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Simpson Street Free Press: Simpson Street Free Press hosted an MMSD School Board Forum for Seat #5 on Feb. 16, 2019. Candidates fielded questions from MMSD students and parents. Voting for the primary races is on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. You can find out where your voting poll is by visiting https://myvote.wi.gov/en-US/FindMyPol…. Thank you to […]
Matthew Continetti: Not any more. If the death of the socialist idea was the most important political event of the last century, then the rebirth of this ideal must rank high in significance in the current one. Just as nationalism has reasserted itself on the political right, socialism has grown in force on the left. […]
Eric Alterman: I do not refer to the obvious and ineluctable fact that some people are smarter than others but, rather, to the fact that some people have the resources to try to understand our society while most do not. Late last year, Benjamin M. Schmidt, a professor of history at Northeastern University, published a […]
Amos Roe: What defines a good school? Nearly every report, comparison or analysis on education labors under the assumption that this can be found in some form of test scores. Ever since No Child Left Behind made its debut in 2001, top-down government-funded education has proceeded from one failed experiment to another. Testing is now […]
Brett Robinson: Therefore, the number one priority of advertisers is making sure that the new mediums built to sustain the next generation of marketing efforts appear as human and natural as possible as they enter the cultural slipstream. The medium is still the message. We are in the midst of a vast re-education program about […]
Andrew German, Shepard Goel and Daniel Ho: Yet setting aside legacies and athletes, Asian American applicants are still admitted at lower rates than whites with comparable academic and extracurricular records. This remaining disparity largely boils down to admissions decisions based on personality, geography, and family. Harvard assesses the “personal” qualities of applicants on a scale […]
Chris Rickert: Endorsements in this month’s School Board primary from the influential Madison teachers union include one for a candidate who sends her two children to the kind of charter school strongly opposed by the union. Madison Teachers Inc. this week endorsed Ali Muldrow over David Blaska, Laila Borokhim and Albert Bryan for Seat 4; […]
I’ve added the following audio recordings to the 2019 Madison School Board Candidate page. WORT FM Candidate discussion 2.5.2019 Cris Carusi and Kaleem Caire [mp3 audio] Mr. Caire: “If we don’t reach our benchmarks in five years, they can shut us down”. There is no public school in Madison that has closed because only 7 […]
Negassi Tesfamichael: MTI cited Carusi’s opposition to voucher and independent charter schools in its endorsement. “Carusi is opposed to vouchers and independent charter schools and strongly believes that we need to continuously work to improve our public schools, rather than support alternatives,” MTI’s endorsement said. Caire’s One City Schools, which expanded from One City Early […]
John Thornton: As universities never tire of pointing out, education is more than the mere transmission of knowledge. It is about formation. Professors and administrators all impressed this upon me often during my years as an undergraduate and later at seminary. At Baylor, a Baptist institution, this took the form of weekly chapel services and […]
Erin Hinrichs: “Minnesota has a state of emergency regarding literacy. I’m very disappointed with where we’re at right now with the persistent reading success gap between white students and students of color,” he said Wednesday. “We are not making adequate progress, and the future of tens of thousands of our students is seriously at risk […]
Chris Rickert: According to emails released to the State Journal under the state’s open records law, Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham on Sept. 10 asked her chief of staff, Ricardo Jara, and other front-office officials whether Arbor was “worth trying to stop? Or change somehow? If so, how?” Cheatham expressed the district’s opposition to the school in […]
Christopher Osher: But districts are free to use their READ Act per-pupil funds on whatever curriculum they want, even on interventions researchers have found ineffective. “Typically, as with any education policy, we’re only given so much authority on what we can tell districts to do and what we monitor for,” Colsman said in an interview […]
Matt Barnum: Until last year, when he became Chicago Public Schools’ chief equity officer, Maurice Swinney was a high school principal pulling out all the stops to keep ninth-graders from failing their classes. At Tilden Career Community Academy, Swinney made it a priority to connect incoming students to the school community and to have a […]
Adam Minter: Who says government can’t innovate? In one Chinese city, the local court system recently launched a smartphone-based map that displays the location and identity of anyone within 500 meters who’s landed on a government creditworthiness blacklist. Worried the person seated next to you at Starbucks might not have paid a court-approved fine? The […]
