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If you believe our nation is basically sound, and if you believe fairness and opportunity are still universally available in America, I urge you not to watch a movie called Waiting For Superman. If you have any conscience at all, it will break your heart.
You will see the desperate decline and potential collapse of our public school system, considered by Thomas Jefferson to be absolutely essential to the survival of the American Republic. For the decline of public education is not merely an economic issue of competition with the Chinese. It is a moral issue at the core of what a nation with a heart owes its children and future generations.
In this movie you will see teachers failing to teach and students failing to

By Mark Green
Mary Matalin and Wayne Barrett (sitting in for Arianna until her return in two weeks) focus on two big issues: first, after the quicksands of Iraq and Afghanistan, can America intervene militarily in the Libyan civil war in a proportionate and successful way? And how should Washington best intervene in local classrooms to improve education? From the Situation Room to the classroom. (To hear entire show, click podcast below.)
*Getting a Little Bit Pregnant in Libya. Mary acknowledges changing her mind on the right role in Libya, first opposing it, then supporting it, now opposing it. (She took cover behind a for-it-before-against-it joke at John Kerry’s expense.) She worries about the confusion of goals — Saving civilians? Regime change? — and wonders what is the doctrine that allows this intervention but not others in Yemen, Bahrain,

For months, the United Kingdom has been roiled by student protests standing up to the coalition government’s attempt to sharply raise annual tuition at universities to up to 9,000 ($14,600). Now, a coalition of more than 90 artists, musicians, and creative figures have come together to make a statement of solidarity with the young protesters. The list includes some big names: visual artists Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, and Rachel Whiteread; Clash rocker Mick Jones, Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie, and Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes; and fashion designer Stella McCartney. And the form of solidarity offered is not just abstract — it comes in the form of cash to pay the fines of persecuted and jailed students, thus encouraging further civil disobedience against the education fee hikes.
Artist Jake Chapman’s “Can’t pay your fees? We’ll pay your fines!” campaign looks to fund payment of the fines incurred by student protestors in the

Are multiplication tables more important than our children’s health? Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell seems to think so. He vetoed a bill yesterday that would have required all elementary and middle school students in Virginia to participate in 150 minutes of physical activity a week, in addition to recess.
McDonnell says the bill is an “unfunded mandate,” according to The Washington Post, citing concerns about the cost of implementation. Other opponents worry about placing the burden of solving our country’s childhood obesity crisis on our public schools.
While these concerns are understandable, they don’t justify a

Recently I’ve taken a hard look at the advice we give to kids who are being bullied and challenged all of us who work on this issue to do better. Now I want to question the common advice we give bystanders. This is critical for two reasons; we rarely admit the complex role bystanders play in bullying and I’ve never seen us publicly acknowledge that often the reason bystanders don’t come forward is because they don’t have confidence in the adults to do what’s right.
Being a bystander:
It’s not like any of us look forward to the opportunity of confronting a bully, as we saw in the recent Dateline special. Ironically, it can often be harder to confront a bully we’re close to than someone we don’t know or don’t

In what is most likely a sign of things to come in next year’s election, three Republican presidential candidates, albeit fringe candidates at the moment, ripped public schools during a homeschoolers convention in Des Moines Wednesday.
The Tea Party darlings threw red meat to a receptive crowd, which ate it up.
Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota noted that she homeschooled her five children and was not allowed to home school 23 foster children, thanks to the evil government.
Herman Cain, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, said, “That’s all we want is for government to get out of the way so we can educate ourselves and our children the old-fashioned way.”
And then there’s Ron Paul.
Texas Congressman Ron Paul told the crowd government wants “absolute control” of the “indoctrination” of children.
“The public school system now is a propaganda machine,” Paul said, prompting applause from the crowd of hundreds of home schooling families. “They start with our kids even in kindergarten, teaching them about family values, sexual education, gun rights, environmentalism — and they condition them to believe in so much which is totally un-American.”
I don’t know what public schools Paul has been around, but the ones I have been around for the past half-century as a student, newspaper reporter, and teacher have generally been reflective of the community. Most teachers go to church, shop at Wal-Mart and Target, and spend almost no time thinking about how they can increase the level of indoctrination of the apparently empty vessels that fill their classrooms.
The teacher in the room next door to mine even listens to Rush Limbaugh every day during his lunch

