In my earlier Blog I said that if Diane Ravitch had read George Santayana’s Reason in Common Sense she wouldn’t have written her most recent book, The Death and Life of the American School System. Here is why I said that. Santayana in the passage quoted, says this: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends [...]
Archive for the ‘School Reform’ category
More on School Reform
March 10, 2010More 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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
The Educational Experiment We Really Need?
March 22, 2009Two recent op ed pieces, the one by Sara Mosle in Slate Magazine, The Educational Experiment We Really Need, and the other by Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times, Education’s Ground Zero might profitably have been placed side-by-side in the same publication. Why? Well Mosle makes this judgment of KIPP or the Knowledge Is Power [...]
Let’s Abolish High School
April 6, 2007Education Week By Robert EpsteinFrom Commentary in Ed Week,April 4, 2007 Well, not quite. But while writing a new book called The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, I explored some ideas that go almost that far. I’m a father of four children, and about 10 years ago I noticed—I couldn’t help [...]
