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.
That's the impression I get from reading Karin Chenoweth's post about
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?
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.
That's what Mona Charen argues in this National Review Online piece,* using No Child Left Behind as Exhibit A.
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.
Mike and Stafford discuss Miley Cyrus's new single, "Breakout," which disparages school-going.
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.
The American Scholar notes, "Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers."
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Jonathan Alter offered Barack Obama, free of charge, some darn good advice in the July 21st Newsweek. Will the senator from Illinois take it? "Now Obama needs to embrace a Grand Education Bargain--much higher pay for teachers in exchange for much more accountability for performance in the classroom," writes Alter.
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.
Because I'm mostly home playing grandpa to a four-year-old this week (and doing my small part to assure that at least one small child is ready to succeed in school and beyond), this must be very brief. To my eye, Randi's explanation is clearer and better balanced than her speech was, maybe because it lacks some of the crowd-pleasing anti-NCLB rhetoric.
My longtime friend Checker Finn wrote a critique of Randi Weingarten's inaugural speech as President of the American Federation of Teachers. Checker chastised her for endorsing the idea that schools should help the neediest kids by offering health services and social services in addition to their customary academic fare.
Christine Campbell and Brock J. GrubbNational Charter School Research ProjectJune 2008
Clifford AdelmanInstitute for Higher Education PolicyJuly 2008
On tonight's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, John Merrow interviews George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union. Here's a teaser from the transcript:
