September 18, 2008
Fundamentalists
The Royal Society sacks its education adviser for talking sense about creationism in schools
September 04, 2008
Thumbs-on sex education
A rational argument for prudence within sex education, but the Right won't like it.
March 23, 2008
Inference and belief
Douglas Kmiec is a law professor at Pepperdine with resume entries in the Bush 41 and Reagan administrations and a spell as dean of the Catholic University Law School. He has just endorsed Obama on Slate. So far so good. But this post is not about the politics of an endorsement that has a lot of benefit for Obama, nor...
March 05, 2008
Math is hard
Two dispatches this week from the “is our girls and women learning?” wars. Elizabeth Weil writes about the nascent movement for single-sex education in public schools, and Christina Hoff Sommers takes on efforts to socially engineer the equal representation of women in science and engineering PhD programs. (Charlotte Allen’s “Women are dumb” doesn’t make the cut.) These arguments over the...
March 02, 2008
February 29, 2008
Toys and art
This week I was trapped in an aluminum tube with the movie, Mr. Magorium's Magical Emporium. This is a piece of fluff that wastes Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman on a deeply vacuous story about a magic toy store, and how you can do anything you want if you only believe, and how accountants and grownups who work for a...
February 28, 2008
Is our children learning?
No, they isn’t. This week’s “what’s the matter with kids today?” hand wringer is Still at Risk: What Students Don’t Know, Even Now. What teens don’t know could fill a book...which they wouldn’t or couldn’t read, it seems. This time, it’s literature and civics—which are being sacrificed in favor of reading and math skills. None of the results should surprise...
February 01, 2008
Bill criticizes Hillary
WJC blasts No Child Left Behind, which HRC voted for and still supports in principle, in contrast with Obama, who sees the real problems: bad inadequate tests and unrealistic goals.
December 07, 2007
Stupefying toys: it’s not the lead you need to worry about
Lead is really bad for you if you inhale or eat it, especially if you’re a kid wiring up neurons into the best possible brain, so toys that put it into kids are deplorable. But I think we’re missing something much more alarming about toys. Plato’s Socrates warned his students that they should be even more careful about what they...
October 22, 2007
August 07, 2007
June 19, 2007
Competition as a substitute for boycott
Don't like the U.S. News college rankings? Neither do I. But you can't beat something with nothing. A boycott is fine, but creating a decent ranking system would be better.
June 06, 2007
April 28, 2007
Abstinence from governing
Well, doesn't this about sum it up. The government is paying ideologues to lie to kids about sex, and they know it, having been repeatedly informed of the facts. Then it lies about lying: "I do want to note that our abstinence programs have been, and will continue to be, medically accurate..." Abstinence-only programs don't affect sexual behavior worth a...
April 24, 2007
Depersonalized Admissions Processes?
Over at TNR's The Plank blog, Jason Zengerle suspects that there is a linkage between the Virginia Tech shooting and the university's depersonalized admissions process. Drawing on an article in the WaPo, he believes that, "the Virginia Tech massacre provides another good argument in favor of de-depersonalizing the college admissions process." I find this a baffling argument. There are a...
April 11, 2007
Implementation analysis
Yes, schoolchildren should know about the Bible. But how likely is it that we'll be able to keep Bible class from turning into a little fundamentalist madrassa, especially in the places where "putting God back in the schools" has the greatest political appeal?
April 05, 2007
OK, I give up
I can't think of a single good reason for letting middlemen make money for processing government-subsidized student loans.
March 16, 2007
Complacency about public education
The big scandal about American K-12 education isn't how many failing schools there are miseducating kids from deprived backgrounds; it's what a lousy job the non-failing schools do educating kids from non-deprived backgrounds.
February 25, 2007
Firing teachers: the evidence
In most of the anti-union South, it's easy to fire teachers. That must be why Southern students outperform Northern students. Oh, wait ...
