The Importance of Ethical Education
There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men. There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women. There is only one child in the world and the child’s name is All Children. — Carl Sandburg We stand on the brink of undreamed exploitation of […]
The Rock and Roll Superintendent Making a Difference
Southern California’s Coachella Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) is one of the poorest school districts in the United States, with most families living below the poverty line. As journalist David Nazar stated, “Eastern Coachella Valley has a lot of poverty comparable to some Appalachian mountain communities, Native American reservations in South Dakota, even some Texas […]
Donald Trump Accidentally Reveals He's Just Another Big-Government Liberal
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump believes education is one the most essential functions of the U.S. government. It’s right up there with security and providing health care for the nation, he told a crowd in Wisconsin Tuesday night. Yet Trump has called for the elimination of the Department of Education, meaning he would destroy the agency […]
Measles Reported In One Of California’s Most Unvaccinated Counties
Measles results in 146,000 deaths worldwide every year. The school is closed because of the diagnosis. The county has one of the state’s lowest vaccination rates. An unvaccinated child has been diagnosed with measles in a California county with one of the state’s lowest rates for kindergarten immunization, the state’s department of public health announced Tuesday. […]
Is There a Right to (Tuition-Free) Higher Ed?
Bernie Sanders is correct that higher education is a right, but he is fundamentally wrong about what that implies. According to Sanders, public colleges and universities should provide universal, tuition-free education for all. This is a noble aspiration, especially for a country in which just over 30 percent of the population has a four-year college […]
Margaret Spellings Avoids Criticizing North Carolina's Anti-LGBT Discrimination Law
University of North Carolina President Margaret Spellings said Tuesday the school system is still working to understand a controversial anti-LGBT bill that was introduced, passed and signed into law last week. In Spellings’ first statement about the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, or H.B. 2, she refrained from criticizing the law, but said the […]
Visit a Children's Museum!
Summer is in sight. This matters to families following a traditional school calendar because children who take an educational break over the summer experience learning losses. Your school probably has suggestions for addressing this, as do organizations like Reading is Fundamental. But if you’d like something more playful, read on. As an expert on children, […]
Schools With Large Concentrations of Poverty Can Be High-Performing, But Not Because They Concentrate Poverty
I recently learned that my work has been used as justification by school officials who advocate deliberately concentrating poverty in a few schools. My reaction is dismay. The high-performing, high-poverty schools I write about hold many lessons, but none of them is that we should deliberately create more high-poverty schools. First, the context. In suburban […]
No, You Cannot Test My Child
Dear Local Education Authority (LEA), State Education Authority (SEA), and Federal Education Bureaucrat (FEB?), We are rapidly approaching the annual state-mandated testing ritual in public school, and it has become evident that all of you are a little nervous about that. I know this because you keep sending letters to each other about how important […]
Killing Ed: The Film That Texas Doesn't Want You to See
A new documentary on the Gülen Movement, a mysterious Islamic group operating charter schools throughout the US, premieres today and runs through March 31st at the Cinema Village Theatre in NYC. A pre-release screening earlier this month with translation into Spanish, Korean and Vietnamese drew a diverse crowd of 980 and a standing ovation in […]