NewsTrust - High School - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic of American Education-Related Social Stratification

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Matthew Yglesias - By Matthew Yglesias - Jul. 28 (Opinion) - Peter Beinart, like all good heterodox liberals, thinks we should curb race-based affirmative action in college admissions in favor of something more focused on class. I’m open to this idea, though I’d like to see a specific proposal rather than a vague suggestion. But every time I hear this debate I have to wonder why we’re having it

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The Evolution Of Technology In Schools

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Daniel Brusilovsky - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - Schools try to keep up with the current technology trends, especially in Silicon Valley, the home of technology innovation. You would think that schools in Silicon Valley would be the most up to date on technology—with the latest computers, projectors, drawing boards—but coming from a first hand perspective, as a student at a local school, it’s the complete opposite. I go to a high school where there are no technology classes that even teach students the basics of web development, or video production, or anything of that matter.

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The Guy with 'The Best Job in Public Education'

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

voiceofsandiego.org - By Emily Alpert - Jan. 30 (Interview) - Despite being the son of a principal and a schoolteacher, Jed Wallace says he stumbled into teaching to pay the bills. But what started as just a job at a massive Los Angeles elementary school became a passion and eventually convinced him that solutions lay outside school districts in charters: publicly funded schools that are independently run and free from the rules that gird school districts. The idea germinated after Wallace helped Hooper Avenue Elementary School boost its test scores "overnight" simply by clamping down on teacher and student turnover. Teachers agreed to stick it out at the school instead of climbing the career ladder to more comfortable schools; an area superintendent allowed Hooper to keep enrolling students who had moved a few schools away when a parent got sick or lost a job. But then a new leader came into the school district and parents were told they had to go back to their home schools. Wallace found himself standing outside the school facing furious families. He calls it one of the worst days in his professional career. "I said, 'I will not put myself in a situation where I do not have greater control over my professional destiny,'" Wallace recalled. "And it was clear to me that the charter school movement was in fact that place." Fifteen years later he has seen charters from nearly every angle: as a classroom teacher and charter founder, as a San Diego Unified manager overseeing charters, and as the executive director and later the chief operating officer of High Tech High, a lauded system of charter schools that use projects to engage students in their classes and now trains its own teachers. He was tapped in December to lead the California Charter Schools Association, a group that advocates for quality charters statewide.

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Flying spaghetti monster defeats anti-evolution FL school board

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

Daily Kos - By davidkc - Dec. 26 (Opinion) - Enter the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you aren't familiar with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it asserts that an omnipotent, airborne clump of spaghetti intelligently designed all life with the touch of its "noodly appendage," and that He appears in "full pirate regalia." The Pastafarians, as the Church's believers call themselves, first came to national attention in 2005, when the Church's leader, twentysomething Bobby Henderson, wrote an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education when the evolution flap was going on there, insisting that students also be taught about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (You can read more about the Church in this recent Wired Magazine article). The Pastafarians appear to have grown in numbers quite a bit since 2005, and soon after the Ledger story appeared, Polk school board members were deluged with e-mails demanding that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism's version of intelligent design be taught in the classrooms alongside evolution and the "alternative" ID theory.

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Reading is Fundamental... and Increasingly Rare

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 10:36:47 -0800

American Prospect - By Ezra Klein - Feb. 23 (Opinion) - According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, the share of 12th graders lacking basic reading skills -- meaning they can't do simple things like extract train fares from a brochure -- jumped from 20% in 1992 to 27% in 2005, and that's an understatement, as it doesn't count the many who've dropped out long before the 12th grade. What's so discouraging, though, is that this deterioration came amidst improvements on a variety of other metrics that could've been expected to cause or signal educational progress. In 2005, for instance, 12th graders averaged 360 more hours of classroom insturction time than they did in 1990. Grades, too had, increased, by about .33 of a grade, though this could be a function of increased competition at the top. Indeed, the share of students taking the standard curriculum or better increased by 28%, to almost 70%.

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Brown v. Board redux, NOT

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 04:44:37 -0800

Alabama Liberation Front - By Ali Bubba - Dec. 04 (Opinion) - ...it seems that the challenge is not to Brown v. Board, but rather an assertion that local schools are discriminating by employing race-based formulas to achieve some ideal of "diversity" or "balance." This should go into the books as the case of ...

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Sugar Daddies

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 01:00:35 -0800

Orcinus - By Sara Robinson - Nov. 26 (Opinion) - It appears as though the National Science Teachers Association has abandoned its search for truth and is now looking for a good sugar daddy.

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