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This is how we do it
People wonder: How did Flypaper emerge? What evil genius spawned it? Coby answers the questions.
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Buster the Bunny is back...off Broadway
Do you remember the Postcards from Buster controversy of 2005?
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Does "Big George" Miller hate the environment?
Or is there another reason his House Education and Labor Committee cancelled an Earth Day event on environmental education scheduled for today?* * I know, the answer is surely yes.
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Graduation or bust
States are forced to decide whether graduation confers on those who achieve it validation of knowledge or participation. If a state decides the latter, its diplomas will mean nothing to employers, who require knowledgeable workforces rather than just compliant ones.
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The (Catholic) good news
Much??recent reporting about the state of k-12 Catholic schools has??offered dreary conclusions. Here's a bit of good news.
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Praise for practicing what you preach
Kudos to Bill Nye the Science Guy--perhaps the nation's best-known and most effective science teacher--for putting his green lessons into action.
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Tunnel vision
You gotta give it to purebred libertarians, they never let their vision of how the world ought to work be distorted by any realities about how it actually works. Nowhwere is this clearer than in K-12 education, where the CATO crowd, indistinguishable nowadays from the "separation of school and state crowd," basically doesn't believe in any form of public education.
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Another argument linking income inequality to education
Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw makes the case in Sunday's New York Times that the technological progress of the last few decades has eclipsed the country's pace of educational advancement, thus driving up wages for skilled workers relative to the unskilled.
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Million-dollar blocks
At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen highlights the following passage from Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood: My Year Spent Policing Baltimore's Eastern District
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Praying for a productive summit
I'm looking forward to Thursday's White House "summit" on inner-city kids and faith-based schools, both because it's a really important issue and because a number of panelists (and at least one moderator) are involved with the promising projects and programs recently profiled in Fordham's
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Dumb generation
The New York Times reviews some handwringing about??that which??America's k-12 schools have wrought.
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Quality debate
Coby informs us (directly below): I find a flaw in Liam's reasoning. First of all, the point of the Times blog post is not that the market does a poor job of gauging wine quality, but that there are a lot of shoppers in the market who don't care about the quality of the wine they're swilling.
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Writing for writing's sake
I was just chatting about this after a recent and jolting visit to some of New York's Chelsea galleries--today's art is not judged by how it looks or the skill of the artist who produced it. It's all about ideology, which is a shame.
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Reverse commute
Usually bad ideas flow from academia into our K-12 system. (Think moral relativism, the decline of the core curriculum, dubious pedagogical approaches.) But now one of public education's worst features--its hyper-unionized workforce--is finding its way into higher ed.
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Mein textbook?
The Discovery Institute's David Klinghoffer defends the link--made by the new Ben Stein movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed--between Nazis and Darwinism. I wish I could write on this with more authority, but the D.C.
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A Methodist on Catholic schools
President Bush weighed in on the crisis of Catholic school closures at this morning's National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.
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It's a question of quality, not preference
Herewith an argument from the The Pour (yes, the New York Times wine blog) about why rigid standards--and not popularity--is the adequate gauge of quality.
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A wise move
Colorado lawmakers voted put forward a plan yesterday to align state academic standards with the ACT exam.
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Mike takes his Catholic schools act to cable
Fox Business channel must have seen Mike discussing the Catholic schools crisis on the latest episodes of Fordham Factor (here and
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This Week's Fordham Factor: Pope Benedict visits D.C.
Mike and Christina discuss Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United States and what he had to say about Catholic schools. httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=xOJnxYJ1U_0
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Re: It's a question of quality, not preference
Liam argues that Fordham is "not content to let the market decide which schools are great and which aren't, because when quality counts, the market is often wrong." This po
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Little intelligence found
The Los Angeles Times featured some debate about Ben Stein's new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which seeks to expose how a cult of Darwinism has overtaken our public-school science classes.
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Alonso asks for help
Bravo to Andres Alonso, Baltimore's schools superintendent, for launching a campaign to recruit 500 volunteers to work in the city's schools.
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Brown's in town
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is an expert at being overshadowed, first by Tony Blair and now by the pope. Brown is in D.C. today, and he's scheduled to meet with President Bush and presidential candidates Clinton, McCain, and Obama.
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Maggie and Teddy
An anonymous source tells Flypaper that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Senator Edward Kennedy were yacking it up at Nationals Field Park this morning while waiting for Pope Benedict XVI to arrive. We're praying that they were discussing how to salvage the D.C.