February 23, 2007
Firing teachers, and hiring them
Yes, it ought to be easier to fire bad teachers. But that won't do much good unless there are better teachers to replace them. That's going to cost money.
December 03, 2006
Expression and Uniforms
Mike O'Hare thinks that formal school rules against clothing that is a direct affront to another student is a bad idea, because it is superior to regulate in this area through social norms, criticism and stigma. I think there's a lot to this, but...Perhaps I'm old fashioned, or because my greatest contact with K-12 schools has been with those dealing...
December 02, 2006
Insulting speech in and out of schools
The speech restriction issue Mark takes up below does not seem to me to be as tractable as he makes it sound, especially outside schools in the larger society. And I don't think he pays enough attention to duties compared to rights in this context, especially as regards an operational definition of language that "insults other students"....
July 14, 2006
Why is America the Best Country?
Piety, the Constitution, apple pie, our especially excellent mothers: all these gifts contribute to the overall wonderfulness of our country, but the underlying rock of greatness has to be big-time college sports, especially football. This industry builds balanced scholar-athletes, deep thinkers with finely-tuned, healthy bodies, prepared intellectually and morally for demanding careers. It legitimizes the effete and self-indulgent lives of...
April 28, 2006
Plagiarism
Mark makes an interesting point about the messages we send (it's OK if you don't do your own work) when we intend to send another (education is so important, we really want you to get good grades and get into a good college etc.). I had a rather bizarre take on this, extending his insight to the classroom itself: When...
As the twig is bent ...
Schoolteachers are assigning homework projects that kids can't do. The parents do them instead. This teaches the kids to cheat. That's a bad thing.
February 13, 2006
Heartless Cruelty
The Boston and Philadelphia Public Schools are closed Monday, Feb. 13. But Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have hearts of stone and kept the New York schools open. May generations of children and ex-children curse their memories....
January 20, 2006
Shameless Self-Promotion
Tomorrow night, I’ll be on Fox News’ “Heartland with John Kasich,” at 5 pm and 8 pm (both times PST). You might very well ask, why in the world is Fox interested in me? Over the last few days, the media has decided that its resources are best focused on a right-wing UCLA group called the “Bruin Alumni Association,” which...
November 30, 2005
Discounting
This is an exceptionally useful study of the real price of higher education in the US. It makes the rather obvious point that it is much more useful to think about the affordability of higher education in terms of what students actually pay, rather than what the headline prices are. For private, 4 year institutions, the headline price for a...
November 26, 2005
Defining mastery down
Predictably, most states have responded to the mandate of the No Child Left Behind Act -- that 100% of their students achieve proficiency in reading and math by the year 2014 -- by dumbing down the tests used to measure proficiency. The law allows each state to set its own standards. It also, however mandates the National Assessment of Educational...
April 13, 2005
Collective guilt
John Moody of Fox News missed his calling. He should have been a press agent for the SS.
March 20, 2005
Waste in public education
A scandal! Arlington, Virginia, is paying its starting schoolteachers amost a third of what the top law firms pay their starting associates.
October 16, 2004
Why does Rod Paige still have his job?
The President who thinks that education is the key to everything and that performance measurement is the key to education retains, as his Secretary of Education, someone who demonstated that performance measurement could be defeated by outright cheating.
September 06, 2004
September 09, 2003
"No child left behind" meets Dukenfield's law
The central theme of the "No Child Left Behind Act" is that the public schools can perform if given measurable goals and strong organizational incentives to meet those goals. Part of the evidence offered for that proposition was the "Texas miracle," and in particualr the improvement of the performance of the Houston schools under Superintendent Rod Paige, now Secretary of...
August 14, 2003
When the News is Unbelievably Good, Don't Believe it
The "Texas miracle" in education, Governor Bush's implausible account of which the media never bothered to scrutinize when he was running for President, turns out to be based largely on hocused numbers. In particular, Rod Paige, the Houston school superintendent whom Bush promoted to Secretary of Education and who was the chief salesman for "No Child Left Behind," turns out...
