Writing at her blog, Dana Goldstein reminds would-be education reformers that most American schools actually serve their students pretty well: This is, in part, the point Nick Lemann made in his New Yorker column on “the overblown crisis in American education.” It’s important to note that the major problem with American education is the problem […]
Education in America
What Discrimination Means.
Conservative commentators have recently sounded the call that the pay gap between men and women has nothing to do with discrimination but everything to do with “individual choice.” Brad Peck argued that point on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s blog a few weeks ago, and today Christina Hoff Sommers from the American Enterprise Institute does […]
Education Reform And Parental Involvement.
I linked to Dana Goldstein‘s post on this in yesterday’s Fallout, but it’s worth addressing again: In the new education documentary “Waiting for Superman,” we hear a lot about how the Finnish education system is the best in the world, but nothing about how much easier it is to be a parent in Finland, because […]
Responding to Goldstein and Welch on D.C. Education Reform.
Dana Goldstein responds to my post in which I argued that Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee would not have made the progress they did in tying D.C. teachers’ job security and pay to performance had they been ideologically opposed to the idea of public-sector unions in education. She pivots to explaining why, after agreeing to […]
The Little Picture: Comic Education.
(Courtesy of Ethan Persoff) An excerpt from a 2001 U.S. Army training guide on the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Today, Sen. Harry Reid scheduled a vote to repeal the ban on gays for Tuesday of next week.
The Occupation Comes Home
Ruling the West Bank continues to corrode Israeli society.
The Era of Data-Driven Education.
Gabriel Arana says No Child Left Behind has given us a lot of hard numbers — but we still don’t know what they’re telling us about educational outcomes: But while rooting out bad teachers and excoriating unions for protecting them has become the cause cĂ©lèbre of education reformers, this isn’t simply a case of teachers’ […]
The Era of Data-Driven Education
No Child Left Behind has given us a lot of hard numbers — but we still don’t know what they’re telling us about educational outcomes.
Bob McDonnell’s Creative Accounting.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has been touting the state’s $403.2 million budget surplus since it was announced earlier this summer. On Fox Business Network yesterday, he took that advocacy a bit further and offered Washington lawmakers some advice on balancing the budget: Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com “What we need to do is incentivize […]

