Iran's students are being taught the virtues of Islamic world supremacy and jihadism. This is the conclusion of a major new study on Iranian textbooks by Freedom House (read the full story here).
New Yorkers got a dose of d??j?? vu yesterday when New York's new governor, David A. Paterson, and his wife Michelle held a press conference to discuss their marital infidelities.
Ed Week reports on an interesting new study showing the impact of teacher absences on students: "taking into account the effects on student achievement that might be produced by various characteristics of the teachers,
Liam, you're right to question whether Catholic schools are necessarily better than public schools or public charter schools. Of course not; there are great Catholic schools, and lousy ones, and everything in between, just as is the case for the other sectors.
The Mississippi Board of Education wants superintendents to be held accountable for student learning, the Clarion-Ledger reports.
Barack Obama said today that our currently segregated schools create and prolong achievement gaps. He compared them to segregated schools 50 years ago. These ideas are patently false--segregated schools circa 1960 are not, for a pile of reasons, analogous to the naturally, racially separated schools that exist today.
Mike, I agree that holding superintendents accountable for the performance of their schools is entirely appropriate, but as with any new law, the devil will prove to be in the details.
According to Inside Higher Ed, Luke Wilson will star in an upcoming film that producer Brendan McDonald says will "lampoon the tenure process" in colleges and universities. Tenure 2: Back to K-12 would make a great sequel.
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has announced a pilot plan to let some states "differentiate" between really bad schools and mediocre ones--i.e., those that fail just one or two of their subgroups instead of all of them.
Peggy Noonan turns in another characteristically perceptive "Declaration" for Saturday's Wall Street Journal--though one with uncharacteristically hokey imagery about a new house (Obama) and an old house (McCain).
I'm still not wholly convinced that the decline of k-12 Catholic schools in this country merits the sort of "save them!" mobilization that many are calling for (see Mike's post, below). If urban Catholic schools can't compete with charter schools, why do they deserve special help?
Over at The Corner, Victor Davis Hanson wonders why Barack Obama is so worried about teaching students about oppression. He quotes a recent "news source":
Liam asks "if urban Catholic schools can't compete with charter schools, why do they deserve special help?"
Mike, I may agree with your point that Catholic schools should receive public funding.
News update: School officials have decided to go easy on an eighth-grader caught purchasing contraband goods. Was it guns, drugs, or tobacco? Actually, none of the above. It was candy--and not even the hard-core kind like Snickers or M&M's, which if consumed in large quantities can really pack on the pounds (trust me, I know). It was a bag of Skittles.
One of the most anticipated events of Pope Benedict's upcoming trip to Washington is his address to 200 Catholic educators at Catholic University, scheduled for April 17.
St. Anthony School in Milwaukee exists today only because of the city's voucher program. In 1998, before the state supreme court allowed public money to fund religious schools, St. Anthony enrolled under 300 students. Now it has over 1,000 pupils (all but about a dozen attend on vouchers) and is thriving.
Center on Education PolicyFebruary 2008
A creeping malaise exists amongst British children, it seems. In February 2007, the United Nations Children Fund labeled U.K. youths the most unhappy in the western world. And why? The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, a national teachers' union, lays the blame at homework's feet.
I'll be brief. I want to applaud your efforts regarding the Reading First scandal ("The true story of Reading First"). Reading First was perhaps education's best attempt at supporting the implementation of truly effective programs for struggling readers.
The central offices of the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., school districts are slimming. Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso this week proposed to cut more than 300 central-office jobs, which will allow him to plug a $40 million budget shortfall and reroute another $70 million directly to schools.
Okay--it was a restaurant, not a bar, where Green Dot's Steve Barr, AEI's Rick Hess, venture philanthropist Vanessa Kirsch, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and Gates Foundation alumnus Tom Vander Ark sat down with writer Paul Tough for a New York Times Magazine "roundtable" on education philanthropy.
An anti-union group hopes to expose how difficult it is to fire the most dreadful teachers. The Center for Union Facts is asking educators, parents, and students to nominate the "worst unionized teacher in America"; the group will choose ten winners (losers, really) and offer each $10,000 to exit the classroom posthaste.
There are sound ways to encourage more students to enroll in AP classes. But the tack of Seattle's Roosevelt High School, which will require all its sophomores to take at least one AP course next year, is not one of them.
Ohio can boast of praiseworthy gains over the past decade in making school funding more equitable across districts, but there is more work to be done. To mitigate the school-finance inequities that remain within districts and gear school funding toward the realities of student mobility, school choice and effective school-based management, this report recommends that Ohio embrace Weighted Student Funding (WSF), which allocates resources based on the needs of individual students and by sending dollars directly to schools rather than lodging most spending decisions at the district level.
