Silly season in academe
Presidential election campaigns bring out the worst in academics whose partisan yearnings overcome their scholarly scruples.
Presidential election campaigns bring out the worst in academics whose partisan yearnings overcome their scholarly scruples.
How do you teach kids to write: through the spirit or the law? That is, should writing be taught through careful attention to grammar, syntax, and composition? Or should the first task be encouraging youngsters to pour their hearts upon the page without regard for subjects, verbs, and objects?
This weekend, French thinker Jacques Derrida, father of the literary method known as "deconstruction," died of pancreatic cancer. His wide-ranging influence on intellectual life on this planet even trickled down into K-12 education, where it has inspired some of our wackier and less responsible pedagogical theorists.
As part of the New York Times' all out assault on education reform this election year, the editorial board (which has yet to retract or correct its misleading editorial on the AFT charter report--click here and here for mo
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education2004
Jay P. Greene, School Choice WisconsinSeptember 28, 2004
E.D. Tabs, National Center for Education StatisticsAugust 2004
Everyone "knows" that we have a looming crisis in education staffing, as millions of Baby Boomers retire from teaching and school leadership posts and too few qualified people step forward to replace them.
The headline could be straight from The Onion: "Janey finds widespread failure in D.C. schools." No kidding! If such perspicacity is all it takes, Gadfly should have put in for the superintendent's job himself. But we do like the noise that new D.C.
If you don't know High Tech High in San Diego, you should. It's one of those schools that pulses, from hard-charging principal Larry Rosenstock, through the excellent teaching staff to the many at-risk kids who are succeeding at this charter school. Rosenstock's philosophy is simple: treat kids like adults and they'll act like adults.
Hurrah for England's chief inspector of schools, David Bell, and his plain-spoken criticism of goofball progressivism in education. In a recent lecture at the Hermitage School in England, Bell argued that students need the return to a well-rounded curriculum that includes a focus on basic skills.
Lou Gerstner, former IBM chair and founder of the "Teaching Commission", penned a trenchant op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that says American companies are outsourcing jobs not just because they can find cheaper labor overseas, but also because workers abroad, particularly in Asia, have stronger skills.
National Review's annual education issue contains much good stuff, including Rick Hess on school funding and Clint Bolick on the fitful progress of school choice. We especially recommend Richard Arum on the collapse of school discipline and the effect that's had on the academic environment, especially in urban school districts.
Opponents of Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson - a brave soul who dared support a statewide graduation test, charter schools, and the suspension of ever-popular class size and teacher pay initiatives - are pulling out all stops in their attempt to unseat her in November.
In this month's Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch poses the question: "Suppose I told you that I knew of an education reform guaranteed to raise the achievement levels of American students; that this reform would cost next to nothing and would require no political body's approval; and that it could be implemented overnight by anybody of a mind of undertake it.
Sara Mead and Andrew J. RotherhamEducation SectorSeptember 2007
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, American Civic Literacy ProgramSeptember 18, 2007
Carl F. Kaestle and Alyssa E. Lodewick, edsUniversity Press of Kansas2007
No Child Left Behind made many promises. One of the most important of them being a pledge to Mr. and Mrs. Smith that they would get an annual snapshot of how their little Susie is doing in school.
New Baltimore schools CEO Andres Alonso is already in trouble. He wants to require teachers to spend one, weekly 45-minute period engaged in collaborative planning with their colleagues. And for that, the city teachers union has gone on the attack, scheduling a no-confidence vote on the CEO. Upon hearing that the union planned such a vote, a perplexed Alonso asked, "Why?
Negar Azimi's New York Times Magazine piece about Teach For America might be new, but her criticisms of the program are not. Take, for example, the idea that TFA is for college graduates a "résumé-burnishing pit stop before moving on to bigger things." That may be partly true--but so what?
In Washington, D.C., school success is measured by the most basic of yardsticks. This year, for example, all 146 schools in the District opened on time, and almost all of them had the supplies they needed.
Bob Herbert can usually be counted on to dispense columns that are either off-base or banal. His latest piece is certainly banal (check out the title); but it's none too credible, either, because Herbert is calling for a "wholesale transformation of the public school system" that, were some politician to actually advance it, he, yes he, Herbert, would surely denounce.
We know that schools and school systems share a lot in common with businesses. Do they also resemble nations?
Gadfly now reads--courtesy of the Columbus Dispatch, a public-records request, and the Ohio Alliance of Public Charter Schools--that indeed Attorney General Marc Dann was doing the teacher union's bidding when he (a) settled out of court an ill-conceived NEA lawsuit against charter schools (that he likely would have won if it had gone to trial) and (b) tackled low-p
Robin J. Lake, Progressive Policy InstituteSeptember 2004
Bryan C. Hassel, Progressive Policy InstituteSeptember 21, 2004
Cheri Pierson Yecke, Ph.D., Center of the American ExperimentSeptember 22, 2004
The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is a splendid survey of what's wrong with textbooks today and how they went awry. The main problem besetting textbooks, we know, is their quality.
As any education researcher will tell you, conducting a "scientific" study of educational programs or practices is difficult at best, primarily because so many factors contribute to pupil achievement, including students' previous knowledge, teacher quality, the degree of parental and community support, etc.