The prevailing notion, at least nationally, is that Detroit is a lost cause. Families have been moving out of Detroit (and Michigan more generally) for years, one of the country’s preeminent research universities continues to lose graduates to big cities, a recent New York Times article about Detroit highlighted the failed attempt to reform the city’s education system, yet again, and the news from Lansing and Governor Rick Snyder isn’t making too many folks excited about the future. Ugh.
The organization I co-founded, The Generation Project, connects passionate community members with high-need public schools through a unique, web-based giving platform that allows donors to specify exactly how they’d like their donation to be used. Of the six geographic regions where we operate, Detroit is the region in greatest

Spring parent-teacher conferences were held this morning at the school where I teach and my belief, that in my dozen years as a teacher I had heard everything, was shattered to the core.
“My son is worried about his scores,” a mother told me. I quickly reassured her she had nothing to worry about. Her son, who moved into the school district midway through the fall semester, has a solid A in my English class and is a skilled writer.
“He got A’s in all of his classes,” the mother told me.
I was having a hard time understanding the problem.
“He can’t figure out why he doesn’t do better on the ACUITY tests.”
“The ACUITY tests?”
“He received a C on the first one he took,” she said. “I told him to take his time on it last time and he made a

I’ll never forget the wrinkled face of a frustrated voter in a schoolyard in the town of Hinche, Haiti.
Each line told a different story of the hardship he faced — corrupt governments, poverty, an earthquake, the painfully slow dispersal of aid and now a cholera epidemic. Yet, at noon-hour on that hot, tension-filled November day, he still turned up to cast a ballot for a new president and a new future.
Sadly, I never learned his name — I’m not sure he did either.
“I can’t read this,” he said, uncomfortably handing his voter’s card to an election official.
The official sounded frustrated as he said, “J–your name begins with J.” Then, he waved the man off towards one of the handwritten lists tacked to classroom doors around the schoolyard indicating who could vote at what

Last week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan joined Sen. Michael Bennet and Gov. John Hickenlooper on a national conference call in conjunction with President Obama’s push to replace the much-maligned No Child Left Behind Act. They spoke of the education reform, the role of the federal government in supporting the states as they make education policy, and how each one of the nation’s children deserves a quality education.
“There’s nothing more at war with who we are as Coloradoans and Americans than the image of fourth grade children doing first grade math,” Bennet

It’s pretty easy for me to say that Mr. Callahan was the best teacher I ever had. Much more difficult is the task of explaining what exactly makes that so. The stakes for making such a claim seem rather high right now, too, as many of the prevailing education reform narratives involve teacher assessment — the identification and rewarding of great teachers and concomitantly, the elimination of the bad ones.
Many of these calls for “teacher accountability” tie teacher assessment to student

A couple of weekends ago, I found myself chatting with a local parent who was born and raised in Europe. Once we exchanged information about our careers, the conversation naturally turned to education, and recent news coverage of education issues:
“I have to say, I find this really strange. I feel sorry for you, those of you who work as teachers. Everything is about conflict, and cutting

Kara Apel is an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina and a frequent contributor to University Chic.
Graduation is quickly approaching for many of us — much faster than we would like it to. For those of you who haven’t scored a job yet, graduate school is probably still in the mix. If you’re a business student, the odds are you’ve probably considered earning your MBA. However, before you proceed, here are some things you should consider:
Planning ahead is necessary
If you’re going to graduate school just to extend your collegiate lifestyle, think

Every now and then along comes a story that’s just too good to be true. And such a story appeared in last week’s New York Times. Manhattan mom Nicole Imprescia is suing York Avenue preschool for failing to properly prepare her 4-year-old daughter Lucia for the Ivy Leagues.
Well, it’s not quite that

Academia is filled with Doubting Thomases. Especially in education, skepticism prevails when you hear of innovative reforms taking place. Academic gains are scrutinized while sustainability is called into question. Slowly but surely, one district in particular is standing the test of time, Baltimore City Public Schools.
There is a strong desire to know more about a district that has accomplished the following: increased enrollment for three consecutive years after four decades of decline, cut their dropout rate in half, engaged parents and community leaders, increased student achievement, closed achievement gaps, settled a long lasting special education lawsuit, increased choice and types of schools, and created a new teachers contract that passed on a second vote by a 2:1 margin.
Last week over 1,600 concerned students, parents, teachers, administrators, and community activists gathered in Annapolis to protest education budget

The future belongs to those who best educate their young people. And right now, America has fallen behind. We know that education is key to winning the future and that, in order to compete, we need to challenge ourselves to improve educational outcomes. The countries that best educate their children will be the ones that win in the global