Negassi Tesfamichael: With the Madison School Board primary election less than a month away, a crowded field of nine candidates will make their case to voters in the coming weeks, starting with a forum on Feb. 5. Here’s a closer look at how candidates are making their case to voters. Seat 3 Kaleem Caire, an […]
Negassi Tesfamichael: Nearly all current candidates for the Madison School Board have started to make their case to voters and potential endorsers as the primary election heats up. That included answering questions from Madison Teachers Inc., the city’s teachers’ union. Nine candidates are running for three seats on the seven-person School Board. MTI executive director […]
Laurie Frost and Heff Henriques: Children who are not proficient readers by fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of school. Additionally, two-thirds of them will end up in prison or on welfare. Though these dismal trajectories are well known, Madison School District’s reading scores for minority students remain unconscionably low and […]
Negassi Tesfamichael m: Why are all of the Madison School Board seats at-large? The answer lies in state law. Tucked into a section of state statutes about how school boards and districts are organized is a requirement that applies directly to MMSD. The requirement says that unified school districts — such as MMSD — “that […]
Tired of Lyong for Google: I was involved in the internal decisions involving James Damore’s memo, and it’s terrible what we did to him. First of all, we knew about the memo a month before it went viral. HR sent it up the reporting chain when he gave it as internal feedback, but we did […]
The Grade: There are two main reasons why Eliza Shapiro’s New York Times piece, Why Black Parents Are Turning to Afrocentric Schools, is this week’s best. The first is that it’s a really well-written piece of journalism. The second is that it addresses an important and previously under-covered topic: parents of color interested in alternatives […]
James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose: This essay, although hopefully accessible to everyone, is the most thorough breakdown of the study and written for those who are already somewhat familiar with the problems of ideologically-motivated scholarship, radical skepticism and cultural constructivism. Part I: Introduction Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain […]
Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.: Last year I ventured the hope that one of these letters might start by reporting a “placid, relaxed year” in higher education. Well, 2018 was not yet that kind of year, but it’s fair to say that some of the turmoil and difficulty of recent times did abate a bit. Tuition […]
Chris Rickert: In March 2016, Cheatham said that it was her intent to make OEO “obsolete — that our schools will be serving students so well that there isn’t a need.” Since then, the district has tried to keep tabs on any new charter proposals for Madison, going so far as to send former School […]
Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques: Dear Editor: We read “The new math: how data is changing the way teachers teach” with great interest. We learned that for freshmen at East High School, coming to school 90 percent of the time, having a 3.0 grade point average, and having no more than two failing grades is […]
Points and figures Have you heard of Bill Easterly? He is an economics professor at NYU. He wrote a book, The Tyranny of Experts. I’d suggest that you read it. It seems as though everyone is quoting from Hillbilly Elegy these days and I think I’d rather see them pick up the ethos of this […]
Evan Goldstein: The book was supposed to end with the inauguration of Barack Obama. That was Jill Lepore’s plan when she began work in 2015 on her new history of America, These Truths (W.W. Norton). She had arrived at the Civil War when Donald J. Trump was elected. Not to alter the ending, she has […]
<a href=”https://madison.com/ct/news/local/education/democratic-legislators-look-to-make-big-changes-to-state-education/article_882a0ddd-3671-5769-b969-dd9d2bc795db.html”>Negassi Tesfamichael</a>: <blockquote> Many local Democratic state legislators say much of the future of K-12 education in Wisconsin depends on the outcome of the Nov. 6 election, particularly the gubernatorial race between state superintendent Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Legislators spoke at a forum at Christ Presbyterian Church Wednesday night, […]
Nicole Hong and Melissa Korn: This year, 42,749 students applied to Harvard College, and only 1,962 were admitted. How Harvard decides who makes the cut has long been a mystery. That’s about to change. A trial beginning Monday in Boston federal court will examine how the elite institution uses race to shape its student body. […]
The Economist: EVERY other Tuesday at Facebook, and every Friday at YouTube, executives convene to debate the latest problems with hate speech, misinformation and other disturbing content on their platforms, and decide what should be removed or left alone. In San Bruno, Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s boss, personally oversees the exercise. In Menlo Park, lower-level execs […]
