Education
A Letter to the Ed. in today’s ProJo calls to mind another example of polemics over scholarship. William Beeman is a Professor of Anthropology and Theatre, Speech and Dance as well as the Director of Middle East Studies at Brown and a long time critic of President Bush’s policies. He has been accused of having…
To dot an “i” and cross a “t”, the Lincol School System has reinstated the Spelling Bee that was once presumed to conflict with the No Child Left Behind Act. School officials, who said last week Lincoln wouldn’t participate in the state spelling bee this year, were eating their words yesterday. Lincoln’s four elementary schools…
Marc’s posting highlights another outstanding piece by Terry Moe. I would encourage you to read both Marc’s fine posting and the entire editorial by Moe, which you can access in Marc’s posting. As a former East Greenwich School Committee member, I would like to expand on several of Marc’s points: First, I agree that parents…
Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and a Stanford University political-science professor (and winner of the Thomas B. Fordham prize for distinguished scholarship in education) has written an important piece explaining the motivation of Teachers’ Unions. The most important point is that the unions aren’t inherently “bad,” but that they are merely looking out for…
This posting continues a periodic series on Rhode Island politics and taxation, building on three previous postings (I, II, III). My town of East Greenwich has an increasingly ugly dispute between School Committee officials and teachers’ union officials. The dispute has been highlighted in local newspaper articles (here, here, here, here, here). Comments by National…
According to State Education Commissioner Peter McWalters, much of the debate on charter schools centers around the issues of power and control. Specifically, this battle revolves around which entity, public schools or charter schools, has more of a “right” to money from a finite pool of education dollars. As reported by the Providence Journal, charter…
I received the December 2004 issue of The Proposition, a publication of the Claremont Institute. As a graduate of Harvey Mudd College, one of the Claremont Colleges, who also satisfied the requirements for a political science major at Claremont McKenna College, I found one of the quotes in the issue to be an interesting perspective…
Confirming my thoughts from an earlier post, Jennifer Marshall and Kirk Johnson have put up a piece over at National Review Online that explains how to interpret the often conflicting Charter School data that has recently been released. In my original post, I compared the data and found that the research (PDF) of Caroline Hoxby,…
To continue building on previous posts (here, here, here and my post yesterday), it seems that progress is being made on one front in the battle for academic freedom. As I have previously mentioned, some Columbia students were outraged when confronted by blatantly anti-Israel rhetoric in the classroom. Thanks to the David Project and the…
I previously posted a piece entitled Where is the Moral Outrage? which documented both the political harassment of American college students by left-wing professors and the hiring by Hamilton College of an instructor who was an unapologetic alumna of the Weather Underground terrorist group. Yesterday’s mail brought the January 2005 issue of Commentary magazine to…
