Via Matt, this week is National Charter Schools Week, which is very exciting. I mention this because I was just having a conversation with an education wonk who lamented that so many progressives seem to think charter schools and voucher schools are the same thing. They’re not. Vouchers are bad, charters are (generally) good. Vouchers […]
Education in America
Posted inEducation in America
TEXAS LEADS THE NATION IN TEEN PREGNANCY.
Everything really is bigger in Texas. This month’s Texas Monthly reports that the state is the largest recipient of federal money for abstinence education — more than $4.5 million annually — but ranks first in the nation in teenage births. Almost a quarter of those births are not the girl’s first delivery. Failing to see […]
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READING FIRST COMES IN LAST.
Sadly, the massive “Reading First” skills-builder program at the heart of No Child Left Behind doesn’t actually improve reading skills among enrolled kids. This fits into the larger pattern in education reform efforts which is that most ideas fall short of expectations. Vouchers have found themselves in a similar decline, and now they’re losing support […]
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The Case of the Missing Education Policy
The McCain Agenda: Want to know what John McCain’s plans are for fixing America’s education system? Good luck. His last major statement was during his 2000 campaign.
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INTEGRATION MATTERS.
I hope you’ll bear with me while I do a bit more education blogging today. Education Week reports on two new studies that find that if you track students from kindergarten through 8th grade, the achievement gap between white and black kids is steepest among the most gifted students. In other words, a gifted black […]
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LAST NIGHT’S EDUCATION DEBATE.
One of the more interesting moments of the debate last night was the conversation about affirmative action, in which both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton said they supported the inclusion of poor white children in the group of people who benefit from college admission preferences. The truth, though, is that most elite colleges already consider […]
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IN EDUCATION TODAY.
Two interesting stories to check out in education news today. First, Bloomberg news does a really excellent job of revealing how Wall Street investment banks JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley fleeced Pennsylvania school districts for billions of dollars by offering them derivative contracts. These are investments tied to changing interest rates, for which school boards […]
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Canada Imports “School Choice” Ideology
Toronto’s current debate over whether to create Afrocentric public schools looks suspiciously like arguments over private school vouchers in the United States, with the same charged rhetoric and misleading data.
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WILL OBAMA BE MORE AGGRESSIVE ON EDUCATION ISSUES?
TNR‘s Josh Patashnik has an interesting rundown of Barack Obama‘s commitment to education reform. Patashnik focuses mostly on Obama’s willingness to buck the teachers’ unions on merit pay. He also suggests that Clinton hasn’t released as comprehensive of an education platform, but in actuality, we know quite a bit about how the Democrats differ on […]
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MORE ON SAX AND SAME SEX EDUCATION.
Sara Mead has more on the phony neuroscience and general quackery afflicting Leonard Sax and his strain of the same sex schooling movement. I thought this, in particular, was an important point: There is pretty strong evidence that preschool-aged boys develop gross motor skills faster than girls do, while preschool-aged girls tend to have an […]
