Fixing Special Education: 12 Steps to Transform a Broken System
Miriam Kutzig FreedmanSchool Law Pro and Park Place Publications2009
Miriam Kutzig FreedmanSchool Law Pro and Park Place Publications2009
Just when you thought reality-TV had sucked the life out of your every brain cell, the creators of the TV show “Lost” figure out a way to wring out the last drop. They think of it as a way to keep the show’s cult following intellectually engaged.
In what the New York Times generously described as “baby steps,” the Empire State’s appalling legislature last week passed several spending reforms designed to close the state’s $3.2 billion budget deficit.
By 2011, if the states stick to their policy guns, all eighth graders in California and Minnesota will be required to take algebra. Other states are sure to follow. In recent years, the conventional wisdom of American K-12 education has declared algebra to be a “gatekeeper” to future educational and career success.
Education SectorNovember 2009 This latest report from Education Sector summarizes the operational challenges that face nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs) as they attempt to grow and support their networks of charter schools.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has some powerful supporters, including the NEA, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Fourteen states have also climbed aboard its effort to refocus American K-12 education on global awareness, media literacy and the like--and to defocus it on grammar, multiplication tables and the causes of the Civil War.
It’s no secret that schools of education teach all manner of nonsense. So when the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development launched its Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group, we might well have expected trouble. But the reality is worse than that.
Is success genetic or environmental? For educators trying to change the prospects of disadvantaged youth, new research on this timeless question might have wide-ranging implications.
To the editor:Should a thousand flowers bloom in the charter school world? Gadfly thinks not (“No oaks needed,” December 3, 2009), and I agree. But would you extend the reasoning, as I think you should, to the nonprofit world generally?
Quotable: "The class teaches values that America doesn't really hold that much anymore. ??I've learned to think about cowboy values when tough things come my way."