Gail Heriot: This essay discusses the aftermath of Proposition 209, which prohibits (among other things) discrimination and preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity in public education. As its proponents predicted, when campuses of the University of California stopped engaging in race-preferential admissions, the number of African-American and Hispanic students decreased at the most-highly ranked […]
Yanan Wang: The sight of five burly guards blocking the way out of her dorm filled Ren Liping with rage. It was 3 a.m. on a recent Saturday and the thin, bespectacled 26-year-old Chinese graduate student was exhausted. Her mind raced back to earlier in the day when she had tried once again to publicly […]
Isaac Stone Fish: There is an epidemic of self-censorship at U.S. universities on the subject of China, one that limits debate and funnels students and academics away from topics likely to offend the Chinese Communist Party. This epidemic stems less from the hundreds of millions of dollars Chinese individuals and the Chinese Communist Party spend […]
Christopher Barca: According to the Democratic nominee in the 14th Congressional District, she and the dozens of area residents who attended the event “talked about race, immigration, healthcare, disability rights and housing.” But unless you were in the room on Sunday, you won’t know what specific community problems were mentioned or how Ocasio-Cortez planned to […]
Victor Davis Hanson: But do the degreed classes, at least outside math, the sciences, engineering, and medicine, merit such esteem anymore? Anthony Scaramucci’s Harvard Law degree seemed no guarantee of the Mooch’s circumspection, sobriety, or good judgement. Bruce Ohr’s similar degree did not ensure either common sense or simple ethics. Or, on the contrary, perhaps […]
Natasha Warikoo and Nadirah Farah Foley: That question is being debated in Massachusetts, where court papers argue over Harvard’s use of race in its “holistic” admissions process, and in New York City, where politicians are trying to increase the number of black and Latino students at top public high schools. But the answer has always […]
Kate Stringer: Nearly two-thirds of Americans — even a majority of those in labor households — believe workers should be able to choose whether or not they pay union dues, according to a new poll released just days before the Supreme Court is expected to make a major ruling on the issue in the case […]
Shane Vander Hart, via a kind Will Fitzhugh email: Last week, Long Island Business News reported that yet another billionaire philanthropist will be throwing more money at what ails K-12 education, this time focusing on social-emotional learning. Adina Genn reporting for the publication wrote: Billionaire T. Denny Sanford visited a Rockville Centre elementary school Wednesday […]
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 […]
Fran Spielman and Lauren FitzPatrick : “All adults offer apology. I offer my apology. But the question is, what are we gonna do now besides words? What are the deeds to fix this up?” Emanuel said. “I take responsibility. … I’m accountable for me,” he said. But Emanuel was quick to note that the sexual […]
Said Jilani: Authors Jonathan Wai, a research fellow at Geisinger Health System at the Autism and Developmental Medicine Institute, and Kaja Perina, the editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, collected a sample of 1,979 employees working at two of America’s most prominent and influential newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, during 2016. They […]
Matthew Walther: Baring-Gould was born in Exeter in 1834 to the daughter of an admiral and a former lieutenant in an Indian cavalry regiment. Much of his early life was spent in continental travel with his family. A sickly child, he attended school for two noncontiguous years and was otherwise instructed by private tutors. After […]
Sebastian Heilmann: When China’s Communists hold their 19th Party Congress in October, the choreography of the event will be as stiff as ever and broadcast the image of a rigid and unchanging political system. This image is wrong. With the help of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, the Chinese leadership is thoroughly reshaping its approach […]
Amy Wax: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” observed― Philip K. Dick in “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.” Somewhere deep in a file drawer, or on a computer server humming away in a basement, are thousands upon thousands of numbers, with names and identities attached. They’re called […]
Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce and Kevin Quealy: Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children. White […]
Tim Alberta: Indeed, the senator has spent plenty of time lately at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. When the unified Republican government made tax reform its top priority—after failing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act—he emerged as a star player, one of four senators who crafted the legislation and worked alongside the administration to win […]
Pam Louwagie: Students in Duluth will no longer automatically get schooled in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or the trials of Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In an effort to be considerate of all students, the two novels, which contain racial slurs, will no longer be required reading in the district’s English classes […]
