Ben Franklin would cry
Another day, another state content to let its kids continue to earn meaningless high school diplomas.
Another day, another state content to let its kids continue to earn meaningless high school diplomas.
Marguerite Roza, School Finance Redesign Project, Center on Reinventing Public EducationMay 15, 2008
Naomi Chudowsky and Victor ChudowskyCenter on Education PolicyMay 2008
Teachers, we are told (mostly by teachers) are professionals--and they require treatment befitting such. Alas, the facts don't always support the claims.
"We have to protect the children, who are the truly innocent victims here." Absent context, one might guess that Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's non-voting congressional delegate, was decrying, say, the inadequacy of the nation's response to child abuse. Not so.
More glum feedback for the Gates Foundation's pricey initiative to create and support small schools--and others enraptured with smallness per se as an education reform strategy.
Bill Bennett's superb two-volume U.S. history, America: The Last Best Hope, is beginning to be adopted as a text by school systems and is now accompanied by all manner of useful educator tools and its own hefty, bumptious (like Bennett himself) history-education-makeover project.
When Gadfly wrote, "Despite what our good friend Jay Mathews tells you, AP is not for everyone," he didn't expect that the selfsame Jay Mathews would then challenge him to a duel. Only in words, mercifully.
You've heard it a hundred times: "We really need to benchmark our education standards to the best in the world," or words to that effect.
I don't know, Liam, what will be the "quality" of the coming decades' progress. Nor, do I think, does Bauerlein.
I was expecting a bit more from Eduwonk's $5 billion challenge. The winner, just announced, would use the money to
A few weeks ago at the NewSchools Venture Fund summit, Newark Mayor Cory Booker's jealousy about Washington mayor Adrian Fenty'
The last paragraph of Coby's latest post,??directly below,??contains this: "But once they're washed downriver by the unyielding tide of technological progress, they'll sound as quaint as Socrates' reminiscences about the days before writing." Progress has both a quantitative and qualitative definition, and one wonders if Coby doesn't concentrate overmuch on the former.
It's true--it's tough to predict the future. Of course, that doesn't mean we should be content to let the progression of technology sweep us up and take us where it may.
Education Week reports today that data collected from the states by the U.S. Department of Education show the percentage of core classes in the nation taught by highly-qualified teachers is around 94 percent for 2006-2007.