Even the most casual consumer of elite American commentary knows about the looming demographic crisis. The drumbeat of warnings that the United States and (more acutely) Europe face some sort of catastrophe due to stagnating or even declining populations has been steady and loud for years. Here in the United States, the defeat of the […]
Education in America
Posted inEducation in America
The F Word
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” says Stephen Colbert. In turn, you might feel that the word “freedom” has a conservative bias. According to George Lakoff, professor of cognitive linguistics and author of Whose Freedom?, that’s because conservatives have subtly but systematically changed the meaning of “freedom” to make it fit a radical right-wing agenda. […]
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Pre-emptive Wire Blogging, or, Education: Not the Silver Bullet
by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math I was fortunate enough to go to a high school where almost everyone graduated and went on to a four-year college. I have family members who went to schools where a sizeable minority didn’t go to college. I have some notion of what it’s like to go to a […]
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Affirmative Action
Erin Aubry Kaplan writes: UCLA has always had a hard time recruiting decent numbers of black students. I should know. I worked for a couple of outreach programs in the admissions office in the mid-1980s, when such programs were not only legal, they had some cachet. It was tough. The critical mass of university-ready black […]
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SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK. …
SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK. On the great David Brooks debate, can I suggest a compromise? Let kids read what they want. Give them a list of books to choose from and allow them into the classes, or into the groups, that are studying books they’d actually like to read. As it is, Brooks’ contention that boys are […]
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GRADUATION 2006: SEND YOUR DAUGHTERS TO WORK DAY.
GRADUATION 2006: SEND YOUR DAUGHTERS TO WORK DAY. Today is Harvard�s graduation day. While the politicians and pundits exhort the lucky few to lead their nation and give back to their communities, no one mentions that many of them will do nothing of the kind. If current trends keep up, half of the graduates who […]
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J School
I was lucky. I got a plum journalism job right out of college, no grunt work on local papers or time spent in graduate school required. But even if I hadn’t been so lucky, I wouldn’t have gone the J School route for much the reasons Jonathan Last identifies: The running theme [in J school] […]
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Pelosi Speaks
On Friday, May 5, we held our fourth Prospect breakfast, this one featuring House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Among the guests were Michael Tomasky and Garance Franke-Ruta of The American Prospect; columnist Marie Cocco; Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News Service; Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post; Ari Berman and David Corn of The Nation; […]
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Pelosi Speaks
On Friday, May 5, we held our fourth Prospect breakfast, this one featuring House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Among the guests were Michael Tomasky and Garance Franke-Ruta of The American Prospect; columnist Marie Cocco; Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News Service; Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post; Ari Berman and David Corn of The Nation; […]
Posted inEducation in America
K-12 vs. Universities
Alex Tabarrok wonders: The United State’s has one of the most admired university systems in the world and one of the most deplored k-12 systems. Could the difference have something to do with the fact that universities operate in a competitive market with lots of private suppliers while k-12 is dominated by monopolistic, government provided […]