Pam Louwagie: Students in Duluth will no longer automatically get schooled in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or the trials of Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In an effort to be considerate of all students, the two novels, which contain racial slurs, will no longer be required reading in the district’s English classes […]
Bill Donahue: the U.S. and landed in western Maine. They planned to grow potatoes. Instead they were taken in for a summer by a kind family, the Adamses, whose ramshackle farm was a mess, a melange of dogs and cows and chickens and broken tractor equipment. To Bernd, the place was paradise, as he writes […]
Susie Boyt: Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a subtle, intelligent and quietly explosive study not just of a woman whose Little House books have sold more than 60m copies in 45 languages, but of a very particular way of life, the life of the American pioneer. Looking deeply […]
Leslie Brody: As the private Dwight School in Manhattan gears up to open a new campus, it is recruiting dozens of American teachers with perks such as free housing and tuition for their children. The rub is that the new site is almost 7,000 miles away in Dubai, a city on the Persian Gulf where […]
David Dayen: The Beginning of a Backlash “I think you do enormous good … but your power sometimes scares me,” said Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana in October to the general counsels of Facebook, Google, and Twitter at the first major congressional hearing on Big Tech in years. The topic was Russian interference with […]
Warren Treadgold: Not so long ago, leftists on campus insisted that there was no discrimination against conservatives in academic hiring. They claimed professors were hired on the basis of merit (and “diversity”), and few if any meritorious (or “diverse”) conservatives wanted to be professors anyway. The left now has a new and better argument for […]
Annalee Newitz: To be more precise, it only takes three or more stories from small news outlets covering the same topic to make discussions of that topic go up by 62.7 percent on Twitter. It took a group of Harvard researchers five years to reach this conclusion. They did it by tracking the effects of […]
Heather Mac Donald: Another academic year, another fattening of campus diversity bureaucracies. Most worrisomely, the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields are now prime targets for administrative diversity encroachment, with the commercial tech sector rapidly following suit. The most significant new diversity sinecure has been established at the University of California, Los Angeles, where […]
Joe Kolman:: The photograph on the college website shows a confident, happy, young African-American woman using a bullhorn to address more than a hundred overwhelmingly white students holding protest signs. It was taken at a Black Lives Matter protest at Reed College, my alma mater, in September 2016. It was a beautiful day in Portland, […]
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 […]
Katherine Kersten: Editor’s note: A longer version of this article appears in the fall issue of ‘Thinking Minnesota,’ a publication of the Center of the American Experiment. For years, the Edina Public Schools (EPS) have been one of the brightest stars in the firmament of Minnesota public education. Parents who moved to the affluent Twin […]
Rachel Cohen: One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that […]
Tom Moran: Brace yourself: The top five officers earned an average of $764,000 in compensation in 2015. The big winner was the executive director, Ed Richardson, who pulled in $1.2 million, roughly twice what the national union pays its executive director. These are union folks, remember, the same ones who rail about economic injustice. The […]
Kashmir Hill But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was […]
K Social managements’ roots are in the core ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP defines itself as the “vanguard of the people”—the Leninist idea that a small group of scientifically guided and educated cadres can lead the people in the direction of social equality and prosperity. Mao Zedong’s organizational guide, the “mass line” […]
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 […]
Janan Ganesh: On top of its book sales, film adaptation and third life as an opera, The Bonfire of the Vanities achieved a rare feat. It turned its author into a 56-year-old enfant terrible. Thirty years have passed since Tom Wolfe’s first novel imagined New York City as an opulent failed state, where millionaires are […]
Doyin Oyeniyi: Since the New York Times‘ report, there have been other articles exploring how wealth affects the admissions process more than affirmative action. Even in Fisher’s suit against UT Austin, she was unable to support her claims of being racially discriminated against in the admissions process. In fact, in a ProPublica report, Nikole Hannah-Jones […]
Jennifer Kabbany: After a white Evergreen State College student filed a formal complaint citing claims of “racially driven violence and harassment” from peers of color, a campus official has pledged that future training topics for student leaders will include preventing bias based on race. The complaint had been filed by student Steve Coffman*, a junior […]
