Education News

VIDEO: Matt Damon Dismantles A Stupid Reason Glibertarian

2:36 pm EST August 2nd, 2011 | Education | 44 Comments

Kudos to Matt Damon, who is a Hollywood liberal with a little common sense. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he believes on education, but it’s a far better approach than the nihilistic libertarian position.

Not surprisingly, the “reporter” in the video is Michelle Fields, development manager for “Students For Liberty” which is Koch-funded.

Texas Getting The Creationism Itch Again

10:41 am EST May 11th, 2011 | Education | 12 Comments

A book promoting creationism over science is going to be examined by the Texas State Board Of Education. Again.

Most other states would laugh this kind of thing out of the room, but Texas has so many conservatives infecting its politics, they mull this kind of crap over.

Let them. Seriously, go ahead and approve it. Let creationism be taught in Texas schools. Then, when they have to encounter the real world and its reality-based science, Texans will be at a distinct advantage. Maybe then they will learn.

Maybe.

Study: KIPP Charter Schools Have A Leg Up

7:23 am EST March 31st, 2011 | Education | 3 Comments

KIPP

My favored way to improve American education is not from the creation of set-aside charter schools, but instead a radical rethink of all of our public schools. The problem of American education is so wide and pervasive we can’t just tinker at the edges.

The study from researchers at Western Michigan University, to be released Thursday, estimated that KIPP schools receive more than $5,000 a year per pupil through private donations in addition to regular sources of public funding. It also found that about 15 percent of KIPP students leave the schools each year as they progress from sixth to eighth grades — and that those students often are not replaced.

Gary Miron, the study’s author, said KIPP schools in Washington and elsewhere often outperform regular public schools. ‘But they’re not doing it with the same students, and they’re not doing it with the same dollars,’ he said.

KIPP officials said that the study was riddled with errors because of flaws in the data that were analyzed.

‘The questions they ask are the right ones,’ said KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini. ‘We reject their conclusions.’”

Michelle Rhee In The Process Of Epic Failing

10:20 am EST March 30th, 2011 | Education | 33 Comments

I’m a big supporter of any move to seriously reform America’s schools, and I certainly believe that some form of union stagnation plays a role in the underperformance of our education system (as does a lack of parental involvement, as well as low pay for teachers). One of the most visible people in this debate has been Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the DC public school system and who – in my eyes at least – was seen as a credible reform advocate before she started peddling her message almost exclusively with the conservative media. And now this:

The District of Columbia’s Board of Education will hold a hearing next week on irregularities in public school test scores, even as former chancellor Michelle Rhee defended the integrity of test results that showed unusual “erasure rates” from wrong answers to right.

“It isn’t surprising,” Rhee said in a statement Monday, “that the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue that the Earth is flat and that there is no way test scores could have improved … unless someone cheated.”

Rhee is now adopting right-wing style arguing, not actually addressing the questionable results, but instead throwing an assertion out about anyone who would dare to fact check her.

Topic: Michelle Rhee

No, We Aren’t Paying Teachers Enough

9:25 am EST March 7th, 2011 | Education | 32 Comments

Via Jonathan Cohn comes this chart, which does a pretty good debunking of the conservative meme that teachers are somehow being overpaid. It’s ridiculous to anyone with half of a brain.

I don’t believe in the likelihood of American decline, but if we allow the ignorant to triumph, that’s exactly what we’ll get. Teachers are part of our first line of defense, we should pay them appropriately.

Maryland Is #1 In AP (Advanced Placement) Success For 3rd Year In A Row

1:44 pm EST February 9th, 2011 | Education, Maryland | Comments Off

Congrats to Maryland’s students. From the College Board:

The top 10 states with the greatest proportion of their seniors from the class of 2010 having at least one successful AP experience were: Maryland (26.4 percent), New York (24.6 percent), Virginia (23.7 percent), Connecticut (23.2 percent), Massachusetts (23.1 percent), California (22.3 percent), Florida (22.3 percent), Vermont (21.8 percent), Colorado (21.4 percent) and Utah (19.2 percent).

