Ross Douthat on the wisdom of federalizing sex education: The debate might be less rancorous if the naturalists and sacralists didn’t have to fight it out in Washington. This is the real problem with federal financing for abstinence-based education: It drags the national government into a debate that should remain intensely local. We federalize the Read More
Cross-posted from TAPPED. A University of Chicago study has found that girls may be learning math anxiety from female teachers who have qualms about their own math skills. Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology, and her colleagues studied students of both sexes in the classes of 17 different teachers, most of whom were Read More
A few weeks ago, Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, made big news when she said the powerful teachers union would make room for dismissals of ineffective teachers — a common sense tactic that she and teachers unions had long opposed. (To see how tragicomic their stridence on that position could Read More
By R.A.B. Over at Education Week’s LeaderTalk blog, former school superintendent Dennis Richards asks, “Should high school students take college courses?” Richards revisits a 2008 study by the Community College Research Center, where Karen Hughes and Melinda Karp asked, “Why would we take students who are not necessarily prepared for college, put them in a Read More
Both Ta-Nehisi and Adam thoughtfully respond* to my post from last week about black men standing in for black people in the Dec. 1 Michael Luo New York Times story about race and unemployment. On Wednesday, Dec. 2, I had a brief Twitter conversation with Luo, who explained — as I suspected — that the Read More
I’m a big fan of raising teacher pay to a level that is competitive with other professions; I think you’d get a much wider pool of applicants than you currently get and give the profession an injection of much-needed cache. But that idea is understandably unpalatable given the current way teacher tenure currently works: Here Read More
The story of Michael Oher’s intellectual development is also the story of his body type. Michael Oher is rare. Huge. A freak of nature. He’s also an anomaly of nurture and it has taken a village to raise him. The Blind Side by Michael Lewis chronicles Oher’s turbulent childhood, his unlikely ascent into professional football Read More
The following post was originally published in December 2007. We’re re-running it as it touches on a major component of our next Book of the Month pick, Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side. Michael Oher was born in the 1980s on the desperately poor, black side of Memphis. His father was murdered shortly after he was Read More
This month we’ll be reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. In an excerpt called “The Ballad of Big Mike,” Lewis tells the story of Michael Oher, an impoverished kid from Memphis who through a strange confluence of events ends up in the legal custody of a wealthy white family. At the time of his adoption Read More
E&S is a small, academically selective school in North Philly with a largely black student body, and is one of the school district’s premier magnet programs, along with Central, The Philadelphia High School for Girls and Masterman. When I graduated from E&S, it boasted the highest college acceptance rate in the city — somewhere in Read More
