The Naked Capitalist says: I am in no position to say definitively, but Morgenson may have been spun in her report yesterday on a Denver public school financing that turned out worse than initially planned due to financial upheaval. Superficially (and the story presents quite a few general comments and analogies that encourage readers to [...]
President Obama’s favorite candidate for senator from Colorado – Michael Bennet – is facing big trouble from the days when he was superintendent of Denver Public Schools. Pointing to a king-sized mess surrounding the teachers pension fund there, the New York Times today dropped a front-page bombshell that seems to imply he was either financially [...]
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 Hill’s Walter Alarkon reports today on the fight within the Democrat Party on education funding. The Obama administration’s Department of Education– in the person of Secretary Arne Duncan–is counting on the competitive grant program Race to the Top (RttT) to reform education. But not all the Dems in Congress are on board. The intra-party [...]
The National Education Association (NEA) convention (July 2-11) is underway in New Orleans. There’s plenty of goings-on to interest political junkies- even those who don’t care all that much about education issues. Neither President Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—nor anyone from the current administration for that matter– is scheduled to speak to the delegates [...]
Kevin Carey’s post at The Quick and the Ed clarifies what’s going on in education reform right now and how’s it’s changed since the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001. We’re in what Carey calls the “post-NCLB era of education reform.” For one thing, today’s major players are different: When I began [...]
Ron Chernow writes in the Wall Street Journal that partisanship and political vitriol are nothing new in this country. Once the War for Independence was won, and folks had to decide how the country should be governed, it was clear that George Washington’s “noble but failed dream of nonpartisan civility” was not to be. In [...]
Coming to schools in Britain– and with any luck to a politically-correct schoolyard near you– is the revival of competitive games. The aim, according to the UK’s Daily Mail, is to “turn Britain back into a nation of sporting champions.” But, as the article points out, it’s also a move away from the PC idea [...]
You’ve no doubt heard about the massive upcoming teacher layoffs and that $23 billion is need right now to save public education. Chris Lane at the Washington Post says you can calm down. It’s just hype. For one thing, the predicted “as many as” figure of 300,000 teachers affected is misleading: Start with that scary [...]
Mark Riebling at City Journal has an amazing piece about the uniqueness of American thought. As he explains, the word “responsibility” and the phrase “personal responsibility” did not enter written English until the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Of course, the Framers did not pioneer the concept of man as a personally responsible agent. That notion, [...]