In Sunday's New York Times, Matthew Forney, a former Beijing bureau chief for Time, seeks to correct what he thinks may be a popularly-held hunch that China's growing class of educated urbanites will soon pressure the Chinese government to reform.
National Review's John J. Miller recently wrote a portion of our Catholic schools report.
"Carney releases education plan for Del." Step right up and get??your new??education plan! Public schools, private schools--everyone's a winner!
For months we've observed John McCain's general lack of interest in education. That appears to be starting to change.
In Florida, where a state income tax is verboten, the housing crisis has had a particularly damaging effect on state revenues. Education is being hit hard. Piling on, today the St. Petersburg Times reports that "lackluster lottery sales" will hurt school budgets even more.
There's more coverage of Fordham's Catholic schools report today, including a front-page
No, it's not good that the "financial know-how" of American high school seniors has "gone from bad to worse." Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is fired up about it:
Mike is right: financial literacy is important, but schools can't teach everything. In fact, we wrote as much several months ago in The Gadfly.
This week's Economist contains a special report on "digital nomadism," the ability to work, and to connect to family or friends, from just about anywhere.
Mike has a fair point that schools can't do everything. He might have added that it's hard to picture most high school teachers being able to confidently explain variable interest rates or balloon payments, or any students bothering to listen.
America's urban Catholic schools are in crisis. Over 1,300 of them have shut down since 1990, mostly in our cities. As a result, some 300,000 students have been displaced--double the number affected by Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. This report, which includes a comprehensive survey of the attitudes of U.S. Catholics and the broader public towards inner-city Catholic schools, examines this crisis and offers several suggestions for arresting and perhaps reversing this trend in the interests of better education.
Why is it necessary to measure student behavior by race? Test scores are in this way disaggregated to prevent schools from ignoring struggling low-income and minority students, who in the past were often written-off as beyond hope.
Fordham's new Catholic schools report, released today, is here. USA Today covers it here.
Coby writes: Many KIPP schools are better than most urban schools because they alleviate more of the burdens of poverty. There should be more such schools.
I'll admit to watching some of last night's Hollywood-glitzy American Idol Gives Back show.
National Review's Phi Beta Cons blog is engaged in discussion of the same topic that we are. See here and here.
Via The Gradebook: Florida could be next to join the American Diploma Project, which Fordham helped develop several years ago.
Mike and Christina discuss Fordham's latest report, Who Will Save America's Urban Catholic Schools? httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAzVVeX34g8
Inaccuracies in school textbooks make Gadfly cringe. So does bias. Too many widely-used textbooks are sloppy and error-filled, not to mention banal. Many are also slanted, mainly to the left.
Free-lancer Alexander Russo recently investigated Barack Obama's involvement in Chicago's "local school council" debates of the mid-1990s. At issue was whether the councils (Russo calls them "mini school boards") should have had the power to fire principals, which several did for dubious reasons.
Since 1990, some 300,000 children have been displaced from Catholic schools that closed during this period--twice as many as were impacted by hurricanes Rita and Katrina. Most of these youngsters live in America's inner cities, most are poor, and their beloved schools closed not because of physical destruction or flooding, not because of poor performance, but for lack of funding.
Deborah Meier, of New York University's school of education, believes the school district in Cheektowaga, New York, which bars underachieving and misbehaving middle-school students from extracurricular activities, is "like prison." Odd that Sondra LaMacchia, whose 14-year-old daughter Cortney attends a Cheektowaga middle school, doesn't appear similarly distressed.
Five elementary schools in Philadelphia jettisoned machines that dispense soda for those that dispense juice, cracked down on candy sales and junk food, and gave prizes to pupils who ate roughage. Mirabile dictu, after two years their students were less fat! So concludes a study that will be released in the April issue of Pediatrics.
A recent New York Times article about the ambitions of United Federation of Teachers (UFT) boss Randi Weingarten is hardly revelatory to those of us in the ed biz, where everyone knows Weingarten is close to taking the helm at the American Federation of Teachers. But the Times piece includes some interesting bits nonetheless.
Zeyu Xu, Jane Hannaway, Colin TaylorThe Urban Institute and the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education ResearchMarch 27, 2008
