In her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, the educational consultant and historian, Diane Ravitch, tells us that she has changed her views on the very public school reforms that she herself, during the past 30 years or so, did so much to fashion, promote, and support.
In particular, the [...]
Archive for the 'Education' Category
On School Reform, Part One
March 6, 2010More on the Schools from Today’s News
February 1, 2010Three comments from today’s news concerning the performance, or failure to perform, of our public schools, two from the Times, and one from Time Magazine.
First Ross Douthat, in an op ed piece. He cites the sociologist, Kristin Luker who in her history of the sex education debate concluded that, “… it is surprisingly difficult to [...]
More on Chester Finn and school reform
January 16, 2010Chester Finn, no less than Arne Duncan and his “Race to the Top,” labors under the (mis-)conception that student achievement levels depend primarily on what the educators, – the teachers, administrators, and politicians — do, and that downward or flat, as at the present time, achievement levels call for additional reforms.
Maybe, but so far a [...]
School Ramblings brought on by reading Chester Finn
January 14, 2010Chester E. Finn, Jr., in an article in the most recent issue of National Affairs, no less than the educational reformers of whom he speaks, has it all wrong. It’s not so much that the reforms have been misdirected, gone after the wrong targets, not been basic enough.
It’s rather that the reforms and the reformers, [...]
A Modest Proposal for Handling the Differences Among School Children
November 1, 2009We’ve only recently moved to Tampa, about a year ago to be exact when we moved into our son’s house while our new home was being significantly renovated for our own purposes. Now it’s completed, but we’re still moving in, taking things out of hundreds of boxes as spaces are prepared for them. Books in [...]
Paul Krugman has it all wrong.
October 10, 2009Paul Krugman has it all wrong in a recent NYTimes op ed piece. “If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word,” he writes, “that word would be ‘education.’” Op Ed writers, even Nobel Prize winners such as Paul Krugman, ought to avoid writing about subjects about which their own knowledge and experience [...]
Let a thousand flowers bloom
September 25, 2009In my lifetime, meaning the 77 years that I have lived, what has changed the most, and what the least? Clearly what has changed the most are the new skills that I have needed to acquire, from one year to the next, if not from one day to another, in order to fully benefit from [...]
Didn’t she know that he had said this 50 years earlier? She should have.
September 12, 2009In a lead piece posted on her liberal outlet, the Huffington Post of September 3, Arianna Huffington had this to say about public education:
Health care is rightly dominating the national debate, but with children all across the country heading back to school, education, currently seated in the back row of the national classroom, is raising [...]
The real elephant or gorilla in the classroom, segregation
August 20, 2009In February of 2006 David Berliner told the American Association of School Administrators Federal Relations luncheon that the 600 pound gorilla sitting in the nation’s classrooms and making it difficult (if not impossible) for schools to do their job was poverty.
Many, especially those on the political Left, believe this. These reformers would address the [...]
The “qualities” of the learners, that’s what it’s all about.
August 13, 2009The passage just below is taken from the Considerations on Representative Government by John Stuart Mill. I found it in Peter Berkowitz’s Introduction to his book, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism.
“If we ask ourselves on what causes and conditions good government in all its senses, from the humblest to the most exalted, depends, [...]
