How the Harvard Kennedy School Abandoned America. Teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in math and English — Quartz. “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” goes the aphorism commonly attributed (perhaps mistakenly) to Sinclair Lewis.
The election of soon-to-be president Donald Trump suggests the prediction may turn out to have been only half-true. As Trump opponents nervously await his inauguration, many are wondering about how to discern the potential signposts of American fascism in the making. What legislative markers should we look for as the government trundles toward authoritarianism, dragging the world’s foremost attempt at democracy into at least four years of retrograde policy and pronouncement? Empire shaped the world. There is an abyss at the heart of dishonest history ...
Wicked Smart: Massachusetts’s Efforts to Turn Around a Failing School District – Chicago Policy Review. Just 30 miles north of Boston on the Merrimack River is the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts.
This industrial metropolitan area is home to almost 80,000 people, with a median household income of $32,851 and a poverty rate of 29.2 percent. Almost 40 percent of residents are immigrants, coming predominantly from the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico. Across the city there are 28 public schools responsible for educating 13,000 students, which, up until 2011, were not doing a very good job. Lawrence Public Schools (LPS) were consistently at the bottom in test score rankings for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and only half of their students graduated from high school in four years. In response to recurring low performance, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) took over LPS in an effort to turn around the district. Thriving in the Heart of Chicago. What’s most notable about the Chicago kindergarten class where assistant teacher Nichelle Bell is temporarily in charge is what is not happening.
Teachers are not redirecting their pupils, who are not off-task. Hands are not in other people’s spaces. Voices—those of children and adults—are not raised. According to conventional wisdom, there should be bedlam in the classroom here at this charter school operated by the University of Chicago. I Quit Teach for America - Olivia Blanchard.
I am sitting in a comfortable gold folding chair inside one of the many ballrooms at the Georgia International Convention Center.
Rebecca Burgess’ Comic Redesigns the Autism Spectrum. Recently, Evan and Dara Baylinson gave their son Gordy a choice.
Gordy, a nonverbal teenager on the autism spectrum, could elect to go to either his school’s prom tonight or an “Autism Night Out” hosted by the local Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland. Gordy, 16, chose the latter and decided to pen a letter to Officer Laurie Reyes, who formed a departmental autism outreach program to train officers on how to interact with people with autism. Gordy’s letter is reprinted below: Dear Officer Reyes,My name is Gordy, and I am a teenager with nonspeaking autism. I prefer this term rather than low functioning, because if I am typing you this letter, which I am, I am clearly functioning. Can AI fix education? We asked Bill Gates. Shut Up About Harvard. It’s college admissions season, which means it’s time once again for the annual flood of stories that badly misrepresent what higher education looks like for most American students — and skew the public debate over everything from student debt to the purpose of college in the process.
“How college admissions has turned into something akin to ‘The Hunger Games,’” screamed a Washington Post headline Monday. “What you need to remember about fate during college admission season,” wrote Elite Daily earlier this month. A Debate in California Brings to Fore Denials of Caste - The Caravan. On 28 March 2016, the Hindu organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh posted a tweet to its official Twitter page: “The leftist scholars’ bid to undermine India’s glorious identity was foiled by young Hindu activists and HEF”—the Hindu Education Foundation, a US-based Hindu group–“in California, USA.”
Another tweet, posted a few minutes later, added: “Congrats to Hindu activists to successfully oppose & contest the suggestion to replace ‘India’ by ‘SouthAsia’ in text books in USA.” These messages concerned a recent meeting in Sacramento, the capital of the large US state of California. A few months earlier, in January, California’s board of education had asked the public to suggest revisions to the History-Social Science Framework, a teaching guide that outlines the social-studies curriculum for the state’s government-run schools. Straight From High School to a Career. Photo CANDIDATES from both parties have been talking a lot about the loss of American jobs, declining wages and the skyrocketing cost of college.
But missing from the debate is the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of “middle skill” jobs in the United States that are — or soon will be — going unfilled because of a dearth of qualified workers. Employers complain that electricians, pipe fitters, advanced manufacturing machinists, brick masons and radiology technicians are scarce. More than 600,000 jobs remain open in the manufacturing sector alone. The Importance of Recreational Math. Photo.
Brittany Stinson was admitted to five Ivy League colleges after writing an es... The evidence suggests I was completely wrong about tuition fees. For a long time I hated tuition fees.
I hated them for moral reasons and for selfish ones. I obviously wasn’t too thrilled to pay them. If I’m honest, it felt like a tax on effort, on intelligence, on wanting to make a contribution to society. ‘The country will benefit from me and people like me,’ I smugly and conveniently believed, ‘and so my education should be a taxpayer investment.’ A better reason to hate them was, I believed, the deterrent effect that they would have on poorer people entering university. Solid stuff. To End Bullying, Get the Cool Kids to Help. For all of the efforts schools put into reducing bullying, there’s actually a dearth of rigorous evidence about what makes for effective anti-bullying intervention. The classic approach — pile kids into an auditorium and lecture them on the dangers of bullying, perhaps including a sad story about its effects along the way — doesn’t appear to really work.
Some researchers believe that the reason it doesn’t work is that students, like people in general, don’t really take their cues for how to behave from authority figures — they take them from their peers. If students think their peers enjoy bullying, or at least aren’t opposed to it, they’ll be more likely to not just engage in bullying themselves, but also to fail to intervene when they see other people doing it. A trio of researchers decided to target this dynamic in a big, impressive new study of 56 middle schools in New Jersey. These kids were geniuses — they were just too poor for anyone to discover them. Indian Schools Are Failing Their Students. Former Hillary Clinton aide rated N.Y. sites for possible 'Clinton School' In a memo describing how Hillary Clinton might establish a public policy school or institute at a major New York university, former State Department director of policy planning Anne-Marie Slaughter offered frank and revealing assessments of several powerful educational institutions, including New York University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York.
Why White Parents Won't Choose Black Schools