Browsed by
Category: Education

The ‘diploma divide’ is the new fault line in American politics

The ‘diploma divide’ is the new fault line in American politics

Doug Sosnik writes: The legal imbroglios of Donald Trump have lately dominated conversation about the 2024 election. As primary season grinds on, campaign activity will wax and wane, and issues of the moment — like the first Trump indictment and potentially others to come — will blaze into focus and then disappear. Yet certain fundamentals will shape the races as candidates strategize about how to win the White House. To do this, they will have to account for at least…

Read More Read More

Why GOP culture warriors lost big in school board races this month

Why GOP culture warriors lost big in school board races this month

Politico reports: Amid all the attention on this month’s elections in Wisconsin and Illinois, one outcome with major implications for 2024 flew under the national radar: School board candidates who ran culture-war campaigns flamed out. Democrats and teachers’ unions boasted candidates they backed in Midwestern suburbs trounced their opponents in the once-sleepy races. The winning record, they said, was particularly noticeable in elections where conservative candidates emphasized agendas packed with race, gender identity and parental involvement in classrooms. While there’s…

Read More Read More

A rural Texas county just blinked on library closures. Pressure worked

A rural Texas county just blinked on library closures. Pressure worked

Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent write: It isn’t every day that the ruminations of local bureaucrats in a small rural Texas county become national news. But when commissioners in Llano County — population 21,000 — voted Thursday to keep its three-branch library system open, the moment was closely monitored by the biggest news organizations in the country. That’s because Llano County has become a national symbol of local right-wing censorship efforts after officials threatened to close its libraries entirely rather than allow offending materials to remain on shelves….

Read More Read More

Is the poisoning of schoolgirls in Iran a new front in the war against girls’ education?

Is the poisoning of schoolgirls in Iran a new front in the war against girls’ education?

Shutterstock By Shireen Daft, Macquarie University Recent media attention has drawn global focus on an escalating number of Iranian schoolgirls falling ill over the past few months because of suspected chemical attacks. Accounts differ, but many reports cite more than 1,000 cases of poisoning at schools across Iran. At least 58 schools in ten provinces across the country have been affected. The first known cases were reported in the city of Qom in November. There has been an escalation of…

Read More Read More

Ron DeSantis’s New College takeover is just the beginning of the right’s higher ed crusade

Ron DeSantis’s New College takeover is just the beginning of the right’s higher ed crusade

Vanity Fair reports: It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she…

Read More Read More

Conservatives want to control what kids learn, but it may backfire

Conservatives want to control what kids learn, but it may backfire

Adam Laats writes: When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) blocked the first draft of an Advanced Placement African American studies course, he insisted he did not want to eliminate Black history, but only to control it. It might seem that his campaign has succeeded: The College Board announced a new watered-down curriculum that transformed resistance figures such as Frederick Douglass into “Black Conservatives,” even as they insisted the changes had nothing to do with political blowback. Yet history tells us…

Read More Read More

Education is at the heart of America’s many divisions

Education is at the heart of America’s many divisions

Eric Levitz writes: Blue America is an increasingly wealthy and well-educated place. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic. But that gap began narrowing in the late 1960s before finally flipping in 2004. John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a two-to-one margin yet won the presidency thanks to overwhelming support among white voters without a degree. Sixty years later, our second Catholic president charted a…

Read More Read More

New York’s failing Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding

New York’s failing Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding

The New York Times reports: The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring. But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every one of them failed. Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that…

Read More Read More

The pandemic erased two decades of progress in math and reading

The pandemic erased two decades of progress in math and reading

The New York Times reports: National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago. This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years. The…

Read More Read More

Canceling student debt could help close the wealth gap between white and Black Americans

Canceling student debt could help close the wealth gap between white and Black Americans

Santul Nerkar wrote in May: America’s racial wealth gap is well-documented, even if many continue to underestimate its existence. Black Americans’ net worth is, on average, less than 15 percent of white Americans’, the legacy of centuries of systemic anti-Black racism. Moreover, both political parties have failed time and again to address the inequities facing Black Americans. But what if I told you that an effective way to start closing this gap was within reach? According to the scholars I…

Read More Read More

White parents rallied to chase a black educator out of town. Then, they followed her to the next one

White parents rallied to chase a black educator out of town. Then, they followed her to the next one

ProPublica reports: [Celia] Lewis was beginning to prepare for her move South, spending as much time with friends and family as possible, when she got a strange call from an official in her new school district. The person on the line — Lewis won’t say who — asked if she had ever heard of CRT. Lewis responded, “Yes — culturally responsive teaching.” She was thinking of the philosophy that connects a child’s cultural background to what they learn in school….

Read More Read More

Students challenge Prof. Tim Hayward’s ‘both sides’ stance on Putin and Assad’s war crimes

Students challenge Prof. Tim Hayward’s ‘both sides’ stance on Putin and Assad’s war crimes

BBC News reports: It was the start of a new term at the University of Edinburgh and Mariangela Alejandro couldn’t wait to take her next course. The 21-year-old history and politics student had heard good things about the professor, Tim Hayward. But a few weeks into the course, she said things started to get “weird”. “He goes from talking about global financial markets [and] poverty, into this realm of conspiracy theories about [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad and Russia,” she…

Read More Read More

Covid-era babies are ‘talking’ less, signaling future reading challenges

Covid-era babies are ‘talking’ less, signaling future reading challenges

Natalie Wexler reports: We know the pandemic has had a serious negative impact on the academic achievement of school-age children. But recent evidence shows we also need to worry about Covid-era babies and toddlers. Because of Covid-related disruptions, about a third of early elementary students will likely need intensive support to become proficient readers, according to one study. Now two additional studies suggest that many children born during the pandemic will also be at risk for academic failure. It seems…

Read More Read More

The real campus ‘free speech crisis’ is not what you think

The real campus ‘free speech crisis’ is not what you think

Lucas Mann writes: I’m a college professor, which is one of those jobs that people outside the profession love to ask you about. For the better part of a decade, most of those conversations have been about one thing: free speech. Are universities, once sites of pure, open intellectual discourse, no longer so pure? What is the future of this endeavor I’ve dedicated my life to, if my peers and I are afraid to speak our minds? In one way,…

Read More Read More

School closures were a catastrophic error

School closures were a catastrophic error

Jonathan Chait writes: Recently, Nate Silver found himself in the unenviable role of main character of the day on Twitter because he proposed that school closures were a “disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision.” The comparison generated overwhelming anger and mockery, and it is not an easy one to defend: A fiasco that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and rearranged the regional power structure is a very high bar to clear. Weighing policy failures in such…

Read More Read More

How is the pandemic affecting the brains of a generation of children?

How is the pandemic affecting the brains of a generation of children?

Nature reports: Like many paediatricians, Dani Dumitriu braced herself for the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus when it first surged in her wards. She was relieved when most newborn babies at her hospital who had been exposed to COVID-19 seemed to do just fine. Knowledge of the effects of Zika and other viruses that can cause birth defects meant that doctors were looking out for problems. But hints of a more subtle and insidious trend followed close behind. Dumitriu and…

Read More Read More