Forums: Education Times

Judgement at Heritage Bethany Stotts, July 30, 2010 Scholars at a recent Heritage Foundation lecture debated whether judicial activism is a “value-neutral” label for judges’ actions or an aspersion cast on some of their decisions. Their comments were made in light of former Harvard University professor Cass Sunstein’s 2006 book Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America. Sunstein was confirmed last year to head the Obama Administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA); he taught at the University of Chicago at the time of publication. “There are, broadly speaking, two accounts of judicial activism,” asserts...

Yesterday, President Obama delivered a major speech on education in an effort to garner support for his Race to the Top grant program and his push for national education standards and tests. The President’s remarks came on the heels of a speech delivered by Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday at the National Press Club, during which Duncan attempted to paint the Administration’s policies as part of a “quiet revolution.” Duncan certainly got the quiet part right. Since his Administration came into office, President Obama has quietly been reworking the country’s education system, doing an end-run around normal legislative procedure....

Like the traditional family, America's school calendar is old-fashioned, says Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year." Go ahead -- re-read that. I'll wait. Are you convinced yet? Are you finally convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that America is under the leadership of not just left-wingers, but communists. You should no longer be afraid to use that word. Not after this. "The days of telling kids to go home at 2:30 and having mom there are gone,"...

Right off the bat let me tell you about myself (J.E.T I.F.). My credentials – a recently retired black teacher of 40 years in the Hartford, Connecticut public school system. I was raised in a large inner city of Washington D.C. and educated in the public school system. I possess a Bachelors and Masters Degree and am a “people person” who loves teaching. I retired this past year with great disappointment and sadness for the public school system, the individual students, teachers and parents. The current education system is failing to do the job of educating our children. There are...

Rich Nukes, Poor Nukes Bethany Stotts, July 28, 2010 Last month, in a Cato Institute lecture, Georgetown professor Matthew Kroenig outlined what he sees as the strategic reasons why nuclear nations help spread these weapons to other countries. The author of Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons, Professor Kroenig argued that nuclear transfers are “driven by a strategic logic.” “My argument, in short, is that the spread of nuclear weapons threatens powerful states more than it threatens weak states and that this leads to three strategic conditions under which countries are most likely to export...

If Education Secretary Arne Duncan has his way, kids would be spending a lot more time at school — and a three-month summer would be a thing of the past. Duncan joked with attendees at a luncheon at the National Press Club Tuesday in Washington that he would like schools to stay open 13 months out of the year. Then he told the audience of over 100 that he seriously supports longer school hours. “In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year,” Duncan said....

Rounding Up Usual Suspects Malcolm A. Kline, July 27, 2010 In the cinematic classic Casablanca, corrupt police chief Louis Renault deflects official attention away from a troublesome crime scene by instructing his minions to “round up the usual suspects.” The Education Establishment appears to be engaged in a similar exercise when it tries to explain dropout rates and other such problematic measurements. In fact, they had such a confab on July 22, 2010. After reporting a 73.4 percent high school graduation rate and an 8 percent dropout rate in public secondary schools (which does not compute), the College Board goes...

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever pretensions of politicians, pedagogues other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."

... [A group of university researchers] examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives. On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed — at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass. They’re fairly explosive. Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on...