September - 2022

Drop college mandates for jobs before the next $400 billion bailout

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 30, 2022
3 min

Drop college mandates for jobs before the next $400 billion bailout

Forgiving student loans -- if it survives a legal challenge -- is estimated to cost $400 billion to $500 billion or more. That means people who didn't go to college, perhaps because they didn't want to take out loans they couldn't repay, will subsidize the more advantaged. Colleges will be able to keep raising tuition, since future borrowers will assume their debts will be forgiven too. "College for all" helped get us into this mess, writes Rick Hess, director of education po

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Who decides what books belong in the school library? Can we talk about it?

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 29, 2022
3 min

Who decides what books belong in the school library? Can we talk about it?

You probably can't find Hustler in the school library -- or Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, write Jay Greene and Robert Pondiscio in Daily Signal. Lots of books are inappropriate for children, uninteresting to children or just not worth the shelf space. I'd guess students would search in vain for Sheila K. Butt's Does God Love Michael's Two Daddies?, The Tuttle Twins and the Road to Surfdom (perils of government regulation). Do they carry Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for

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Joanne Jacobs

Sep 28, 2022
1 min

Homeschoolers try mix-and-match option

Long before Covid-19 closed schools, families were "combining part-time homeschooling with part-time in-person classes, reports Greg Toppo on The 74. But the model is growing. Most of these part-time schools are private and church-based,A says Eric Wearne, who founded a research center at Kennesaw State University, northwest of Atlanta, to study what he calls the "hybrid school" model. (It now means a mix of online and in-person classes, but he's talking about a mix of home a

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School choice withstands challenge in Arizona

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 28, 2022
2 min

School choice withstands challenge in Arizona

A campaign to repeal Arizona's expansion of school choice apparently has failed to gather enough signatures to go on the ballot. Arizona has been pro-choice for decades, writes Matthew Ladner on reimaginED. That includes "universal access to district schools, universal access to charter schools and universal access to a limited pool of tax credit funds." What's changing is that the program will be "available to the family of any student who feels in need of it." That may doub

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Joanne Jacobs

Sep 27, 2022
2 min

You're not so special

"No one is you, and that is your superpower!" reads a sign at Brian Huskie's school. "Ridiculous," he writes on SubStack. "Imagine being 16 years old and believing that. That you are unique and special and different from everyone else and that’s what gives you your power." Young people have potential, he writes. But there's nothing unique about that. While they may be the hope of the future, they're not superheroes in the present. "For the most part, they don’t have any parti

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Joanne Jacobs

Sep 26, 2022
1 min

Topless teens

More transgender and gender-neutral teenagers are having "top surgery" -- double mastectomies -- to make their bodies conform with their gender identities, reports Azeen Ghorayshi in the New York Times. One surgeon who specializes in gender "affirmation" advertises on TikTok. The story shows some skepticism about the trend: "Some clinicians have pointed to the rising demand and the turmoil of adolescent development as reasons for doctors to slow down before offering irrever

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Instead of gender dogma, why not say: 'There's no wrong way to be you'

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 26, 2022
3 min

Instead of gender dogma, why not say: 'There's no wrong way to be you'

Seven states now require schools to teach about gender identity: California’s Department of Education tells kindergarten teachers that “some children in kindergarten or even younger have identified as transgender.” Florida bans teaching on gender identity till fourth grade, and at least a dozen other states are considering similar legislation. What's really going on in schools?, asks Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic. He looks at Evanston/Skokie School District 65, in the C

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Biology denial: Girls can't win if sports go coed

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 25, 2022
2 min

Biology denial: Girls can't win if sports go coed

I was forced to take four years of P.E. in high school in the late '60s. Illinois' gym teachers had a great lobby. Only three years of English, two of math, two of science and one of social studies was required. I did field hockey, but no physics. (I won the National Council of Teachers of English contest with an essay titled Confessions of a Physically Educated Woman about my hatred of field hockey.) But Illinois had banned competitive sports for girls. Because . . . The gym

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Without phones, school is calmer and students are listening, talking

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 24, 2022
2 min

Without phones, school is calmer and students are listening, talking

Banning cell phones transformed a Philadelphia high school, reports Kristen A. Graham in the Inquirer. Students were ignoring teachers -- and each other -- to focus on their phones, Marla Travis, principal of West Philadelphia High, says. She turned to "Yondr pouches, sealed magnetic devices that allow students to keep phones in their possession but inaccessible until unlocked at the end of the day," writes Graham. Now, students are paying attention to teachers and talking to

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Once they can decode, the next step is knowledge

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 23, 2022
2 min

Once they can decode, the next step is knowledge

The mainstream media has declared a victor in the "reading wars," writes Robert Pondiscio. Both TIME and The New Yorker had stories last month on the efficacy of research-backed reading instruction instead of "balanced literacy." But it's not enough for students to master foundational skills, such as phonics, he writes. To make sense of what they read, students need to build knowledge. Pondiscio, who once worked for the Core Knowledge Foundation, was a co-founder of the Know

