“Homework Hooey” is the apt headline on Martin Davis’ New York Post column critiquing two books — Alfie Kohn’s The Homework Myth and The Case against Homework by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish– that argue American students are overworked, leading to depression, obesity, family tension, and, no doubt, acne. Homework doesn’t help students learn, they […]
Archive for May, 2008
As hosted by Thespis Journal, this week’s Carnival of Education has a theatrical theme. In “The History Boys” category, A History Teacher explains Wikipedia to his students and teaches them to consider the source of information.
Next week, send carnival entries to Scott Elliott of Get on the Bus at scemel-(at)-aol.com.
To meet “diversity” quotas, publishers plop able-bodied child models in wheelchairs and pass off Hispanic kids as Native American or Asian-Americans as Hispanic, observes Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, citing a Wall Street Journal story by Daniel Golden.
At least three-fourths of the children portrayed as disabled in Houghton Mifflin textbooks actually aren’t, (a photographer) […]
California’s “English learners” — so-called because they’re not completely fluent in English — are learning, writes Peter Schrag, a long-time Sacramento Bee columnist. Schrag finds a lot of good in the state’s 2006 STAR scores, which the bilingual lobby claims show the need for “to create yet another segregated program for English learners.”
Students reclassified […]
The New Yorker’s education issue is on news stands. The story on the rape charges against Duke lacrosse players — framed as an analysis of Duke’s split academics-athletics personality — can be read online. It’s a lot better than the New York Times’ coverage despite magazine deadlines.
Ninety percent of Massachusetts charter schools are performing as well or better than schools their students otherwise would attend, concludes a new study by the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment for the state Department of Education.
Researchers compared MCAS results in English and math between individual charter schools and their comparison sending districts […]
Category Five hosts this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling.
Send next week’s submissions to Why Homeschool.
Today’s children can’t explore the World Beyond The Front Yard, says a Washington Post story
. . . . to drive around America’s suburbs is to see tidy but empty blocks, devoid of the kickball, hide-and-seek and aimless wanderings of earlier generations. For many parents, the thought of allowing their children out unaccompanied invokes spasms of […]
In releasing its annual State of State Standards report, the Fordham Foundation calls for national standards.
Two-thirds of schoolchildren in America will return to class in coming weeks in states with mediocre (or worse) expectations for what their students should learn.
Five years after No Child Left Behind made standards-based education reform the law of the land, […]
Even as ACT scores are rising, SATs are declining: Students taking the new, longer test posted the largest drop in scores in 31 years. College Board, which runs the SATs, blamed the decline on more students taking the test only once.
Fatigue wasn’t to blame, the College Board insisted, even though this year’s class was the […]
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