schoolinfosystem.org
Joanne Jacobs: In Chicago’s Old Town, children who live north of North Avenue go to top-rated Lincoln Elementary (63 percent white, 14 percent low-income), while those south of the line go to low-rated Manierre (96 percent black, 4 percent, Latino, 93 percent low-income). “At the end of the 2018–19 school year, not a single eighth […]
Larry Alex Taunton: Seduced by the communist promise of earthly bliss, Muggeridge and his pregnant wife, Kitty, moved to Moscow in 1932. The rumors that Stalinist Russia was anything but a “workers’ paradise” did not dampen their spirits in the least. Shaking the dust of London and the West off of their shoes, they were […]
David Blaska: “Teachers are very very afraid.” — former teacher* Parents are mobilizing for a showdown at Madison’s Jefferson middle school, which they describe as ruled by virtue-signaling administrators and out-of-control students. The flash point was on December 3 when a 13-year-old boy shot a girl with a BB gun outside from a bus window. The student […]
Evan Sernoffsky: The following is a transcript of Sotomayor’s message to Boudin: Chesa, my court sessions resume next week so I am unable to join your inauguration ceremony. I sent you this message to tell you how much I admire you, and to wish you well in your new endeavors. A little over ten years […]
Scott Girard: For the past seven months, Strong has been a program associate with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Strong said in an interview Thursday he considers school safety and racial disparities in discipline and achievement to be the top issues facing MMSD. “We have to make sure that our schools are safe […]
Scott Girard: The Madison School Board seat left open by incumbent Kate Toews choosing not to run for re-election has a candidate. Maia Pearson, a Madison native who has three children in Madison schools, will run for Seat 6. She filed her declaration of candidacy and campaign registration statement with the city clerk Monday and […]
Nicolas Granatino: Knowledge management (KM) is defined in Wikipedia as ‘the process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organisation’. It originated in the early 90’s as a scientific discipline and its practice was adopted in enterprise to manage and leverage an intangible asset which was increasingly seen as being strategic. […]
Michael Poliakoff: For $73,000 per year, top students with SAT scores well north of 1,500 count themselves lucky to be accepted by Williams College. There, however, despite the chilly Massachusetts climate, they are in danger of melting with their fellow snowflakes. Last year, the school canceled a play for alleged racial insensitivity, notwithstanding its African American authorship, […]
John Judis: As the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, so too, it seemed, did the dream of socialism. The German sociologist Rolf Dahrendorf declared, “The point has to be made unequivocally that socialism is dead and that none of its variants can be revived for a world awakening from the double nightmare of Stalinism and […]
Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, Tyler Ransom: Over the past 20 years, elite colleges in the US have seen dramatic increases in applications. We provide context for part of this trend using detailed data on Harvard University that was unsealed as part of the SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit. We show that Harvard encourages applications from many students who […]
Musa al-Gharbi: Members of the press need to rethink their instinct to write endless Trump stories. That doesn’t mean a more aggressive posture; the alignment between the press and Trump’s ‘resistance’ has been part of the problem: In terms of endorsements and direct financial support, reporters and media organizations rallied behind Clinton’s candidacy (and against Trump’s) in a manner […]
Sharon Roznik: The Nesvacil sisters of Ashwaubenon take their handwriting seriously. Grace Nesvacil, now a freshman in high school, was named the nation’s top fifth grade hand-writer in the 2016 Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest. Her sister Evelyn was a semifinalist as a third grader, and another sister, Claire, earned a state award in the competition. […]
Johnny Rodgers The library at Glasgow School of Art has—or had—special status for connoisseurs of the work of architect-artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Its ineffably graceful timbers garnered a totemic value as a symbol of the workaday genius of their creator. It was said that this exquisite room could be created by any competent craftsman under […]
James Flynn: I was notified of Emerald’s decision not to proceed by Tony Roche, Emerald’s publishing director, in an email on 10th June: I am contacting you in regard to your manuscript In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor. Emerald believes that its publication, in particular in the United Kingdom, would raise serious […]
Rachel Lu: It’s an interesting conundrum. It seems obvious that many of these regions need help. Even our most desperate and impoverished citizens, though, seem to prefer the dignity of a free exchange to the discomfort of being patronized by people with an agenda. Who is able and willing to provide the goods they want […]
Rebecca Lurye: Democrats, in leadership in Hartford since 1971, are responsible for the city’s educational failures, Lewis said. “[The party] doesn’t serve black people, it doesn’t serve middle-class or poor white people, it doesn’t serve Hispanics,” Lewis said. “It serves people at the top tier of the party. “No matter how many times people from […]
Betsy Morris and Tawnell D. Hobbs: When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping the district reach the “one-to-one” ratio of one for each child that […]
Ryan Grim And Aida Chavez: HOUSE DEMOCRATS ARE woefully behind on dues owed to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to an internal party document provided to The Intercept. The rank-and-file’s lagging participation in the party’s money chase is being made up for, however, by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s prolific buckraking. By the end of […]
Greg Ashman: Let me lead you through a portal created in the basement of some secretive and sinister government laboratory and into the Educational Upside Down. The Educational Upside Down is a parallel dimension where elementary school children are captivated by street signs and bored rigid by myths and tales of heroes. It is a […]
Christopher Mims: Over a period of three months in 2016, a small aircraft circled above the same parts of West Baltimore that so recently drew the ire of President Trump. Operated by a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, the plane was equipped with 12 cameras which, at 8,000 feet, could take in 32 square miles […]
