Education in America: Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Economist | Oct. 2, 2010 (Opinion)

For America’s children the education system is often literally a lottery. That is the main message of a new documentary about America’s schools, “Waiting for ‘Superman’.” Made by the team that gave us “An Inconvenient Truth”, and supported with the sort of marketing budget that other documentary makers can only dream of, it is intended to create a surge in public support for education reform at least as great as the clamour to do something ... Full Story »

Posted by Joe Pallas - via Peter Avalos (t), Randy Benson (t), Fabrice Florin (t), Kaizar Campwala (t), David Wardell (t), Sirajul Islam (t), Wil Kristin (t), Willie Bido (t), Ray Nichols (t)

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Subjects: Business, Education
Topics: Jobs, Education Reform
Member Tags: Unions
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# Tweets: 7 (as of 2010-10-02)
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Posted by: Posted by Joe Pallas - Oct 2, 2010 - 4:06 AM PDT
Reviewed by: Fabrice Florin (review), Joe Pallas (review), Kaylee Lentz (review), Rasheed Hammouda (review)
Content Type: Article
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Fabrice Florin
3.5
 by Fabrice Florin - Oct. 2, 2010
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Joe Pallas
2.0
 by Joe Pallas - Oct. 2, 2010

This piece spouts the familiar "teachers’ unions are the problem" line while completely ignoring key facts: states where teachers are not unionized don't perform better than unionized states, the vast majority of charter schools don't perform better than regular public schools, and we don't even know how to identify "good" and "bad" teachers. If "reform" means investing scarce resources in alternatives that don't do the job any better, then maybe being an "obstacle to reform" isn't such a bad thing.

Joe posted this story.
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Kaylee Lentz
2.9
 by Kaylee Lentz - Oct. 3, 2010

I'm not sure why this article was written in the first place. If I wanted to read a review of the documentary, I would have Googled one. But there is too much opinion and unbelievably boring ramblings in this article that any morsel of data mentioned, hard to trust. The lack of quotes from experts was a big mistake as well.

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