The Elite Protection Scheme
Okay, I'm trying my first diary post. It has a single link, which I hope to draw attention to, but I hope it doesn't cross the guidelines. Many years ago, I heard Noam Chomsky say something...
View ArticleFraming
Something short. Is there a group on this site working on framing issues? I can't help but think that all of us together should be at least as canny and sly as Frank Luntz. By the way, if anyone hasn't...
View ArticleNo Child Left Behind Widening the Gap
An article at the New York Times (reg. required, etc. etc.) describes a new study of K-12 education under NCLB. It appears that, though classes as a whole are improving modestly in test scores from...
View ArticleAmerica's culture of militarism
I'd like to draw attention to a new book by Andrew Bacevich entitled The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War. Two excerpts from this book have been published by Mother Jones...
View ArticleNo Cuspid Left Behind
I just recently discovered, via the ordinary circulating e-mail grapevine, this astute essay by John S. Taylor, former superintendent of the Lancaster County School District in South Carolina. Since I...
View ArticleConfirmation of Downing Street Memo
via Laura Flanders, If no one has diaried this yet, well, it deserves another diary. The Times of London has published another memo from its own deep throat. You can read it here:...
View ArticleBill to Strengthen Foia (Freedom of Information Act)
The Senate is considering a bill, sponsored by Jon Cornyn, R-Texas, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to strengthen the Freedom of Information act. In this case, it basically amounts to forcing back what I...
View ArticleDifferent Rules for Different Classes
Here in California, our beloved Gropinator has a measure on the ballot to require teachers to wait five years, instead of the customary two, before they gain civil service protections (what's called...
View ArticleWhere school funding matters more than anything
As if in answer to the education critics who always simply say "you can't just throw money at the problem" but never have any idea themselves how to better the situation, comes a new study of rural...
View ArticleResponse to Joe American
It would seem that anonymous viral emails are finally catching up technologically with the rest of the world. My Limbaugh-loving father, who normally would never forward to me anything political,...
View ArticleShock and Gangs
I've been reading Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, and in the first part of the book, she describes how Milton Friedman and his fellow U. of Chicago economists and students yearned for a "laboratory"...
View ArticleEducation Obstructionists
The other day I was reading an article through Slashdot, and found the following sentence in its introduction, referring to the article's author, a scientist who has proposed some reforms to science...
View ArticleNo Olympics?
Silly me, I thought the Olympics opening ceremony was today. I guess I was wrong.
View ArticleArrgh I can't stand it!!!
Okay, I don't care if this is a short diary with a simple message. I just can't stand it anymore. Maybe I have enough karma from previous diaries with hundreds of words to let this slide. But look,...
View ArticleAsk DK: Mailing a friend's absentee ballot a felony?
I'm living with a community of English-speaking ex-pats in China. There are a few hundred of us, and people are often arriving and leaving China for home or other countries. It is common for those...
View ArticleTerminator readies next victim
Dale Kasler of McClatchy Newspapers is reporting that, now that California's aid to poor children, state park system, etc. have been led to the chopping block, the next victim will be the state's...
View ArticlePsychology Today: Stop teaching arithmetic
Teaching arithmetic. That's a pedagogical problem, maybe an economic problem, but is it a political problem? I think it is, and the reason highlights what I hate most about the No Child Left Behind...
View ArticleThe Real Science Gap
As a science educator, I'm so sick of hearing our public schools bashed from both sides of the propaganda wars for not educating enough kids in science /math so they can become scientists, when nobody...
View ArticleEC has passed away.
As a teacher in a Chinese university who doesn't care that the government here blocks Facebook, because I don't like Facebook, anyway, I often send mass emails back to my friends in the states so they...
View ArticleUSA comes from behind in education
Yes, it turns out that students in the USA are not number one in those International mathematics comparison tests. However, it also turns out that USA students have never been number one, and in fact,...
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