. One sign of the high attention: Nearly $30 million has been spent on campaigns for the postof state superintendent […]
Jason Karaian & Matt Phillips: 4. America’s escalating student debt… The stock of outstanding student debt in the US has surged to more than $1.1 trillion. This isn’t all bad news—more people are in college, which is a good thing. But some economists suggest that the burden of student debt is reshaping the spending patterns […]
Daisy Christodoulou: Today the Sutton Trust and the University of Durham have published a fascinating new report called What Makes Great Teaching? It sets out to answer that title question, as well as looking at ways we can measure great teaching, and how that could be used to promote better learning. Here is my short […]
Issie Lapowsky: Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn’t to prepare students for a career. It’s to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point. Nelson is the founder and CEO of a new experiment in higher education called Minerva Project. He says when it comes […]
Frank Bruni: More than halfway through Joel Klein’s forthcoming book on his time as the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, he zeros in on what he calls “the biggest factor in the education equation.” It’s not classroom size, school choice or the Common Core. It’s “teacher quality,” he writes, adding that “a great […]
Brian Rosenberg: I have read many responses to the report of corruption at Chapel Hill. Some argue that those at the center of the activities were simply trying to help at-risk students, to which my response is that awarding credits and grades without providing instruction is not “help” in any sense that I can accept. […]
Chris Rickert: It’s no surprise Democratic nominee for governor and Madison School Board member Mary Burke isn’t saying how she plans to vote Monday on a proposed school district budget that includes a $100 tax increase for the average homeowner. For purely political reasons, dropping that particular dime would be a pretty dumb thing to […]
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 […]
Madison School District PDF: For MMSD, the most important aspect of multi-year budget planning is the careful use of ‘unused tax levy authority’ which can be carried forward from one year to the next. For 2014-15, the budget has available just over $8.8 million of ‘unused tax levy authority’ which was carried forward from 2013-14.1 […]
Nick Grantham: In this fascinating and inspiring TEDx talk, Philip Kovacs, Associate Professor of Education at UAH in Huntsville, discusses how he is working to convince schools and school systems to stop using textbooks and instead to harness the power of the web. I first came across Philip’s work after reading a brilliant piece he […]
Brooke Powers: Before Common Core I was a typical math teacher. I had my curriculum maps and and state standards which read like a skill and drill check list that I marked off one by one whether the kids understood them or not. I used really “great” methods and math terminology like “butterfly method”, “keep […]
Laura Waters: The New Jersey Senate Education Committee heard testimony on Sen. Teresa Ruiz’s new charter school bill on Oct. 16. One of the lobbyists there was New Jersey Education Association President Wendell Steinhauer. As he approached the podium you couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. This well-spoken and diplomatic head of New Jersey’s […]
OETC: Big data is coming to education; the next step is figuring out how to use it. Horace Dediu is an expert at using big data to understand technology’s accelerating development. He has been interviewed by Forbes, Fortune, and various other news sources as an Apple expert, and his independent blog, Asymco, is filled with […]
Aaron Renn: This is an absolute blowout, with a massive amount of red on the map showing areas to which Chicago is actually losing young adults. Honestly, this only makes sense given the well known headline negative domestic migration numbers for Chicago. I do find it interesting that there’s a strong draw from Michigan. Clearly […]
Andrada Fiscutean: Students who want to dodge the tens of thousands of euros in fees and living expenses that come with getting a degree in IT might want to consider Romania. Landing a good job in technology often means spending several years at university, and racking up a huge bill. However, there are ways to […]
Barry Garelick, via a kind email: Back in September, when I was doing my sub-assignment for the high school, I attended a math department meeting the day before school began. Sally from the District office presided, and among the many things she told us at that session was that this year the students in the […]
Kevin Roose interviews Wisconsin native Marc Andreesen: But let’s just project forward. In ten years, what if we had Math 101 online, and what if it was well regarded and you got fully accredited and certified? What if we knew that we were going to have a million students per semester? And what if we […]
Laura Waters: Last Thursday, the New Jersey Senate Education Committee heard testimony on Sen. Teresa Ruiz’s new charter school bill. One of the lobbyists there was New Jersey Education Association President Wendell Steinhauer and as he approached the podium you couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy. This well-spoken and diplomatic head of NJ’s […]
Davud Edwards: Are Americans getting dumber? Our math skills are falling. Our reading skills are weakening. Our children have become less literate than children in many developed countries. But the crisis in American education may be more than a matter of sliding rankings on world educational performance scales. Our kids learn within a system of […]
Marketplace: Illinois based-Paragon Marketing Group is working on a deal to bring high school football to a national audience. The group – which brought LeBron James’s high school basketball games to TV – is currently in negotiations with several states and ESPN to bring some type of high school football playoff to television. ESPN wouldn’t […]
Dave Girard: Last November, my father took his own life. I’m frequently aware of the fact that the depression which helped drive him to that dark fate lives on in my genes. That’s a doozy of a legacy to inherit, but it’s one that has not been wholly negative for me. Getting to the point […]
Beth Akers: In response to growing concerns over the issue of higher education finance, policy makers, advocates, and entrepreneurs have developed and proposed an array of solutions to address the shortcomings of our current system. Income Share Agreements (ISAs) are one such proposal that deserves more attention. ISAs allow students to raise funds to pay […]
