Ted Nordhaus, a self-proclaimed “recovering pollster,” and Michael Shellenberger, a former San Francisco public relations executive, began quietly sending out e-mails in the spring of 2005. Love your work, they’d write people they thought would be like-minded. We should meet. The duo had created a minor stir that fall with the essay “The Death of […]
Education in America
Posted inEducation in America
Great Expectations
By 30 minutes and several days, Barack Obama is running late. He is supposed to be at his grandmother’s in Hawaii — his wife and daughters already are there — but the Senate is still voting on some fairly significant legislation. So here he is, stuck in Washington nine days before Christmas. Illinois’ junior senator […]
Posted inEducation in America
So…No On “Operation: Sugar Mama”?
From Tierney’s column: A woman’s earning power, while hardly the first thing that men look for, has become a bigger draw, as shown in surveys of college students over the decades. In 1996, for the first time, college men rated a potential mate’s financial prospects as more important than her skills as a cook or […]
Posted inEducation in America
Interview with Milton Friedman
RK: You have obviously had the enormous satisfaction of seeing your ideas influence a revolution, both in the thinking of economists and in the premises of politics and the role of government. Does this make you any more optimistic about the ability of the political process to work, and of government to learn over time? […]
Posted inEducation in America
Education as a Positional Good
This idea that education is a positional good (as in, school quality mostly matters as compared to other schools rather than on isolated quality markers) seems obviously right to me. Education, after all, is instrumental these days. The better your performance, the more prestigious and numerous your options. If you want to learn for the […]
Posted inEducation in America
The Population Time Warp: An Exchange
Adam Werbach’s inaptly titled essay “The End of the Population Movement” might have been worth reading three decades ago. He struggles at length with the superfluous task of rejecting the long outmoded concept of “population control.” Werbach might just as well mount a campaign against disco music or urge the pullout of U.S. troops from […]
Posted inEducation in America
TABOR Pains
Just at the moment the Republican coalition is showing strain over Katrina recovery and Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, a Colorado ballot measure is threatening more harm. Though it’s a “purple” state with notable blue and red streaks, Colorado now has a chance to roll back a program long supported by the anti-government movement. In […]
Posted inEducation in America
School Integration
Today’s LA Times rightly laments that LA Unified is home to quite a few teachers, supervisors, and program directors who’re totally incompetent at teaching math: For instance, middle school teachers are erroneously taught that fraction division is repeated subtraction. This makes sense only for special examples such as 3/4 divided by 1/4 . In this […]
Posted inEducation in America
End Of Story
I’m not usually one for Times-bashing, but since Slate‘s Jack Shafer deftly kicked off a discussion of Louise Story’s mysteriously placed page-1 New York Times piece in which she discovered — shock! — that women often know in advance that they intend to reduce work hours or stop working temporarily while their babies are still […]
Posted inEducation in America
Educational Inequality
Jonathan Kozol, in an interview with Campus Progress, touches on something I’ve been thinking a lot about: Some young people will tentatively say to me, “well maybe I oughtta get involved.” Well I say, “You don’t have any choice; you’re involved already. Even if you never do anything about this, you’ve benefited from an unjust […]