Education
Andrew has just posted the results of the vote on the Cranston teachers’ union contract. [Read the first comment to that posting for an interesting perspective from someone who attended the meeting.] Steve Stycos, a School Committee member, was quoted in the referenced ProJo article as saying that board did not have sufficient information about…
Thanks to Andrew for the heads-up about a posting in today’s kausfiles: Test Scores Improving, NEA In Full Damage-Control Mode! Want to know what to make of those recent encouraging NAEP test score results, which the Bush Administration promptly hailed as “proof that No Child Left Behind is working.” As usual, Eduwonk is the place…
The North East Independent and the East Greenwich Pendulum, our two local newspapers, carried two stories this week that reinforce, yet again, why public schools are structured in a way where neither teachers nor bureaucrats act in ways that lead to a level of excellence necessary to provide our children with a superb education and…
Michelle Malkin has a wonderfully effective way of being quite direct. Consider this posting entitled Shut Up and Teach: The National Education Association recently had its annual convention, where it called for President Bush to withdraw our troops from Iraq, vowed to defeat the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and resolved to educate about the…
The following comments were made in a Wall Street Journal editorial (available for a fee) entitled Jayhawk Judgment: …[In Kansas] the state Supreme Court has commanded that the legislature must increase spending on the schools, as well as the taxes to pay for it, by precisely $853 million over the next two years. This week…
The New York Times published an editorial yesterday entitled False Data on Student Performance: Americans often can’t find reliable information about how the schools in their state compare with schools elsewhere. The No Child Left Behind Act [“NCLB”] was supposed to change that by requiring states to file clear and accurate statistical information with the…
Robert Gordon, a former education policy advisor to John Kerry, has written a provocative article in The New Republic magazine about the Democratic Party’s actions on educational matters. Ed Achorn has recently commented on the article here, noting: …Mr. Gordon contends that Democrats should stop letting Republicans eat their lunch on education. Democrats, given their…
Five years ago, fighting the Rhode Island educational establishment of bureaucrats and teachers’ unions reminded me of Sisyphus, who mythology says was condemned to constantly pushing the rock up the hill – only to have it slide back down so he would have to repeat the senseless effort again and again. But the winds of…
Rhode Island Politics & Taxation, Part XXI: Blocking More Charter Schools Means Hurting Our Children
The latest news on charter schools in Rhode Island is bad news for our children, especially those who need our help the most: The House Finance Committee’s decision to impose a two-year moratorium on new charter schools has derailed plans to open such a school in East Providence this fall. Dennis Langley, chief executive officer…
David Gelernter of Yale has written this editorial: …Our schools teach history ideologically. They teach the message, not the truth…They are propaganda machines. Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin’s gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot…