The ‘new’ Graze to the Top program
If you need a laugh, this is for you. It’s by Matt Farmer, a Chicago trial lawyer who is a member of the Local School Council at Philip Rogers Elementary School. Farmer wrote this satirical piece about Race to the Top, the competitive funding program run by Arne Duncan’s Education Department to dispense federal grants […]
Bad behavior in college: Not just at Dartmouth
Philip J. Hanlon, the new president of Dartmouth College, has just gone public with his concern that the Ivy League school’s future “is being hijacked by extreme behavior,” by which he means in part sexual assaults and the proliferation of groups with “racist and sexist undertones.” He also lamented a campus culture marked by commonplace […]
Seven things kids need to read better
For two decades, Ellie Herman was a writer/producer for television shows including “The Riches,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Chicago Hope” and “Newhart.” Her fiction has appeared in literary journals, among them The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review and the O.Henry Awards Collection. In 2007, she decided, “on an impulse,” she wrote, to become an English teacher and […]
Even the strongest relationships sour
Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, and John White, Louisiana’s education commissioner, were once a great school reform pair — seemingly inseparable. Times have changed. In early 2011, Jindal tapped White, then the superintendent of the Recovery School District in New Orleans, to become education chief in Louisiana and the state Board of Education approved the […]
The Answer Sheet 4-16-14
The Answer Sheet: Live online chat at 1 p.m. todayI’ll be doing a live chat on washingtonpost.com at 1 p.m. today, so if you have any questions or comments about anything in education (or even marginally related), send them in here: http://live.washingtonpost.com/the-answer-sheet-20140409.html#submit-question Here’s a transcript of the first chat, and here is the transcript of last week’s.by Valer