Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw makes the case in Sunday's New York Times that the technological progress of the last few decades has eclipsed the country's pace of educational advancement, thus driving up wages for skilled workers relative to the unskilled.
At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen highlights the following passage from Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood: My Year Spent Policing Baltimore's Eastern District
You gotta give it to purebred libertarians, they never let their vision of how the world ought to work be distorted by any realities about how it actually works. Nowhwere is this clearer than in K-12 education, where the CATO crowd, indistinguishable nowadays from the "separation of school and state crowd," basically doesn't believe in any form of public education.
The New York Times reviews some handwringing about??that which??America's k-12 schools have wrought.
I was just chatting about this after a recent and jolting visit to some of New York's Chelsea galleries--today's art is not judged by how it looks or the skill of the artist who produced it. It's all about ideology, which is a shame.
Usually bad ideas flow from academia into our K-12 system. (Think moral relativism, the decline of the core curriculum, dubious pedagogical approaches.) But now one of public education's worst features--its hyper-unionized workforce--is finding its way into higher ed.
The Discovery Institute's David Klinghoffer defends the link--made by the new Ben Stein movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed--between Nazis and Darwinism. I wish I could write on this with more authority, but the D.C.
President Bush weighed in on the crisis of Catholic school closures at this morning's National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.
Herewith an argument from the The Pour (yes, the New York Times wine blog) about why rigid standards--and not popularity--is the adequate gauge of quality.
Coby informs us (directly below): I find a flaw in Liam's reasoning. First of all, the point of the Times blog post is not that the market does a poor job of gauging wine quality, but that there are a lot of shoppers in the market who don't care about the quality of the wine they're swilling.
Colorado lawmakers voted put forward a plan yesterday to align state academic standards with the ACT exam.
Fox Business channel must have seen Mike discussing the Catholic schools crisis on the latest episodes of Fordham Factor (here and
Mike and Christina discuss Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United States and what he had to say about Catholic schools. httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=xOJnxYJ1U_0
Liam argues that Fordham is "not content to let the market decide which schools are great and which aren't, because when quality counts, the market is often wrong." This po
The Los Angeles Times featured some debate about Ben Stein's new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which seeks to expose how a cult of Darwinism has overtaken our public-school science classes.
Bravo to Andres Alonso, Baltimore's schools superintendent, for launching a campaign to recruit 500 volunteers to work in the city's schools.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is an expert at being overshadowed, first by Tony Blair and now by the pope. Brown is in D.C. today, and he's scheduled to meet with President Bush and presidential candidates Clinton, McCain, and Obama.
An anonymous source tells Flypaper that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Senator Edward Kennedy were yacking it up at Nationals Field Park this morning while waiting for Pope Benedict XVI to arrive. We're praying that they were discussing how to salvage the D.C.
No, I'm not referring to Linda Darling-Hammond, but to William Ayers, the "distinguished professor" at the
1) This week's Education Gadfly. It's chock full of good stuff, including a guest editorial from the Rodel Foundation about how to train the education spotlight on states, "which are these days the wallflower at the school-reform dance." The article recommends spiking the school-reform punch.
The New York Times, one understands, seeks to reach its audience, and those who casually turn the pages of Thursday Styles are of a sort that enjoys and relates to articles such as this.
The pontiff is still in the middle of his speech to Catholic educators (which, as predicted, is mostly a soft-spoken smack down of Catholic colleges and universities gone astray).
Last week we asked, ???Who Will Save America's Urban Catholic Schools????
What to make of Pope Benedict XVI's comments about Catholic schools? Here are a few thoughts.