Topic: Education, Maryland

American Education Fail: Twilight As Required College Reading

2:51 pm EST January 31st, 2011 | Education | 25 Comments

Via The Daily What comes this picture of Twilight in a college book store as required reading. You’ve got to be kidding me. According to this link, the school in question is OSU (Ohio State University) in an honors Introduction to Fiction course:

While we read and discuss some important, influential narratives about the supernatural – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight as well a few minor works

One of these things is not like the others. One of these things does not belong.

Topic: Twilight

Perverting History: Virginia Textbook Said Thousands Of Blacks Fought For South In Civil War

8:19 am EST October 20th, 2010 | Education, History | 10 Comments

This is the kind of excrement that gets through when we allow the conservative movement to infest our education system:

A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War — a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery’s role as a cause of the conflict.

The passage appears in ‘Our Virginia: Past and Present,’ which was distributed in the state’s public elementary schools for the first time last month. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Topic: Civil War

Multiple Blind Sides: A Failure Of The Black Community

2:30 pm EST October 14th, 2010 | Education, Sports | 26 Comments

In Slate, Josh Levin explores a number of stories that echo that of The Blind Side’s Michael Oher. That is, black atheletes adopted by white families that end up flourishing.

michael oher

For these guys, it’s a good ending – undeniably – but it’s a mark of failure in the black community that such a thing has to happen. This shouldn’t be happening, and if it is it shouldn’t be something happening multiple times.

I argued with some folks on Twitter about the Blind Side, as they complained about the supposed racist message of the white savior assisting the helpless black. But, as I argued then — this is what actually happened. Don’t be angry at Hollywood for telling a compelling story, but rather be angry at Black America for failing our kids this miserably.

And we all know it isn’t just the athletes. There are much more kids slipping through the cracks that don’t have the benefit of athletic prowess. Yes, there are outside factors, but the solution is inside black America. It has to start re-learning how to value the basic elements – hard work, family values, education, etc. All the sins of society are a pittance if you can’t emancipate yourself from mental slavery.

Topic: Race

CREW, Tom Matzzie Bought Off By For Profit Colleges?

9:20 am EST October 6th, 2010 | Education, Liberals | 1 Comment

This looks bad.

In June, Wall Street short-seller Steve Eisman, who was made famous by Michael Lewis’ book about the financial crisis, The Big Short, testified about the rule in front of the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee. ‘I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime mortgage industry,’ Eisman said. ‘I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.’ He argued that students will default on up to $275 billion in loans during the next 10 years.

Matzzie, a veteran progressive activist with experience at both MoveOn and the AFL-CIO, pounced on Eisman’s testimony. Despite his reputation as a bold progressive who goes for the corporate jugular, Matzzie wrote an op-ed attacking Eisman’s testimony against for-profit schools. The op-ed deployed talking points similar to those used by former Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis in a defense of the industry the day before. Both claimed that Eisman should not be allowed to testify because, as a short-seller, he stood to profit if the price of stock in private colleges dropped — the likely result of the new regulations.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), another prominent watchdog that normally focuses on the unsavory relationships between members of Congress and their funders, also joined the attack, filing a complaint with the Senate HELP Committee criticizing Eisman’s testimony — the first time the organization has intervened in a policy dispute like this.

CREW concedes that it did not consult any experts about short-sellers’ role in the financial system, nor did it look at Eisman’s track record; the complaint merely cited Davis’ op-ed and a Politico article that quoted Matzzie and the head of the for-profit schools’ front group, The Career Colleges Association. Sloan, CREW’s director, would make the same argument in The Huffington Post, suggesting that the new regulations would benefit financial speculators more than students. She, like Matzzie and Davis, did not mention that another person with a financial conflict of interest — Sharon Thomas Parrot of DeVry University (a for-profit school) — testified that same day.