You remember the stress all too well. You can almost recreate the sense of dread you felt as you studied well into the night, and still feel the jitters of sitting in that hard wooden desk waiting for your teacher to hand you several sheets of paper filled with question after question. And now your child has to suffer through the same experience.… [Read more]
How the Face of American Universities are Changing with Modern Technology
American universities have always been leaders when it comes to college education. People from around the world come to study at American universities because of the prestige, challenge, and opportunities available. As the modern world continues to embrace technology, American universities have been quick to respond and adopt these technologies wherever they exist. However, as with all things, the trick is to adopt technology in a way that promotes students to become creators and not simply users of technology.… [Read more]
Uncorking New Strategy for Funding Schools
Public education is a public good. This can’t be said often enough or stressed strongly enough. Like law enforcement and fire protection, public schools are offered free of charge on an even-handed basis. But it’s the one public good no one wants to pay for. Instead we come up with one silly scheme after another as the savior for cash-starved schools.… [Read more]
The Bizarro World of Joe Biden, Where 1,000 School Resource Officers are *Not* Armed Guards
If you’ve never read Superman comics or watched “Seinfeld,” let me tell you a little about Bizarro World.
In Bizarro World, up is down, black is white, ugly is beautiful. Listening to the Google+ “Fireside Hangout” on Thursday afternoon with Vice President Joe Biden got me thinking about this inverted universe, where everything is the opposite of the real world.… [Read more]
In Praise of Public Educators
One could easily believe that our public school educators have a patron saint in the late comedic actor Rodney “No Respect” Dangerfield. We went from treating our trained and dedicated educational professionals as a respected calling involving “starving with dignity,” to tagging them as a gaggle of greedy, selfish, and coddled public dollar freeloaders who allegedly weren’t perfect surrogate parent nannies.… [Read more]
Arming Teachers: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea
The unthinkable tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School left us all horrified with an uneasy feeling of vulnerability. Predictably, as we wrestle with questions about why and how something so gruesome and incomprehensible could happen, some reactions have been strong and swift: more gun control, better access to mental health services. Some have been feeble: curtailing violent movies and video games.… [Read more]
Obama: On Education, Is The President Liberals’ Piñata?
While the rest of us offered thanks for family and friends on Thanksgiving, one D.C. teacher told a colleague, “I am thankful Obama won, now I can go back to hating him for what he’s doing to public education.” You mean like pumping almost $100 billion in new funds into federal education programs and another $60 billion into saving teacher jobs?… [Read more]
Textbooks: The Bad, the Worse, the Politics
If you haven’t been keeping up, since President Obama’s re-election, Republicans have morphed into a bunch of embittered, whiny, cranky crybabies. Mitt Romney, blaming his loss on Obama “gifts” to special groups. Paul Ryan, blowing dog-whistle about the large turnout of the “urban vote.” And then there’s the pièce de résistance, Peter Morrison.
This little-known Tea Party wacknut in Texas is demanding “an ‘amicable divorce’ from…the ‘maggots’” who voted for Obama.… [Read more]
Gambling on Schools, Rolling Snake Eyes
Next week many voters will breathe a sigh of relief. The political ads that have saturated the airwaves, driving us all insane, will thankfully come to an end. Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, you have my sympathy. Maryland is solidly blue – far from a battleground state – but an epic battle is brewing over a question on the statewide ballot, sparking a $60 million ad war over casino gambling.… [Read more]