The Answer Sheet:
All Week @ The Answer Sheet
One surefire way to wreck a public school system
How do you wreck a public school system? There are plenty of ways, but right now let’s just focus on one district, the state-run Philadelphia School District, which has been starved for funding by the administration of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett and has been a guinea pig for corporate school reform, with widespread school closures […]
Bloomberg, at Harvard, blasts Ivy League ‘liberals’ for ‘trying to repress conservative ideas’
(And here’s a link to the video.) Because I am a fan of good speeches, I’ve recently posted some interesting ones from the 2014 college commencement season, including a few that were funny (Mindy Kaling at Harvard Law, Jim Carrey at the Maharishi University of Management) and one that included an extended apology to students […]
Mark Zuckerberg is giving $120 million to Bay Area schools (after his last education reform effort didn’t go so well)
The world’s most innovative community shouldn’t also be a home for struggling public schools. Today Priscilla and I are announcing a $120 million commitment to support efforts to improve education for underserved communities in the Bay Area. That begins an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News written by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla […]
Is the $1 trillion student loan debt really a crisis? — Part 2
Earlier this month I published a post titled “Is the $1 trillion student loan debt really a crisis?” by Donald E. Heller, dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, which sparked a lot of comments and questions. It started out this way: For the last couple of years, ever since the outstanding volume […]
MAY 29
Winning words in National Spelling Bee going back to 1925
It’s National Spelling Bee time again, and some Post colleagues put together a great graphic that tests your ability to spell, here. Below is a selected list of words that won the bee in various years going back to the first one in 1925. You can see the entire list here. 2013 – knaidel 2012 – guetapens 2011 — […]
Mindy Kaling to Harvard law grads: ‘I’m afraid a couple of you probably are evil. That’s just the odds.’
Here’s yet another in my series of interesting/amusing/surprising commencement speeches that have been given in the 2014 graduation season. This one was delivered at Harvard Law School on Wednesday by Mindy Kaling, creator, producer and star of “The Mindy Project” and who had been a cast member on “The Office.” She was introduced by a student […]
How Maya Angelou touched a young teacher’s life
Years ago, Maya Angelou, who died on Wednesday, made a difference in the life of a young teacher. That teacher, Maja Wilson, explains how in the following post. Wilson is a teacher educator at the University of Maine, Farmington. She taught adult basic education, ESL, and high school in Michigan’s schools for ten years. She […]
Diane Ravitch a candidate for New York governor? (update)
(Update: Ravitch confirms on her blog that she won’t be a candidate, which is what the original post said.) Diane Ravitch a candidate for New York governor? New York newspapers, including The New York Times, are reporting that the Working Families Party, whose New Jersey affiliate just helped get Ras Baraka elected mayor of Newark […]
All students should learn to code. Right? Not so fast.
It’s the newest thing in education, at least for the moment: teaching kids to learn to code computers. In fact, there is a growing chorus in the business and education world for all students to learn to code and program computers. It is the 21st Century, after all, and it’s a computer world. But education […]
Utah high school alters girls’ yearbook photos to cover skin, remove tattoo
Some female students at a high school in Utah apparently broke the “modesty” standards for their yearbook and discovered that their photos had been changed digitally, with sleeves and necklines added to cover their skin, and a tattoo removed. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that some girls at Wasatch High School in Heber City, named […]
‘I belong to a generation that has fundamentally failed you’ — commencement speaker
In my continuing coverage of interesting 2014 commencement speeches, here’s one that Deborah Bial, president and founder of the Posse Foundation, delivered at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley in which she bashes her own generation, not the usual focus of such events: I wish I could tell you that we have been a good […]
MAY 28
When Maya Angelou blasted Obama’s school-reform policies
The legendary poet and author Maya Angelou, who just passed away at the age of 86, was a big supporter of President Obama, and in 2011, he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. But she also was a critic of his school-reform policies, raising her voice last year to blast […]
WiFi in U.S. schools estimated cost: $3.2 billion to meet Obama’s goal
(Correction: Earlier version had incorrect total) President Obama’s vision of ensuring that 99 percent of American K-12 schools have broadband and WIFI by 2018 is going to be mighty expensive. The Federal Communications Commission received an estimate Wednesday of how much money it will take: $800 million a year for four years for a total […]
Jim Carrey gives commencement speech at Maharishi University of Management
Jim Carrey surprised graduates at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, with a funny, emotional commencement speech in which he told them a poignant story about his father and urged them to walk their own path in life and never settle. “The decisions we make in this moment are based in either love […]
MAY 27
Send in questions, comments for live online education chat at 1 p.m. Wednesday
I’ll be doing a live online education chat on washingtonpost.com at 1 p.m. Wednesday, May 28. Please submit questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, jokes or whatever here, and tune in then or read the transcript later. Here are transcripts of some of my previous online chats: here, here, here, and here.
Is Boston’s school district eliminating history department as part of Common Core?
The Boston public schools district found itself in the position of having to issue a public statement denying that it was eliminating its history and social studies department after someone posted on the Web that it was and the news went viral in the education world. Historians assumed it was true and rightly flipped out. […]
MAY 26
No. 1 Shanghai may drop out of PISA
First in 2009 and then in 2012, Shanghai’s 15-year-old students (or, rather, a supposed representative group) were No. 1 in the world on the recent Program for International Student Assessment reading, math and science exams. But now, according to a popular Shanghai newspaper, Shanghai is considering dropping out of PISA. Why? The title of the article in Xinmin […]
Rating colleges is ‘like rating a blender’ — Education Department official
This is what Jamienne Studley, a deputy under secretary at the Education Department, told a group of college presidents who were meeting to talk about President’s Obama’s plan to rate colleges with the apparent aim of driving out of business schools that don’t meet the administration’s definition of success, as reported by The New York Times: […]
MAY 25
What school reformers can learn from poker
School reformers have made student outcomes the big focus of their efforts, targeting teachers for failure to improve student achievement. But teachers say they ignore the inputs — the issues students bring into a classroom and the training/resources of teachers. Here’s a look about the problem with outcome-based assessment, by Ben Spielberg, a Teach For […]
MAY 24
Thousands hold vigil as UC Santa Barbara reacts to shootings
Several thousand students staged a candlelight vigil Saturday night in the seaside community near the University of California at Santa Barbara where a 22-year-old gunman killed six people – including three students — and injured 13 others. Flags on the campus were lowered to half-staff and school officials moved quickly to set up counseling services for students, faculty and […]
‘Let’s stop measuring fish by how well they climb trees’
Joshua Katz is a high school math teacher in Orange County, Florida. He gave the following speech about what he calls “the toxic culture of education” today in a TEDx talk this month at the University of Akron. TEDx Talks is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share an experience […]