We’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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Education’ category
A Modest Proposal for Handling the Differences Among School Children
November 1, 2009Paul 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 [...]
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, [...]
Do we really want to replace NCLB?
August 12, 2009In last week’s Ed Week, in a Commentary article, Replacing No child Left Behind, Richard Rothstein writes: “We all want better math and reading assessments. But we should also invest in better tests of history, sciences, and the arts, and develop tools to evaluate student behavior, judge a school’s disciplinary climate, see whether students know [...]
The first mistakes are the hardest to undo.
July 31, 2009Isn’t it true that any number of the troubled situations we find ourselves in are the result of the bad decisions we made to begin with. Our choice of a partner in marriage. Vietnam and then Iraq, from our bad decisions to go to war without good cause. Huge government deficits now threatening our children’s [...]
My Three Grandsons
July 8, 2009David Elkind, the Tufts University professor of child development, reminds us that, “every child is like all other children, like some other children, and like no other child.” Or, as he says, there is the biological, social, and psychological child. My biological grandson will eventually walk upright and use language to make his wants known, [...]
Aptocracy
July 5, 2009It’s true that much that we recognize as merit is not tested. (See the article by Walter Kirn in today’s NYTimes.) Schooling and testing right up to and on through the SATS is most of all a measure of one’s aptitude, one’s mental quickness, one’s readiness with and understanding of words and numbers, and in [...]