mp3 audio – Machine Transcript follows [Better transcript, via a kind reader PDF]: I’m Carousel Baird and we have a fabulous and exciting show lined up today. Such a fabulous guy sitting right across from me right here in the studio. Is Madison metropolitan school district current superintendent? She still here in charge of all […]
Michael Cummins: aybe kids are disrespecting their teachers because adults have taught them to. If, as Muldrow asserted during her campaign, the “theme” in Madison education is “how do we blame black children, how do we hurt black children, how do we get rid of black children, how do we not listen to black children,” […]
HARRY STEIN: It may be that the best book that will ever be written about today’s progressive mind-set was published in 1941. That in The Red Decade author Eugene Lyons was, in fact, describing the Communist-dominated American Left of the Depression-wracked 1930s and 1940s makes his observations even more meaningful, for it is sobering to […]
Tim Harford: Mr Woodford isn’t the only star to fade. Fund manager Anthony Bolton is an obvious parallel. He enjoyed almost three decades of superb performance, retired, then returned to blemish his record with a few miserable years investing in China. The story of triumph followed by disappointment is not limited to investment. Think of […]
Jane Coaston: This is a highly unusual level of disdain for a word that until several years ago was a legal term in relative obscurity outside academic circles. It was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. “Intersectionality” has, […]
Chris Arnade: I wasn’t in the mood to listen to anyone, especially other bankers, other academics, and the educated experts who were my neighbors. I hadn’t been for a few years. In 2008, the financial crisis had consumed the country and my life, sending Citibank, the company I worked for, into a tailspin stopped only […]
C.J. CIARAMELLA: It’s been quite a day for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Atlantic announced that Emanuel is coming aboard as a contributing editor to the venerable magazine’s “ideas” section. Meanwhile, ABC News announced it has hired Emanuel as a contributor. All within 48 hours of his leaving office. The former Obama White House […]
Christina Samuels Employing experienced and fully-credentialed teachers is one of the major factors contributing to California school districts that are producing higher-than-expected academic achievement among their Hispanic, black, and white students, says a new report from the Learning Policy Institute. In the report California’s Positive Outliers: Districts Beating the Odds, released Thursday, the Palo Alto-based […]
Joel Kotkin: The French nobility, observed Tocqueville in The Ancien Regime and The Revolution, supported many of the writers whose essays and observations ended up threatening “their own rights and even their existence.” Today we see much the same farce repeated, as the world’s richest people line up behind causes that, in the end, could […]
David Blaska: We see that the Madison Board of Education is going to take its show on the road next Monday, April 29, in a desperate attempt to evade the F-bombing mob that disrupts their every meeting. They’re hoping that the race-baiters can’t find Chavez school, 3502 Maple Grove Drive, Madison, WI 53719. (Starting with […]
Rod Dreher: Over the weekend, I met a friend in Cambridge, Mass., for lunch. He’s a foreigner studying at Harvard. He told me that his experience there has been quite an education in how the American elite constructs its worldview and reproduces itself. In fact, that is perhaps the most important lesson he has learned […]
David Blaska: I met many people throughout the city (and reconnected with sister Jane). Gratified at the many educators, teaching support staff, and mainstream Democrats who said they voted for me. Another shout-out to liberal downtown Madison blogger Greg Humphrey. That took courage. We started a long overdue conversation in this community. That will continue. […]
Moriah Balingit: If you are driving east on Florin Road toward Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, you will pass under a pedestrian bridge that has a message permanently affixed to it: “If you dream it, you can do it.” It’s the kind of message I have seen in neighborhoods where aspirations far surpass resources […]
Joshua Chaffin: The young woman was nearly hyperventilating 30 minutes later. “So, it’s been like half an hour, and I’m like, semi-calmed down — to the point where I’m not shouting expletives any more . . .” she explained, addressing her camera phone. “But, yeah. I got into Yale. Oh, my God! I got into Yale!” In the […]
Frederick Hess: Here’s another way to look at this: This isn’t an indictment of America but of the elite college cartel and the pathologies that it has enabled and exploited. It’s an indictment of the way elite colleges sell fast-passes to lucrative jobs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, of the manufactured scarcity that […]
Kaleem Caire: Our School District has an obligation to learn from these incidents and to ensure that our staff, students and parents have clear guidelines about how to address similar situations when they arise, and how they can also avoid such challenges as well. After reading the police reports, it is clear to me that […]
Andrea Cantora: In 2007, I gave someone a second chance. I was in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution recruiting women for a new program for people returning from prison that I was running in New York City. A woman approached me and handed me her portfolio. It was basically a detailed resume of her accomplishments, skills […]
Jon Gabriel: Politicians in Washington always have some drama to distract them. Over the past week, Michael Cohen called the president a “conman,” and Trump called him a “rat.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez insisted the world would end in a dozen years unless we pass her Green New Deal, while Democrats murmured about Biden and Beto […]
Gwen Samuel: It’s been 65 years since the Supreme Court ruled in the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. That landmark ruling, the outcome of 13 courageous black parents’ challenge to an unjust public education system, was a milestone in the civil rights struggle. […]
Amy Harmon: It was not an overt incident of racism that prompted Edray Goins, an African-American mathematician in the prime of his career, to abandon his tenured position on the faculty of a major research university last year. The hostilities he perceived were subtle, the signs of disrespect unspoken. There was the time he was […]
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 […]