Dan Williams: Last week, colleague Laura Townsend wrote about the reality of white privilege. Her column relays the experiences of three college-age individuals who feel they have been affected by white privilege. This is an important topic that deserves a public discussion, because, as Townsend’s column illustrates, there’s some confusion about what white privilege is. […]
Richard Epstein: Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is the new catchphrase of today’s elite businesses and universities. Those institutions assume D&I is both a means—to excellence—and an end in itself, making them more closely resemble the larger world of which they are a part. So understood, companies from Facebook to Apple to Goldman Sachs, and academic […]
Nicolas W. Allard: Traditional bar exam and licensing practices have outlived their sell-by date. In their present state they are increasingly hard, if not impossible, to justify as serving the best interests of the profession or the public. Dissatisfaction with “take it or leave it” business as usual by the bar testing industry is not […]
The use of “gravy train” to describe public investment will resonate with those readers familiar with Toronto’s disgraced former mayor Rob Ford. Indeed, the general tone of Jacob’s piece – questioning the wisdom of public management of transportation – is more reminiscent of writing from the political right than the political left. As demonstrated frequently […]
Jamie Halper: A year after racially-focused protests rocked Harvard Law School, a student, faculty, and alumni task force has recommended changes to improve diversity and inclusion across the school. Though the task force was appointed by former Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, the school’s new dean, John F. Manning ’82, sent the report to […]
Greg Jaffe: Sullivan was going on about the “growing” and “scary” divide in the country when a law student from a rural town in Kentucky interrupted his monologue: “Coming from a flyover state, it is difficult for me to even be on the same wavelength as the people I grew up with.” The student’s confession […]
Paul Caron Summary:: It describes the big decline in applicants in the high band of LSAT scores. Of course, these are the students who would be admitted to top law schools and/or strong performing law schools with significant merit scholarships. In short, the most sought after students are saying “no thanks” to law school. This […]
Nathan Hansen: Despite collecting the information, by law, for more than 40 years, public schools continue to struggle to report accurate and comparable civil rights data to the Department of Education. “The issue is whether different districts are providing the same type of data and working on the same definition,” said outgoing Sparta Superintendent John […]
Mark Perry Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” 2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry […]
Lisa Grace Lednicer: Sarah Hunt makes her living educating fellow Republicans about climate change. It requires the cool detachment of the well-trained lawyer that she is. But for years she has also been building a life advising young women who have fled their sheltered, fundamentalist Christian home-schooling families in search of independence and opportunity. So […]
Clint Smith: I was fifteen, and watching the game on television. I remember thinking that this is what we had been waiting for. “We” meaning American fans of “the beautiful game”— o jogo bonito, as the Brazilians call it—a style of soccer that had eluded us for so long. We lived for the double step-over […]
Molly Beck: A group of school officials, including state Superintendent Tony Evers, is asking lawmakers to address potential staffing shortages in Wisconsin schools by making the way teachers get licensed less complicated. The Leadership Group on School Staffing Challenges, created by Evers and Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators executive director Jon Bales, released last […]
National Asphalt Pavement Association Today, this dark, resilient material covers more than 94 percent of the paved roads in the United States; it’s the popular choice for driveways, parking lots, airport runways, racetracks, tennis courts, and other applications where a smooth, durable driving surface is required. Called at various times asphalt pavement, blacktop, tarmac, macadam, […]
Boluwaji Ogunyemi, via a kind reader: From my first steps onto campus, I was determined to make my Nigerian parents proud and to seize the opportunities they had left their native country for. I had graduated high school in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s most eastern province, at the top of my class and as student […]
Kristen Graham: “This is a critical issue of our time – in our society, but also in our students’ lives,” said Charlie McGeehan, an English and history teacher and member of the Caucus of Working Educators, an activist group within the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. “It’s important for us to dive in.” That’s not a […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition: UW-Madison’s Mark Seidenberg, Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, has a long-standing commitment to using the science of reading to improve educational outcomes. Examples of insightful publications from Seidenberg and his colleagues in recent years include: Language Variation and Literacy Learning: The Case of African […]
