A conference was held last week at Harvard seeking to trace out the "hard problems" in the social sciences, following after David Hilbert's famous ranking of the hard problems in mathematics. I thought it might be interesting to talk about what we think the hard problems in education are. Note that many of the problems Hilbert came up with eventually proved to be unsolvable.I have two, that will surprise no one who has been reading.1. How can schooling contribute significantly to the democratic empowerment of marginalized students?2. How can we eliminate the relationship between the efficacy...
This could be a very sad day - I choose differently
this is not policy per se, but it explains about me as a teacher. For those who do not know, Leaves on the Current is the screen name of my spouse. This was originally posted at Daily Kos1889 the birth of Adolph Hilter1999 the shootings at Columbine High SchoolEither could be an occasion to look back - in horror or in sadness.Instead I look ahead. To the words of a man born around this time - we do not know for sure when, only that he was baptized on April 26.And for this day, one set of his words seems appropriate, at least in my mind:When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,I all alone...
Looking Past the Spin: Teach for America
is perhaps the most important single article to date on what has developed from the Princeton Senior Thesis of Wendy Kopp. Authored by Barbara Miner, it appears in the Spring edition of Rethinking Schools, which if you care about the future of public education you should support (while the material is available online, you can consider contributing if you choose not to subscribe). here is the link directly to the articleA PDF version of the article was circulated among similarly thinkers on education a few weeks before the Spring issue was mailed. I have not written about it until now because...
Pay Kids to Do Well in School? I Vote Yes
For lots of reasons not necessarily laid out here. If we are going to make them do work they don't want to do, why not pay them? We get paid. And if they like it and they get paid, well. . . . And see Sidorkin.The kids had much in common. In all four cities, a majority were African American or Hispanic and from low-income families. So why did the results vary so dramatically from city to city?One clue came out of the interviews Fryer's team conducted with students in New York City. The students were universally excited about the money, and they wanted to earn more. They just didn't seem to...
Why Are 25 Hedge Fund Managers Worth 658,000 Teachers?
That is the question Les Leopold asks in this Huffington Post entry.Here is his opening paragraph: In 2009, the worst economic year for working people since the Great Depression, the top 25 hedge fund managers walked off with an average of $1 billion each. With the money those 25 people "earned," we could have hired 658,000 entry level teachers. (They make about $38,000 a year, including benefits.) Those educators could have brought along over 13 million young people, assuming a class size of 20. That's some value.Leopold writes The wealthy will have placed an estimated $2 trillion into hedge...
Why a School of Education?
I have recently become the founding dean of the school of education at Merrimack College. The school itself brings together already existing undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as a graduate institute that focuses on non-degree programs and professional development for K-12 teachers and administrators. It is, as such, not a true “new” school of education. Nevertheless, I had to reflect on whether it was even legitimate to take on the position of dean of a school of education in today’s educational policy climate. I am giving a short speech at the beginning of a forthcoming conference...
"Dr. Death vs. The Vampire"
Just so people know that us academics are not completely pedantic, my novelette, "Dr Death vs. the Vampire" has just been published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. My wife got very nervous when I had a bunch of different books on how to poison people laying around the hou...
Ravitch: A new agenda for school reform
this was written for and originally posted at Daily Kos. The links to my previous posts are to the Daily Kos versions of those piecesI used to be a strong supporter of school accountability and choice. So begin Diane Ravitch in an op ed in today's Washington Post titled A new agenda for school reform. And yes, she hotlinks in that sentence to an earlier Post piece about her new book, a book about which I wrote in this diary. In today's piece Ravitch criticizes both accountability, telling us NCLB did not produce large gains in reading and math and that choice has been disappointing and provides...
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