Education · Featured · Podcast
Joy Pullmann, managing editor at The Federalist and education research fellow at the Heartland Institute discusses some of the top education policy stories of 2014 with Heather Kays, managing editor of School Reform News. Pullmann and Kays also discuss what’s to come in 2015.
Only one week after Election Day, Washington, DC’s focus has shifted from furious campaigning to National Education Week and the Thought Leader Summit (held from Nov. 10–13), “a gathering of the leaders from education, business, and government who define and shape trends in public and private education.”
Behavioral psychologists and economists long have considered incentives to be a normal part of human nature, but applying them to education still stokes controversy.
Education · Featured · Government
Storm clouds have been gathering around the Common Core for some time. Until now, most of the critical attention has been on the political ramifications of the program, that it centralizes and federalizes teaching, diminishing the power of parents to participate in the educational process. When the criticism does turn to the content of the curriculum, it usually focuses on social studies, such as Joy Pullmann’s excellent account of the Common Core’s trashing of the Constitution and Founding Fathers. Yet the Common Core’s treatment of math is proving to be even more questionable.
Economics · Education · Featured
Matt Damon made headlines a few years ago when he went on an expletive-laced screed about teachers’ poor (not his word, but close) salaries. It’s personal to him because Damon’s mother is an early childhood education professor.
Let’s agree with Damon that good teachers should earn a lot. The job can be very demanding, and it is crucial to society. So what would it take to pay teachers a great salary — say, something around $90,000 a year or more? That’s actually possible, without raising taxes or adding to the great American debt mountain. Here are three major barriers to that.
A key argument for national curriculum and testing mandates is the promise that, in the words of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Common Core is “voluntary” and “state-led.” Odd, then,[…]
Review of The Story Killers: A Common Sense Case Against the Common Core, by Terrence Moore, Amazon.com (2013), 292 pp. What the public has heard about the controversy over national Common[…]
As the New Year approaches, now is the time to make resolutions about what we should change in 2014. As most legislative sessions begin in January, it’s a good time[…]
Every Christmas, schools make headlines by labeling their calendars for “holiday break,” “winter solstice,” and the like instead of “Christmas break.” The occasional Scrooge-like superintendent or teacher will inevitably punish some little six-year-old for bringing candy canes with a Bible verse to school or wanting to share the story of Jesus’ birth for a class presentation.
The Wall Street Journal dubbed 2011 “the year of school choice” because 13 states enacted school choice laws and another 28 considered doing so. That was just the beginning. From 2011 to[…]
Every Christmas, schools make headlines by labeling their calendars for “holiday break,” “winter solstice,” and the like instead of “Christmas break.” The occasional Scrooge-like superintendent or teacher will inevitably punish[…]
Indiana education politics has dwelt in drama-queen land recently, with state Superintendent Glenda Ritz unsuccessfully trying to sue the school board she chairs for discussing over email an idea she[…]
Students at St. Louis’s De La Salle Middle School will no longer open their days with prayer or attend Mass each month if, as planned, it converts into a public charter[…]
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