Tag: schooling

Commentary: As Education Decentralizes, Those Who Like Control Are Nervous

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As more parents gain the opportunity to abandon a compulsory schooling assignment for other options, including homeschooling and microschooling, it’s no surprise that those who favor top-down control of education feel anxious about this bottom-up education transformation. This nervousness is occurring on both ends of the political spectrum.

On the political left, The Washington Post did some pearl-clutching last week around the possibility that “no government official will ever check on what, or how well, [homeschoolers] are being taught.” On the political right, the Fordham Institute expressed similar concerns about hybrid homeschoolers and microschoolers: “To ensure that those children receive the education they deserve, it will require policymakers to craft smart laws to govern these new institutions….”

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Commentary: Unions Fight Return to Schooling

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Sacramento

The little-known Oakley Union Elementary School District, in the sprawling suburbs 50 miles east of San Francisco, isn’t accustomed to national attention. The school board’s hot mic moment, however, during a video call earlier this month created widespread and justifiable anger because it captured the arrogance, stupidity, and condescension that’s typical on some school boards — especially as officials drag their feet on reopenings.

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Worldwide Pediatric Experts Argue Schools Should Reopen

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Several reports published in western countries worldwide argue that children should be returning to in-person classrooms in the fall.

Reports by the top pediatric hospital in Canada and by a leading expert in the British government argue that schools should reopen with relatively few restrictions because of growing evidence that indicates that children appear to be at little risk of contracting or spreading COVID-19.

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How a 1934 New York Graduation Exam Shows How Far Academic Standards Have Fallen

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by Annie Holmquist   Today’s education system has a myriad of advantages that earlier generations never would have dreamed about. Smartboards. Tablets. Advanced science labs. Massive libraries. These perks are wonderful and suggest that our schools are giving children a much better education than they would have had at an earlier time. But what if all these advancements are just smoke and mirrors? Is it possible that the parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents of today’s students had a better education? Understandably, such a question might be met with skepticism, particularly since these points are framed around I-remember-when anecdotes rather than hard evidence. But once in a while some of that evidence surfaces, causing thinking individuals to ponder the possibility that today’s education system is perhaps not all it’s cracked up to be. Such was the case when I came across a collection of Regents Exams – the exams required to graduate from high school in New York – in the New York State Library. The archives provide a variety of exam subjects and range in date from the 1930s to the present. Curious, I pulled up one of the oldest, a 1934 American history exam, and did some quick, first page comparisons with the one…

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