All students learn more when “diverse” voices participate in class discussions, say proponents of racial and ethnic preferences. But minority students don’t necessarily want to speak for their groups. At the University of Colorado’s School of Education, a “school and society” class created a special section restricted to minority students and students who are […]
Archive for May, 2008
Kimberly Swygert links to a New York Post story about a 17-year-old boy who’s well on his way to a lucrative career as a litigant. In 1999, Albert Salcedo got $30,000 for facial cuts suffered when he fell through a school fence. As Kimberly points out, the way to suffer facial cuts from a […]
You can read John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education (2000) for free online.
A former teacher and long-time critic of the system, Gatto is the author of Dumbing Us Down, A Different Kind of Teacher, The Exhausted School and Educating Your Child in Modern Times: Raising an Intelligent, Sovereign, & Ethical Human Being.
Worried about a rise in childhood obesity, British authorities plan to send manuals to parents of newborns on how to play games such as hopscotch and hide-and-seek with their children. The manuals also cover skipping. In Fife, Scotland, the idea already is being tried.
The Play At Home manuals remind parents how to do everything […]
Students taught directly by the teacher understand scientific concepts signfiicantly better than students who are asked to discover the science on their own, concludes a study by David Klahr, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon, and Milena Nigam, a research associate at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biomedical Informatics. Monitor on Psychology reports:
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Many of Buffalo’s 4,000 charter school students are in school in the summer, reports the Buffalo News. Students don’t seem to mind; it’s not as if their families can afford summer camp or family vacations.
At the Enterprise Charter School, classes ended July 15 and start up again on Aug. 16, cutting summer […]
Chicago is closing 60 failing schools, opening 100 new schools and letting private managers run most of the new schools with no union contract. Chicago business leaders used the prospect of federal sanctions under No Child Left Behind “to pressure the city to put many schools into private hands, outside union jurisdiction,” reports […]
In the Baltimore Sun, columnist Gregory Kane profiles a black engineering professor who’s turning inner-city kids on to math. “Most of the Ph.D.s in math are going to foreign students,” says Charles Johnson-Bey. He’s coaching Team America.
Last week, for the third consecutive year, the 38-year-old electrical engineering professor at Morgan held his one-week math, […]
As teen-agers revel in online pornography and videogame violence, they’re less likely to be reveling in the real thing. Glen Reynolds makes the connection:
When teen crime and pregnancy rates were going up, people looked at things that were going on — including increased availability of porn and violent imagery — and concluded that […]
Once a social studies teacher, California Superintendent Jack O’Connell teaches adult students preparing for the high school equivalency exam. The LA Times reports:
The Monday night classes offer a reality check for O’Connell, whose day job is filled with piles of paperwork, power lunches and endless meetings about education minutia.
O’Connell gets to see the […]
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