New York City’s Department of Homeless Services’ Advantage program aims to assist families in making a permanent transition from shelter to self-sufficiency by providing a rent subsidy for one to two years once they leave shelter. To maintain their eligibility, Advantage program participants are required to work at least part time and contribute 30 percent of their gross monthly income toward rent in the first year, and if they qualify, 40 percent in the second year.
While receiving an Advantage subsidy is premised on a parent’s ability to obtain and retain a job, without at least a high school equivalency diploma (known as the General Education Development Exam or GED), the road to gainful employment and self-sufficiency will be riddled with potholes. Homeless parents — almost 50 percent of whom are high school dropouts — require tools, such as a GED, to solidly begin down the road to self-sufficiency.
While funding Advantage is clearly better than having no significant subsidy in place, the city’s housing policies must be linked to cost-effective investments in

In August of last year, a IT-centric research blog called Wikibon released a stunning infographic representing the total amount of data stored online in 2010. The astronomical figure cited — 1.2 zettabytes, or 1 billion terabytes — could have filled a stack of 16GB iPads (75 billion, to be precise) that would nearly reach the peak of Mount Everest. Other estimates have put the number of total information transacted (i.e. not necessarily stored) in recent years closer to 3 or 4

Call it Arizona’s Shock Doctrine.
And the children are the shock troops.
They dressed as firefighters, doctors, lawyers, police officers, pilots and scientists. They carried signs, including a 30-foot banner of colorful hand prints. They marched along the Arizona Capitol grounds, singing “This Little Light of Mine.”
On the eve of the Arizona state legislature’s historic vote today on a blockbuster array of radical new immigration bills, including a controversial legislative challenge to a US Supreme Court ruling for K-12 education access for undocumented students and 14th amendment birth rights, children from Tucson to Flagstaff held a symbolic sit-in on the Capitol lawn with a reminder that no one would suffer more from the draconian bills than state’s youngest.
In a stunning defeat to Senate President Russell Pearce, every immigration bill was voted down by his own senate today, who defiantly declared immigration was a state issue, not a federal

Profound truths are often so unsettling that people lose themselves in lengthy explanations that ultimately confuse, rather than clarify.
This is a very human trait which starts as the youngest children begin to form straightforward explanations as to how they see ideas fitting together. But unless they replace such earlier ‘naive’ explanations as they grow older, youngsters can’t develop the more robust frameworks needed to handle complex thinking. It has been well noted that, “it is not people’s ignorance you need to fear, it’s what they know which darned well ain’t true any longer that causes all the difficulties.”
How humans learn, and consequently how children should be brought up, has long troubled our

American public education remains front and center, which is mostly good news. Let me start this “news summary” in Washington, DC, where President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are calling for fundamental changes in the law known as No Child Left Behind, the Bush Administration’s version of Title One of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
No Child Left Behind
I doubt you could find more than a handful of educators who like NCLB these days, but whether anyone in the nation’s capital will be able to agree on what a new version should call for is highly questionable.
To recap the law’s flaws would take a long time; Learning Matters produced an award-winning series on it a few years ago, which you can see here. In my view, the best thing about NCLB was its insistence on ‘disaggregating’ data so that high scores from one group can no longer mask low performance by other groups. I also admire one phrase from the run-up to the law, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
But the law’s many loopholes allow and encourage districts, schools and individual teachers to

Much of the conventional wisdom today about the difficulty of elevating the teaching profession is mistaken or exaggerated. Many people believe that the challenges facing the teaching profession are largely unique to each nation. Others contend that the status of the teaching profession in America and other countries is largely immutable, fixed by economic and social tradition. Or they believe that teachers unions are inevitable roadblocks to reform, rather than potential sources of knowledge and expertise.
We disagree with all three of these popular assumptions — which is one reason why we have convened the first-ever international summit on the teaching profession for high-performing nations and rapidly-improving countries on March 16 and 17 in New York

When I was a kid, one of my school teachers read from the book Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. I remember it vividly. The entire first grade class sat there on the floor in the classroom, entranced with this woman. Occasionally, she held up the book so we could see all the

Congress and our policy makers have their priorities wrong.
Nothing new, but now the impact is even greater because it hits everyone where it really hurts—-our teachers– again. It isn’t though policy makers are ignorant that the key to better education is the teacher. Having a good teacher can make a huge difference for kids.
Knowing that they still have cut funding to some of the most important educational support programs for teachers in the nation—the National Writing Project that supports thousands of classroom teachers in the teaching of writing; the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards that recognizes outstanding teachers ; and Teach for America program that brings in new teachers from America’s top