Education
President Obama's preschool proposal has provoked predictable grousing from some predictable sources. House Speaker John Boehner said last week that getting the federal government involved in early childhood was "a good way to screw it up." But the idea is also picking up some support on the right. "President Obama has taken on a big challenge in a realistic and ambitious way," New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote on Friday. READ MORE >>
Do the classics matter? The Common Core State Standards—new, K-12 education rubrics that were rolled out in 2010 and have been implemented in 45 states and Washington, D.C.—seem conflicted about the answer. Their designer, David Coleman, is a self-professed atavist, and the standards praise the value of Ovid and Shakespeare. READ MORE >>
President Barack Obama visited Georgia on Thursday to tout his ambitious new proposal for universal preschool. READ MORE >>
Education is the Work of Teachers, not Hackers
WHEN I LOOK BACK at my education, I am struck not by how much I learned but by how much I was taught. I am the progeny of teachers; I swoon over teachers. Even what I learned on my own I owed to them, because they guided me in my sense of what is significant. The only form of knowledge that can be adequately acquired without the help of a teacher, and without the humility of a student, is information, which is the lowest form of knowledge. READ MORE >>
How Charter Schools Fleece Taxpayers
In government, if I help myself to taxpayer dollars, we call that embezzlement and I go to jail. In the private sector, if I help myself to taxpayer dollars, we call that innovation and I get hailed as a visionary exponent of public-private partnership. That’s the lesson of a Nov. 17 investigation by Anne Ryman of the Arizona Republic into the state’s charter schools. READ MORE >>
Law School Confidential—How to Fix Legal Education
Can the Chicago Teachers’ Strike Fix Democratic Education Reform?
Minding the Metro Education Gap
For the first time since World War II, there are fewer jobs three years after the end of a recession than before it began. Our new Brookings report suggests that most of this flat recovery can be attributed to severe losses in housing wealth and jobs in industries such as manufacturing and construction. Yet education--especially the balance between the demand and supply of educated workers--is the most important factor explaining long-run unemployment in metropolitan and national labor markets. READ MORE >>
How the GOP’s New Education Policy Embraces the Market and Abandons Objective Standards
We all got a good laugh at the recent befuddlement (reported at TNR by Amy Sullivan) of a conservative Republican legislator from Louisiana who withdrew her support from Gov. Bobby Jindal’s school voucher program when she realized that its open door to public support for religious schools was not limited to those catering to Christians. READ MORE >>
