I’m a little leery of this new study: Personality Set for Life By 1st Grade, Study Suggests On the other hand, maybe this is nothing new. As Francis Xavier, the co-founder of the Jesuits, said in the 16th century: Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.
There are two seemingly-contradictory conversations going on right now about kids graduating from college. One conversation focuses on the importance of a college degree. Bob Herbert for instance– his NYT op-ed column last week—bemoaned the fact that the U.S.—once the world leader in college graduation rates—now lags 12th behind other industrialized countries. We should quit [...]
Bloomberg reports today that Robert Wilson – known as one of the great stock investors of the last 50 years, the now-retired peer of Warren Buffet and George Soros—gave $5.6 million to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York this summer to set up fundraising programs for Catholic schools. “Most of what the Catholic schools [...]
So says the governor of Wyoming. Governor Dave Freudenthal is threatening to sell off a chunk of [the Grand Teton national park]… unless the Obama administration comes up with more money to pay for education in the financially beleaguered state.
At the State of Ohio Education blog there’s a discussion of the Fordham report on the fiscal impact of increasing the student-teacher ratio. According to the report, Ohio could save $276 million on teacher salaries if each school increased its student-teacher ration by just one (say 17:1 instead of 16:1) and could save $1.38 billion [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Nick Anderson at the Washington Post reports that the overhaul of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) seems to be stalled in Congress. Despite pleas from Duncan and Obama, it also appears increasingly unlikely that the Democratic-led Congress will provide a bailout for schools this summer to prevent teacher layoffs and program cuts related to local [...]