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Most boys should start school a year later than girls

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 22, 2022
3 min

Most boys should start school a year later than girls

Boys should start school a year later than girls, argues Richard V. Reeves in The Atlantic. Boys are slower to mature and benefit from "the gift of time." He's author of a new book, Of Boys and Men, about "why the modern male is struggling." Before the pandemic closed schools, only about 6 percent of children, nearly all boys, delayed entry to kindergarten, Reeves writes. But the numbers are higher for students with affluent or well-educated parents and for private-school stu

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Joanne Jacobs

Sep 21, 2022
2 min

Career tech pays off in Massachusetts

Students at career-tech high schools in Massachusetts are more likely to go to college and earn more than similar students who take a traditional path through high school, concludes a new book Hands-On Achievement: Massachusetts’s National Model Vocational-Technical Schools by the Pioneer Institute. Outcomes vary by career specialties: Health-care concentrators are significantly more likely to enroll in college, while construction students are less likely to go to college bu

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Joanne Jacobs

Sep 20, 2022
2 min

If the students don't care ...

Desperately trying to get failing students to a diploma, counselors are putting kids who can't pass Integrated Math 1 (ninth grade) into Integrated Math 2, writes math teacher Darren Miller in a rant on his Right on the Left Coast blog. The theory is that maybe "credit recovery" will work its magic. But students who haven't passed IM 1 don't have the skills or knowledge to pass IM 2, math teachers argue. Why set them up to fail? If students don't care about their own learnin

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Joanne Jacobs

Sep 20, 2022
1 min

Why the math learning curve is a K

Some students were learning more math, before the pandemic, while most were learning less, writes Mike Goldstein. He believes changes in math teaching and the rise of private tutoring centers favor motivated students and those with motivated parents, explaining the K-shaped curve. In the old days, a fourth-grade teacher would teach a lesson to all students, slowing the pace to keep stragglers from getting lost, and boring the advanced students. Over the last 10 years, he wri

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$They passed calculus, but can't add fractions$

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 20, 2022
2 min

They passed calculus, but can't add fractions

Alex Small, who teaches physics at Cal Poly Pomona, keeps seeing students who passed calculus in high school, but aren't prepared for college math. "Some students aren’t sure if 30% and 0.3 are equivalent; some think that adding one-third plus one-fourth yields one-seventh," he writes. Others can solve an equation with a variable named "x" (a common label in algebra), but "they worry if I label it 'E' or 'v”' (common labels in physics)," Small writes. "The equivalence of thes

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Joanne Jacobs

Sep 19, 2022
1 min

Learning builds resilience

It's a mistake to put "social-emotional learning" ahead of academic learning, writes Eva Moskowitz, who created the high-performing Success Academy charter network. Teaching students to do challenging academic work builds resilience, which is linked with mental health. Even as educational leaders weigh strategies for addressing this achievement crisis, we also hear opinions that it is “impossible to ask kids to tackle difficult academic challenges” without first attending to

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Joanne Jacobs

Sep 19, 2022
2 min

Closing schools was a 'wrecking ball'

"The pandemic was a wrecking ball for U.S. public education," concludes the Center for Reinventing Public Education in The State of the American Student. "The kids are not all right," academically or emotionally. Where schools stayed closed the longest, the effects were worse, the study finds. "Students who were poorly served before the pandemic were profoundly left behind during it, including many of those with disabilities who were cut off from essential services critical

6 comments

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 18, 2022
1 min

Reading 'Anne Frank' in Kabul

A secret book club for teen-age girls in Kabul, Afghanistan is reading The Diary of Anne Frank, reports Diaa Hadid for NPR. "Banned from high school, told to cover up and stay home," the Muslim girls identify with the Jewish girl "also forced to live her life in secret," writes Hadid. "She had hope. She was fighting. She was studying. She was resisting her fate," said Zahra. She hopes to write a book telling the world about life for girls under the Taliban. Volunteers set up

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Joanne Jacobs

Sep 17, 2022
2 min

Freedom of ... um ... uh ...

Happy Constitution Day! How many First Amendment freedoms can you name? If you get more than one, you're a civics star. Americans' civics knowledge is poor and getting worse, concludes the Annenberg Public Policy Center's annual Constitution Day Civics Survey. While 63 percent of those surveyed know the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech, most are fuzzy about freedom of religion (24 percent), freedom of the press (20 percent), right of assembly (16 percent) and the r

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Can online privacy laws make the net safe for kids?

Joanne Jacobs

Sep 17, 2022
2 min

Can online privacy laws make the net safe for kids?

A new California law will try to protect children online by requiring safeguards for users under 18, reports Natasha Singer in the New York Times. It covers "social networks, game platforms, connected toys, voice assistants and digital learning tools for schools." Among other things, the measure will require sites and apps to curb the risks that certain popular features — like allowing strangers to message one another — may pose to younger users It will also require online se

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