Via a kind Will Fitzhugh email: The Concord Review Academic Coaching Service, founded in 2014, provides individual online guidance for students worldwide in writing high-caliber history and social-science research papers of around 6,000 words or more. Our service provides the necessary support for high school students who are able to and interested in going academically […]
Matthew M. Chingos, Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst & Katharine M. Lindquist: Superintendents are highly visible actors in the American education system. As the highest ranking official in a school district, the superintendent receives a lot of credit when things go well, and just as much blame when they don’t. But should they? Research emerging over […]
Pamela Druckerman: I recently spent the afternoon with some Norwegians who are making a documentary about French child-rearing. Why would people in one of the world’s most successful countries care how anyone else raises kids? In Norway “we have brats, child kings, and many of us suffer from hyper-parenting. We’re spoiling them,” explained the producer, […]
Ilya Somin: On several important issues, majority opinion has actually flipped over the last forty years, shifting from a majority in favor of federal dominance to a majority against it. For example, the percentage of Americans who believe that state or local government should make the major decisions on drug policy has increased from 39% […]
Sonali Kohli: Princeton University faculty voted to end their practice of grade deflation, bowing to concerns that it creates a negative campus atmosphere and can be a turnoff for applicants to the school. For the past 10 years, each department had been asked to give A’s to no more than 35% of course work—the intent […]
Motoko Rich: Monica DeSantiago wondered how in the world she would get the students to respect her. It was the beginning of her yearlong apprenticeship as a math teacher at Berkley Maynard Academy, a charter school in this diverse city east of San Francisco. The petite, soft-spoken Ms. DeSantiago, 23, had heard the incoming sixth […]
Jeffrey Blitz: One Saturday afternoon last month, six second graders from P.S. 295 in Brooklyn got a head start on the fine-dining life when they visited the acclaimed French restaurant Daniel. There, five waiters presented them with a seven-course tasting menu (after the trio of canapés and an amuse-bouche, naturellement). The meal was overseen by […]
Ulrich Boser, Megan Wilhelm, and Robert Hanna: People do better when more is expected of them. In education circles, this is called the Pygmalion Effect. It has been demonstrated in study after study, and the results can sometimes be quite significant. In one research project, for instance, teacher expectations of a pre-schooler’s ability was a […]
Barry Garelick, via a kind email: Mrs. Halloran, the teacher for whom I was subbing, was known for her strictness. On the day I met with her, she had me observe some of her classes and she introduced me. She told the students “I expect you all to behave well with Mr. Garelick. He and […]
Rebecca Winthrop and Eileen McGivney: This week, we’re focusing on the challenges facing millions of marginalized girls who can’t access a safe, high-quality education. Yesterday we explored the data on enrollment, child marriage and attacks against girls’ education and identified hotspots—areas where girls do not have the same access to education as boys. Today, we […]
Jay Matthews: A new book out by nationally known gifted-education expert James R. Delisle, a former fifth grade special education teacher and Kent State University professor, says our schools are making war on our nation’s finest young minds by failing to fund enough programs for the gifted. What’s the problem with that? He — and […]
Liz Peek: Unfortunately, it turnsout the numbers are bogus. In keeping with a White House that talks a good game on transparency but that is cloaked in secrecy, the Department of Education moved the goalposts at the last minute, changing how the default rates were calculated and thus sparing some colleges from tough penalties. It […]
Edoardo Porter: In 1987, when he was Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, the conservative culture warrior William J. Bennett wrote a famous essay denouncing federal aid for higher education because it allowed colleges “blithely to raise their tuitions,” at little benefit to students. Nearly two decades later, it seems, he was broadly right. Indeed, he didn’t […]
Ginia Bellafonte: On a Friday afternoon last spring, Dennis D’Amelio, an artist and teacher in late middle age was presiding over a class in color theory at LaGuardia Community College, whose location in the immigrant hub of western Queens makes it one of the most ethnically diverse colleges in the country. It was the end […]
Bob Herbert: Bill Gates had an idea. He was passionate about it, absolutely sure he had a winner. His idea? America’s high schools were too big. When a multibillionaire gets an idea, just about everybody leans in to listen. And when that idea has to do with matters of important public policy and the billionaire […]
Nate Hoffelder: Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues. A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe’s DRm for educational purposes when they noticed that Digital Editions […]
Meghan Murphy: For an entire school year Hillsborough, New Jersey, educators undertook an experiment, asking: Is the iPad really the best device for interactive learning? It’s a question that has been on many minds since 2010, when Apple released the iPad and schools began experimenting with it. The devices came along at a time when […]
Anthony Sanders US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew repeated First Lady Michelle Obama’s talking points that “the US Economy is Moving Strongly in the Right Direction!” It has been six years since the Great Recession ended in June 2009. This misleading statement will be repeated many, many times leading up to the mid-term elections in November. […]
Adam Grant: THE college admissions system is broken. When students submit applications, colleges learn a great deal about their competence from grades and test scores, but remain in the dark about their creativity and character. Essays, recommendation letters and alumni interviews provide incomplete information about students’ values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing […]