Jay Mathews makes a candid confession at Class Struggle: He didn’t think there there was much to the claim that schools are short-changing boys, but reading Richard Whitmire’s new book changed his mind. Mathews is a breath of fresh air compared to Wellesley College’s Susan McGee Bailey, who argues stubbornly that this is not a [...]
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DeTocqueville's Daughter
As a part-time grammar queen, I couldn’t resist this. Kind of makes me wish I were teaching fifth grade again!
The meme in education circles has changed in the last few days. The focus has shifted from Race to the Top to Ed Secretary Arne Duncan and the Obama administration’s Department of Education. Instead of asking just how much the states will have to change and do to have a chance at billions in grant [...]
Their principals know who they are. So says Marcus Winters– citing some pretty impressive studies– over at City Journal. This is a much bigger issue, though, than just seniority rules and giving principals some say in which teachers should be laid off and which should be kept when the budget gets tight. Forty years or [...]
Samuel Freedman’s On Religion piece at the NYT–an interesting take on Diane Ravitch’s new must-read– argues that the proliferation of free charter schools hurts urban tuition-charging Catholic schools. Not all alternatives to failing public schools are equal, though, and Catholic schools are still the only ones to offer the things that public schools– by definition– [...]
Is teaching a profession? A semi-profession? A sort-of profession? One of the things that usually comes up in debating this as-yet-unresolved question is the issue of self-regulation. Doctors and lawyers can get rid of bad doctors and lawyers who are a blot on the profession. Teachers can’t. A step in the right direction, though, would [...]
We’re up to our eyeballs in other stuff at the moment, but we couldn’t resist hanging out our shingle on the Net. When we finally get here, we’ll be talking about schools and education, Catholic anthropology and the Federalist, dogs and gardens and other things that strike our fancy. See you all in just a [...]