Education / Youth
Shortchanging Students
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Education / Youth on January 24th, 2012
Okay, okay … I may be beating the proverbial dead horse here, but yesterday, a colleague shared an article written by the the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, bemoaning the continuing elevation of what I’ve called “credentialing” over the sort of broad, liberal education that Americans used to recognize as an ideal. [...]
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Education Reform Basics
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Education / Youth on January 18th, 2012
Democrats for Education Reform is an important organization in our state. It’s composed of people–mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats–who want to approach education issues from the standpoint of what is best for children, and without the usual political constraints. (“Political constraints” in this context means automatic obeisance to the teachers’ unions. The organization is not [...]
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What We Don’t Know DOES Hurt Us…
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Education / Youth, Uncategorized on January 8th, 2012
The other day, I was grading a research paper produced by a graduate student who shares my concerns over civic literacy. The paper included a comprehensive review of available research on the topic, much of which confirmed what we had already known about the American public’s appalling deficit in basic knowledge of our government and [...]
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Legislative Whack-A-Mole
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Education / Youth on December 30th, 2011
As I noted in yesterday’s post, our intrepid legislators are hard at work making fools of themselves on the taxpayers’ dime. There’s the effort to ban the non-existent use of Sharia law by the state’s judiciary, a bill prescribing how school children must sing the Star Spangled Banner (no, I am not making that up–and I’m [...]
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Entering the Minefield
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Education / Youth on December 18th, 2011
The Mind Trust is one of those “do good” organizations that virtually everyone supports. It has spent its relatively brief organizational life doing work that is essentially uncontroversial–studying what sorts of methods work in the classroom, offering Fellowships to good teachers, and reminding the public generally about the importance of education to everything from economic [...]
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