Earlier this year, tucked in the massive stimulus bill, was a sop to the teachers union in Washington, D.C. The bill effectively killed the D.C. opportunity scholarships that gave a few lucky poor children an out from D.C.'s atrocious public school system. I'm not a proponent of taxpayer-funded vouchers for kids generally. I think the […]
The San Diego Unified School District apparently believes there's little difference between Junior ROTC programs and street gangs. Marksmanship training must end on San Diego school district campuses, a split school board decided Tuesday. Critics argued that the training, part of ROTC programs, sends the wrong message when three high school students have been killed […]
It is really no surprise that President-elect Barack Obama would pick the schools chief from his hometown, Arne Davis, to be education secretary in his administration. Obama would've certainly come to know Davis during his time heading the failed Chicago Annenberg Challenge -- a fact that seems absent from most of today's news reporting. (You […]
The class was AG301 and one of the general education requirements at Cal Poly SLO. The class was three times a week and consisted of two classroom lectures (Mondays and Wednesdays) and a "field trip" each Friday. The field trips could be eye-opening for kids like me whose encounters with farming was limited to seeing […]
Earlier this month I wrote that if President-elect Obama and his wife decided to send his daughters to a public school in the Washington, D.C. area, I'd have a minor heart attack. Well, no worries for my ticker: Obama spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter confirms to CNN the Obama daughters will attend Sidwell Friends school in Washington, […]
I've got a bunch of tabs open in my browser again that I've been meaning to write about, but there hasn't been much time available to me, so here are the links: The Washington Post's Robert Samuelson takes aim at the "Cap-and-Trade" program for greenhouse gases and finds that is more aptly named "Cap-and-tax." The […]
Morehouse College, one of America's historically black colleges, has a first in its history -- its first white valedictorian. It's a great read, but I want to point out this little anecdote from the story. When [Joshua] Packwood applied to Morehouse, he had frequent conversations with George Gray, an alumnus who was a recruiter at […]
Watch this video and imagine the outrage throughout the media universe if these crosses were part of a protest against the war in Iraq. Roderick Eugene King, a sophmoric sophmore, obviously needs an education. Also, what exactly does it take to be arrested? Justice, in this case, would be for the university to put him […]
I could see it coming from a mile away when national cable news channels reported on a huge drug probe at San Diego State University that resulted in 96 arrests and implicated students at several fraternities. Thursday's second-day story on the busts led with this: The unusual move by San Diego State University officials to […]
Over at The New York Times, law professor Stanley Fish addresses some of the issues in Evan Coyne Maloney's flim, "Indoctrinate U." Maloney's response can be found here. I want to touch on one of the points that Fish mentions and Maloney's response. Fish: Then there’s the matter of speech codes. This is a fake […]