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Who's the greenest of them all?
The New York Times "Education Life" supplement asks that question of America's colleges and
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Right again
Over here, over there, those "right-wing thinktank[s]" are always so spot on. How do they do it? From The Guardian:
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Where extra-curriculars are "extras"
When I wrote in the Education Gadfly a few weeks ago that "in times of budget crunch, school boards are tempted to consider extra-curriculars as, well, extras, frills even,
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Must... create... knowledge
Does the??penchant of universities??for outsized emphasis??on production of new research create professors who shirk??one of their primary duties, namely??to teach undergraduates? I think so.
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Does Education Trust hate high-achieving children?
That's the impression I get from reading Karin Chenoweth's post about
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Death by browser
If any district is thinking about setting up a career and technical education program for aspiring bike messengers, it should think again. The internet is apparently killing that occupation.
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How to be the best
Want to be the best public school in the nation? Banish all those??who do not hold??at least a B average.
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Bush ??? blacks
That's what Mona Charen argues in this National Review Online piece,* using No Child Left Behind as Exhibit A.
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More on integration (racial, socioeconomic, etc.)
Interesting to note that liberals Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias have both blogged recently about how socioeconomic and racial integration (the 2008 kind of integration, which seeks to overcome housing patterns; not the 1950s kind, which sought to overcome de jure separation of black and white) won't work.
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A new era in virtual education?
Virtual classes may be morphing into entire virtual schools. What is lost and what is gained? How will virtual education change how we define the school experience?
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And in this corner...
The slugfest between Checker, Diane Ravitch, and Randi Weingarten that ran in yesterday's Gadfly is the subject of an item in today's New York Sun.
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Two cheers for George Parker
The Washington Teachers' Union president tells it like it is (on The NewsHour): JOHN MERROW: Rhee is hoping to tie teacher pay to student achievement. Because teacher union membership is declining, Rhee may have an edge in negotiations.
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"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"
The American Scholar notes, "Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers."
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About that science bias
Some are pushing for the government to apply Title IX to science education. John Tierney wrote on Tuesday an article about this; he??offers more on his blog.
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This Week's Fordham Factor: Rock and roll is the devil
Mike and Stafford discuss Miley Cyrus's new single, "Breakout," which disparages school-going.
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What's in a revision?
"Please revise," indicates your editor, his note scrawled in red ink atop your latest submission. So you do. You rework the major points, you tighten where needed, you revamp and polish and tweak and shift around. That is, after all, how revision is done. Not, it appears, in Saudi Arabia.
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Racy and classy, in a bad way
Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine included a piece titled The Next Kind of Integration, which was about school districts that have, since the Supreme Court's ruling l
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Randi Weingarten responds to Checker (and Mike)
Mike Petrilli is spot-on in this sense: Clearly, a good education is much more than test scores. He's right about the importance of extracurricular activities in providing that education--and I hope he'll agree that we should find ways to make sure kids in our highest-poverty schools have access to those kinds of activities.
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Rock 'n' fail
No good can come of this. In recent years, ever since the Beastie Boys slung their anti-school rhetoric on the airwaves, pop singers' lyrics have attacked educational institutions with alarming frequency and ferocity.
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Short and sweet
Maryland students were said to have made impressive gains this year on their state test. Naturally, our first reaction was to wonder how that happened when the state's NAEP scores are stagnant.
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Checker responds to Diane
It's never easy to disagree with Diane--not only is she a friend and colleague of long-standing, as well as a Fordham trustee, but also she's so often right about education. I've found over the years that when she and I work at a difference of opinion for a while, we usually discover that the domain of true disagreement is small.