Life is to be entered upon with courage.
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DeTocqueville's Daughter
We always tell kids that set-backs shouldn’t discourage them. If at first you don’t succeed– try harder. The State of Arizona did just that and found itself a finalist in the second round of the Race to the Top (RttT) grant competition. The Hechinger Report‘s Liz Willen reports: Ann-Eve Pedersen of the Arizona Education Network [...]
In his “Class Dismissed” post, Mr. Foteach–writing From the Desk of Mr. Foteah– describes the last day of school he had with his fifth grade students. It’s bittersweet—and you don’t have to be a former fifth-grade teacher like me to understand what he’s talking about. Via EdWise
The Week has collected a variety of opinions on who’s to blame for the January suicide of high school student Phoebe Prince in Massachusetts. Prince, as you may remember, was the 15-year-old girl who had emigrated from Ireland with her mother. At her new school in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Prince was bullied for weeks and [...]
National Journal’s Education Experts Blog recently posed this question: Can Communities And Parents Help Turn Around Schools? This is a question that I’ve asked myself and my students. It’s one of the things that we talk about when we’re reading Jonathon Kozol’s Savage Inequalities. Kozol’s argument is that government should fix everything, but my students [...]
Emmy Partin at Flypaper uses Ohio figures to measure the fiscal impact of increasing class size, but similar savings could be expected elsewhere. Current Ohio law caps class size at 25 kids. But with the state, which invests about 40 percent of its revenue in K-12 education, looking for ways to plug an $8 billion [...]
The AP reports that the Mount Olive (New Jersey) school district is getting rid of the D grade in the middle and high schools. Any score under 70 percent will be considered failing. According to The Star-Ledger, Superintendent Larrie Reynolds wants to motivate kids who are working just hard enough to get by. “This is [...]
Michael Petrilli at Education Next has a very interesting video interview with Chester Finn and Terry Ryan about the new book they’ve written with Michael B. Lafferty. All three are from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The book– Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Front Lines–chronicles Fordham’s attempts to help what they refer to [...]
I always tell soon-to-be teachers that the teacher is the most important school factor in student achievement. Now comes more research data to back me up. David Leonhardt in the NYT reports on a study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty. Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers … examined the life paths of [...]