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

Why Fire Teachers?

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Megan McArdle - Mar. 08 (Opinion) - I think there are some jobs that are too important to let any consideration intrude other than the best way to get the job done. Nuclear power plants, firefighters, poison control--I don't want to let other social goals, no matter how laudable, hamper their mission. Teaching is one of those jobs.

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Which High School Students Are Most Likely to Graduate From College? - Yahoo! News

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

U.S. News & World Report - By Kim Clark Kim Clark - Sep. 10 (Review) - Parents: Stop fretting so much about which high school your youngsters attend or how they score on the SATs. If you want your student to make it to a bachelor's degree, it's far more important for him or her to earn at least B's in high school and reach for the best possible college. Oh, and saving a few thousand bucks by sending your kid to a community college could turn out to be an expensive mistake.

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Do You Know a High-Achieving Student Kept From College Over Money?

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - Jul. 26 (Opinion) - But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, as Delbanco says, we are ignoring many accomplished but poverty-stricken young scholars. Help me test that theory. My e-mail address is at the bottom. Send me the name and contacts of any gifted and motivated students you know who have been unable to go to college because of money. If their stories check out, I will confess my ignorance, tell why this happened to them and help them get where they want to go.

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The underworked American

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Jun. 11 (Opinion) - American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces.

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Duncan details $150 billion education stimulus

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

CNN - By Campbell Brown, Arne Duncan - Jan. 30 (Interview) - CB: Mr. Secretary, the President's new stimulus plan includes a massive $150 billion increase in federal money for education. Walk us through what the priorities are and when parents can expect to see results. DUNCAN: This is an extraordinary opportunity and if we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated work force. So this is a huge, huge opportunity to make things dramatically better for schools and for school children around the country and at the higher Ed level as well. So the stimulus package is going to do a number of things. It's going to help us a tremendous unmet capital needs and so it's really going to be a huge opportunity to invest in infrastructure and several ready projects that we want to get to work on very early on, late spring and through the summer. We want to save literally hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs. We're very, very worried about tremendous cuts, devastating cuts in school districts and states around the country. We want to stay those off going into the fall. We want to continue to raise the bar academically, raise standards, raise expectations, and there's opportunities in the stimulus package to do that.

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Does community service really change anything?

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Christian Science Monitor - By Raj Mundra - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - What are the crucial social issues? The answers to those questions are complex. And listening was crucial for participants. Dust swirled as we trudged through the littered, stifling streets of Dharavi, in Mumbai, India. Climbing a ladder to the windowless room that a family of six calls home, I thought: What does this impoverished community really get from our school's efforts at community service? What long-term benefit does any underserved community truly derive from Phillips Academy's – or any other organization's – outreach efforts? What differentiates well-intended programs to encourage global citizenship from those that seem more like "cultural tourism," and resume-building for high schoolers? Phillips Academy high school students and faculty were toiling for Niswarth, a program where students go to Mumbai ( Bombay) for three weeks to study urban development and serve in one of Asia's poorest areas. Niswarth is the Hindi translation of Philips' motto non sibi or "not for self." This year, Phillips' students, partnered with Indian high schoolers and two nongovernmental organizations, were challenged to create a one-day project for this specific community. They were invited into shanties to practice the complex skill of observing without judgment. Everyone looks poor – but what is poverty? What are the root causes for almost 10 million people in Mumbai living in these conditions? What are the crucial social issues?

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Should Teachers Ignore Poverty's Impact?

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Jay Mathews - Nov. 28 (Opinion) - Owens described her effort to join the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows program, and her reaction to the prevailing view in that organization that good teachers should be able to raise the achievement of even the poorest kids. That is my belief, and the belief of the educators I most admire. But most Americans, including Owens, think people like me are wrongly discounting the effects of poverty and thus hurting, rather than helping, the national movement to raise the level of instruction in impoverished neighborhoods.

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Evolution and Texas

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:12:49 -0800

New York Times - Dec. 04 (Editorial) - Is Texas about to become the next state to undermine the teaching of evolution? That is the scary implication of the abrupt ousting of Christine Comer, the state's top expert on science education. Her transgression: forwarding an e-mail message about a talk by a distinguished professor who debunks "intelligent design" and creationism as legitimate alternatives to evolution in the science curriculum.

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American kids, dumber than dirt

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:13:33 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Mark Morford - Oct. 24 (Opinion) - We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

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High-quality standards, a curriculum based on critical thinking can enlighten our students

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 10:03:12 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Linda Hammond-Darling - Oct. 14 (Opinion) - One of the central lessons of No Child Left Behind is that if school sanctions are tied to test scores, the testing tail can wag the schooling dog. And a key problem for the United States is that most of our tests aren't measuring the kinds of 21st century skills we need students to acquire and that are at the core of curriculum and assessment in high-achieving countries. While a debate rages about whether our tests should be created at the national or state level, this argument is focused on the wrong issue.

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Teen actors moved by war denied a stage

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:16:33 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Amy Goodman - Jun. 13 (Editorial) - Stanley Tucci (who played "Nigel" in "The Devil Wears Prada") was in an off-Broadway theater, the Culture Project, watching high-school students perform a play about war. The production, "Voices in Conflict," moved the audience to tears, ending with a standing ovation for the teenage actors, still reeling from a controversy that had propelled them onto the New York stage. Their high school principal had banned the play.

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