No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due. U. S. Constitution, Article 4, Section 2; 3 Despite the objections of Justice Thomas to the contrary, Article 4, Section 2;3 makes it clear that the Constitution was not conceived and executed as a color-blind document. If it had of been, then Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Harrison, Van Buren,...
The Marginal Utility of Education
Economists define “marginal utility” as the usefulness that is gained from an additional amount of some good. E.g., if you already have a washer and a dryer in your house, what is the marginal utility of having a second washer and dryer? Of another bottle opener when you already own three of them? Not much, for most people.Charles Karelis makes an interesting argument using the idea of marginal utility to explain why poor people remain poor. Like all arguments at this level of abstraction, it illuminates at the same time as it is much too simple to carry the weight he wants it to.It might...
The Forum for Education and Democracy
Jim Garrison pointed me to this website for The Forum for Education and Democracy, which also has a blog. It's unclear exactly what they are doing, although there is this project page and they did publish this report on Guiding Principles for NCLB. The participant list is pretty impressive. Overall it seems like just another shell organization. To the extent to which it is as "empty" as it seems (the website looks like this even though the Forum was founded over a year ago), it may embody how education usually deals with "education and democracy".Note also how their statement on NCLB lists relating...
Balanced Discussion of Teach For America?
This looks like a fairly balanced discussion of the Teach for America program. See the nice graphs at the bottom. 130 full-time recruiters? $56 million bucks? I had no idea they had that much money. I don't know a lot about TFA. Commen...
Roundups of Responses to Ruby Payne Across the Blogosphere from Jane Van Galen's educationandclass.com Blog
Jane Van Galen has been pulling together responses to the NY Times article discussed below by Dan Butin here, here, and here. Also see her response he...
A Response to Tough's Article on Ruby Payne
Paul Tough, an editor at the New York Times Sunday magazine, has just published “The Class Consciousness Raiser” about Ruby Payne. (The article is in a NYT Magazine special issue on “Inside the Income Gap”.) It is a glowing and uncritical review of Payne’s work, and in many ways an obvious next article for Tough, after his most recent article for the NYT Magazine, “What It Takes to Make a Student.” I see three big points that should be made up front: Payne’s work is an un-nuanced rehash of scholarship 20-30 years old; the immense popularity of her work signals the complete inability of educator...
Community Organizing and Urban Education X: Is Progressive Democratic Education Undemocratic?
[To read the entire series, go here.]Progressive reformers at the turn of the century undertook the project of reclaiming citizens from the “human junk” produced by industrialization . . . . In the short run, as many historians have shown, Progressive reform of the political process narrowed rather than expanded the circle of citizenship. Dewey and most Progressives . . . failed to acknowledge this process of exclusion. . . . The Progressive movement[‘s] . . . vision of the people, although universal in its claims, was in fact more limited and culturally bounded. New immigrants and African...
Almost 16,000 Children Die in the World Every Day from Starvation
Hunger Facts: InternationalIn America, 35 million people feel the effects of hunger every day, which researchers estimate costs the nation 90 billion dollars a year, mostly from illnesses, but also from lost education.More:Throughout the year in 2003, 88.8 percent of U.S. households were food secure, essentially unchanged from 2002. The remaining 11.2 percent (12.6 million households) were food insecure. These households, at some time during the year, had difficulty providing enough food for all members due to a lack of resources.Furthermore:hunger and obesity [can] coexist because many hungry...
NCLB and Test Scores
[Kevin Drum] Here's the headline in the Washington Post today:Test Scores Soar After 'No Child'Now, this is a peculiar headline since the second paragraph of the accompanying story admits, "The study's authors warned that it is difficult to say whether or how much the No Child Left Behind law is driving the achievement gains." And indeed, the study from the Center on Education Policy (available here) goes to considerable pains to emphasize that the trend they're reporting started before NCLB was enacted. This, along with other factors, makes it very difficult to say whether, or how much, NCLB...
Regulating Homeschooling?
Talk to Action gives an excerpt from this forthcoming paper on homeschooling. Key paragraphs:Surprisingly, the social and legal implications of this phenomenon have received almost no scholarly attention. For decades political theorists have worried and argued about what steps a liberal society must take to protect children being raised in illiberal communities. They have focused their attentionon the extent to which a liberal society must permit or condemn such practices as polygamy, clitoridectomy, and child marriage.Virtually absent from the debate has been any discussion of the extent to...
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