“Most Americans have always been passionately devoted to education. The current national panic over our plummeting learning scores is only the latest sign of this devotion and is remarkably similar to the panics over purported education crises that have occurred throughout U.S. history. Unfortunately, almost all of the politicians and so-called expert educationalists rushing forward […]
“President George W. Bush’s 2009 budget request for the federal government, released in February, includes a proposal to boost federal funding for the Washington, DC school system by $32 million, including a $5 million hike for the DC Opportunity Scholarship program–the citywide voucher program for low-income students. The proposed budget increase for schools in the […]
“The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) is launching a new leadership initiative aimed at giving superintendents the tools and resources they need to understand the transformative role of educational technology, as well as to lay out a blueprint for technology leadership and action. The initiative, called Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent, will help superintendents […]
“Two students at Colorado College were found guilty of violating the school’s conduct code regarding ‘violence’ after they distributed a satirical flyer mocking a publication of the Feminist and Gender Studies program. As part of their punishment, student Chris Robinson and a second student have been required to hold a campus forum discussing issues brought […]
“The parents of Melissa Busekros, the German teen who was taken by police from her home and placed in a psychiatric ward because she was homeschooled, now are being billed by the government for the cost of her forced stay, according to attorneys who are working on her case. WND originally reported more than a […]
“On the agenda: A student who got into a shouting match with a faculty member. Another who harassed a female classmate. Someone found sleeping in a car. And a student who posted a threat against a professor on Facebook. In a practice adopted at one college after another since the massacre at Virginia Tech, a […]
“Nothing does more for bipartisanship at the state Legislature than a common foe. And few foes are more commonly despised around the Legislature - by Republicans and Democrats alike - than the purse-string-holding bureaucracy that administers the No Child Left Behind education mandates. But do the federal bureaucrats frustrate Arizona legislators enough that they might […]
“It’s the 800-pound gorilla of U.S. education. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the sweeping legislation enacted six years ago to improve public schools, seems to make a lot of people unhappy. But President Bush, undaunted by the barrage of criticism aimed at this beleaguered measure by states, teachers’ unions and politicians on both […]
“I find it disheartening that efforts under way since the 19th century to develop a merit pay system for teachers have failed. (’Merit pay misses the point,’ New Jersey Education Association advertisement, March 9.) Merit pay is not a bonus or competition among others, and it is not based solely on student performance or test […]
“Public school. Private school — those were the two choices facing me 13 years ago on the eve of my daughter’s entrance into kindergarten. Prohibitive cost and constricted social milieu ruled out private school. An ill-fated meeting with public school officials left me appalled that birthdays, not ability, mandate when a child starts kindergarten in […]
