“I have never been considered a part of the religious right, because I don’t believe politics is the most effective way to change the world,” he says now. “Although public service can be a noble profession, and I believe it is our responsibility to vote, I don’t have much faith in government solutions, given the [...]

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In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.
Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment [...]

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I understand the idea of “standards-based” education. I embrace the need to hold teachers in low-income schools to the same standards as teachers who work with more privileged children.
But the standards to which I’m being held here are not high standards; they are just a high pile of standards, a mountain of detritus generated by [...]

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Attending the awards ceremony in the spring at our high school (not TJ) for example, the Asian students carried off a huge number of the awards in nearly all subjects and completely flattened everyone else in math and science.
It’s so unfair. These Asian students, some of whom only arrived in this country within the last [...]

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So I have this fantasy: Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan’s tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports. There would be no immediate payback, but a better-educated and more economically vibrant Pakistan would [...]

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Psychologists Lisa Blackwell of Columbia University and Kali H. Trzes­niewski of Stanford University and I monitored 373 students for two years during the transition to junior high school, when the work gets more difficult and the grading more stringent, to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, [...]

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In response to this article by the Intl Herald Tribune (Literacy debate: Online, r u really reading?):
My one issue with printed media is that I don’t like being immersed in the author’s bias for too long when it comes to contentious issues in religion, sexuality, gender/race issues, culture, philosophy, or even some scientific theories. I [...]

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As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of [...]

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When Lombardi took charge in 1997, 37 percent of fourth graders read at grade level, compared with nearly 90 percent today; there have also been double-digit improvements in math scores. By 2002, PS 49 made the state’s list of most improved schools. If you ask Lombardi how it happened, he’ll launch into a well-practiced monologue [...]

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The majority of people I know in higher education would argue that there is nothing wrong with religion for people who feel they need it. Their sentiments come down to something like this: “You have your religious convictions, I have mine. Let’s acknowledge our differences and agree to disagree with one another within the confines [...]

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What if, instead of borrowing, students could arrange for investors to pay their college bills in exchange for a fixed percentage of their future income, as Ron Steen suggested two years ago? Students would shift the financial risk to lenders who could pool that risk and then package their students bonds into bundled securities that [...]

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Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this.
The author of the article goes on to flesh out the idea of how an Ivy League education can cripple their students of [...]

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AS USUAL I HAVE assigned way too much reading. Even though we begin class discussion with references to three essays required for today, our conversation drifts quickly to “Who Can Say Nigger?” and plants itself there. We talk about the word, who can say it, who won’t say it, who wants to say it, and [...]

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⇒ “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words”
I wish someone had given me this article earlier on in life.  It’d have made my life more interesting, both for me AND my teachers.

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