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Having had a good friend whose father was briefly a professor at Ave Maria Law School, I’ve long harbored a quiet fascination with Tom Monaghan’s attempt to create a premiere Catholic university in the swamps of Naples. (Michael Brendan Dougherty profiled the attempt to develop the surrounding town in TAC last August.) But whether or [...]
As an addendum to JL’s post below, Corby Kummer’s dispatch in the July/August Atlantic (not yet online, sorry) is well worth a read for anyone interested in this stuff. Kummer profiles Tony Geraci, the food-service director for the public schools in Baltimore, who’s made an effort to combat obesity and improve student nutrition by stocking [...]
So I have very little sense of what E.D. Kain is trying to argue in this post. In the first place, as I’ve emphasized before and as commenter Matt C. has helpfully noted, voucher programs don’t necessarily mean “subsidizing private industry”, as students could, for one reason or another, just as well be given vouchers [...]
Filed under: education, government/law
I’m not one bit inclined to get into yet another argument with Freddie et al over public and private education, but this is just silly: Private schools have far less accountability in the form of standardized testing than their public counterparts. Indeed, private school educational outcomes amount to self-reporting and the honor system. This is [...]
Filed under: education, government/law
Seeing as it appears to be Say Controversial Things About Public Education Week, I want to make a couple of remarks about state-sponsored preschool programs, by way of a column I wrote for Culture11 late last year. That column grew out of what was, and still remains, a deep frustration with the ways that advocates [...]
Berkeley’s undergraduate library currently has up a blackboard-sized piece of white paper and a bucket of markers, with a request for students to write down their suggestions on how to make the library more “green”. Among the multicolored contributions: F*CK FINALS, and Get reusable condoms for [NAME REDACTED]. (And yes, the redactions are mine.) How [...]
Filed under: education, environment, miscellany
Commenting on the education fooferaw over at the Scene, E.D. Kain loads the bases with a handful of nice points about the difficulty in quantifying performance, then leaves those runners stranded with a huge swing-and-miss: So let’s pay teachers more across the board. Let’s give them back the reigns [sic] to their own classrooms, and [...]
Filed under: education
by JL Wall Two weeks ago (but I’m just now getting to it) Patrick Deneen helped reiterate a point that I’ve become particularly keen on over the past year or so: My argument, in a nutshell, is that the liberal arts were based on the teaching of an older form of liberty, namely the liberty [...]
Filed under: civil liberties, education
So Edinburgh linguist Geoffrey Pullum does not like William Strunk and E.B. White’s Elements of Style: The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English [...]
Filed under: education, media/culture
Glenn Greenwald’s widely-cited post from over the weekend on Jim Webb’s courageous push for prison reform is a must-read. I especially liked this bit: Webb’s commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates how false that excuse-making [that says that taking bad but popular positions is necessary if one is to avoid political risk] is – just [...]
Filed under: civil liberties, economics, education, foreign affairs, government/law, politics, torture, war