Kevin Welner, the director of the National Education Policy Center, explains why Inside Job, the winner of the Best Documentary Academy Award, is a better movie about education than Waiting for Superman: The film also points out the growing and now extreme inequality of wealth distribution in the United States. “The top 1 percent of …
Education
The Inexplicable Conservative Assault on Collective Bargaining
Gets curiouser and curiouser… First, (and thank you to commenter morzer for this) Governor Walker seems to be spreading some confusion on collective bargaining: And yet on the morning of Feb. 18, 2011 — a day after Democratic state senators fled to Illinois to prevent a vote on the bill — Walker made a startling …
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The Death and Life of the Great American School System (part one)
All the bad crazy out of Wisconsin lately lines up really well with the book I’m reading at the moment, The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch. Ravitch was for a long time an enthusiastic supporter of the choice and accountability movement in education reform. Her book is a …
The Death and Life of the Great American School System (part one)Post + Comments (128)
Charter Fantasy Over
Here’s an interesting statistic from a depressing account of the state of New York schools: The data also cast new doubt on the ability of charter schools to outperform their traditional school peers. Statewide, only 10 percent of students at charters graduated in 2009 at college-ready standards, though 49 percent received diplomas. The state has …
Something to take our minds off woe while we wait…
I know that the thoughts of the community here, and mine certainly, are with Rep. Giffords, the wounded in that horrible incident, their families, and the loved ones who have been lost. I know what my first reaction is to the shooting, beyond grief for the individuals directly afflicted and longing for a society where …
Something to take our minds off woe while we wait…Post + Comments (17)
Snow Day
I like the idea of asking the kids: How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers? Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of distinguishing good teachers from bad. Statisticians began the effort last year by …
Yes, But WHAT Is Our Children Learning?
As part of a semi-off-topic discussion of the current unemployment problem on an earlier thread, one commentor brought up an issue I have been wondering about: 1) All of those eager beaver foreign engineering students? Dollar to a doughnut, most of those students have their education being paid for by their governments. This is more …