Education
Seems like an idea worth trying: Instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools are grouping students by ability. Once they master a subject, they move up a level. This practice has been around for decades, but was generally used on a smaller scale, in individual grades,…
I wonder how Providence Journal columnist Julia Steiny would feel about the observation that she’s moving ever closer to an Anchor Rising point of view. In her column, last week, she drew from her summer reading list to suggest that political correctness is gutting the aspects of American education that made for good, devoted citizens:…
The Warwick Teachers Union (WTU) leadership continues to look for and (surprise) find reasons to not meet with the Warwick School Committee to help resolve the district’s $8.9 million budget deficit. As reported by Russel Moore in the Warwick Beacon, the School Administration had proposed to consolidate and eliminate some department head positions in the…
A subscription is required, but Reihan Salam’s recent article in National Review on education is worth a read: Earlier this year, the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform published a study assessing Milwaukee’s School Choice Demonstration Project. For many voucher enthusiasts, the results were sobering. Students enrolled in choice schools performed no better on…
A recent article on Rhode Island education and the high-tech sector ends with this discouraging testimony: Prof. Edward Bozzi, coordinator for the biotechnology manufacturing program at the University of Rhode Island, said high school students need to learn physics, chemistry and biology, in that order. He also said high-tech business is increasingly international, and that…
According to its Web site, the Cardinal Newman Society works to “renew and strengthen Catholic identity in Catholic higher education.” To that end, the organization’s president spoke on “Newman and the Renewal of Catholic Identity in Higher Education” at the Portsmouth Institute’s 2010 conference, here introduced by Portsmouth Abbey Headmaster James DeVecchi: (The remainder of…
In a brief review of Alasdair MacIntyre’s God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (try here without a subscription), Ryan Anderson makes a point that echoes in a Portsmouth Institute speech by Patrick Reilly that I’ll be posting tomorrow: Scholars once sought unified knowledge of all being, in pursuit of which…
Mary McConnell starts off a recent book review with an excellent anecdote. (If you don’t subscribe to First Things, try here.) “Catholic schools reap one benefit from poverty,” the high-school principal hiring me commented ruefully (I’d just glimpsed my pay package). “By the time we’ve scrounged up money for the latest educational innovation, everybody else…
As reported by ProJo The public outcry over the fate of popular Highlander Charter School registered with state education officials, who Tuesday reversed an earlier recommendation to close the school next year unless it showed dramatic improvement and instead granted the school a three-year extension. Highlander supporters said after the meeting that they were relieved…
The news hook was local, so I posted it over on the Tiverton Citizens for change Web site, but the topic applies to the whole state, so here’s the upshot: … if our investment in education — and let’s put aside Rhode Island’s and Tiverton’s questionable results — leads to policies that drive up the…