Chris Rickert: If I were Santa Claus, my Christmas gifts to Republican state Rep. Dave Murphy and Republican state Sen. Steve Nass would be vouchers to enroll in the UW-Madison class “The Problem of Whiteness.” According to a course description, it offers the chance to wonder “what it really means to be white” and asks: […]
Lee Petersen Decades of distinct market knowledge ended up devalued and then simply disappeared, rolled up into a singular corporate branding and buying approach. But the forces of finance pushed for chain-wide savings ahead of doing something that might have helped the category: Staying closer than ever to shoppers. In effect, Macy’s stopped doing the […]
Carole Cadwalladr: Here’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is […]
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel The report by Dave Umhoefer and Sarah Hauer was the result of a study of the five-year impact of Act 10 during a nine-month O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism through the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. Among the report’s findings: Teachers are moving from district to district, creating a year-round […]
Laura Waters: Allow me to take a wild guess: New Jersey’s newly-anointed next governor Phil Murphy has never stepped foot in a charter school. Yet on Saturday, he, along with the rest of the NAACP National Board, will vote to call for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools. Now allow me a wish: […]
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 […]
Walter M. Kimbrough As we begin a new academic year, many colleges and universities find themselves with heightened sensitivity around issues of race. Led by the unrest last year at the University of Missouri, dozens of campuses from coast to coast saw protests as students of color, particularly black students, reached a collective breaking point. […]
Christopher Emdin: How can we help black boys succeed in school? One popular answer is that we need more black male teachers. The logic appears simple: Black boys are not faring well, and the presence of black men as teachers and role models will fix this problem. The former secretary of education, Arne Duncan, brought […]
Mary Grabar: Hamilton College has for years had an open curriculum, allowing students the freedom to shape their education as they think best. Whether that’s a good idea is debatable, but the college is about to move in the opposite direction by instituting a “diversity requirement” for all students. As a resident fellow at the […]
Thomas Sowell: Jason Riley has now joined the long and distinguished list of people invited — and then disinvited — to give a talk on a college campus, in this case Virginia Tech. Mr. Riley is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and, perhaps most relevantly, author […]
Charles Cooke: In her harrowing 1892 treatise on the horrors of lynching in the post-bellum American South, the journalist, suffragist, and civil-rights champion Ida B. Wells established for her readers the value of bearing arms. “Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year,” Wells recorded, “the only case where the proposed lynching did not […]
A Teacher: This is a claim used to justify dumbing-down, the idea being that if technology changes working life really quickly then there is no need to teach content as it will be irrelevant by the time our students get to the workplace. The widespread use of the claim in educational environments can almost all […]
Alan Borsuk: That’s not a platform. It’s a couple of slogans, a vague concept, and a sort-of position that has been pretty much already settled in favor of Trump’s view. The education law passed a few months ago by Congress stops the federal government from promoting the Common Core education standards and shifts education decision-making […]
David Gelernter, via Will Fitzhugh: Donald Trump is succeeding, we’re told, because he appeals to angry voters—but that’s obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America’s fate under Obama, […]
Marc Randazza: It is said that if you are a young conservative you have no heart, and if you are an old liberal, you have no brain. As a 46 year old Liberal, I take offense at half of that, but I would not wish to stop anyone from saying it. Unfortunately, I feel like […]
Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction, along with the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have received a four-year, $5.25 million grant to advance the work of DPI’s Promoting Excellence for All initiative. Promoting Excellence for All is focused on reducing achievement gaps for student […]
Justin Jouvenal: While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report. The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web […]
The Economist: MICHAEL WANG, a young Californian, came second in his class of 1,002 students; his ACT score was 36, the maximum possible; he sang at Barack Obama’s inauguration; he got third place in a national piano contest; he was in the top 150 of a national maths competition; he was in several national debating-competition […]