With school districts across Texas rallying against drastic budget cuts, many elected officials and critics of public schools have tried to cast educators as being responsible for the situation they’re currently facing. These critics charge that schools need to learn to be more efficient with the resources they have and that more competition and accountability […]
Category: Education Policy
Categories
A Costly Denial
As the debt ceiling debate fades, a new reminder of a dangerous collective malady emerges with the ill-defined protests that started in New York and have spread throughout the country. The protests, despite the message the media works so diligently to construct, represent another scene in the vacuous western between employers and employees, owners and […]
We’re all aware of the beating public education took this past legislative session. A total of $5.3 billion was cut, representing the first time Texas deliberately underfunded its schools. As a result, thousands of teachers lost their jobs and hundreds of innovative programs were ended. However, a less familiar, but equally unfortunate reality of […]
Categories
The Government Is Making Us Fat
America is sick. And it’s not just the economy, or the perpetual state of war … it’s our health. The United States is the most obese country in the world, and the U.S. government is causing the problem. By prohibiting the cultivation of healthy foods in the America, allowing dangerous artificial sweeteners in our […]
Categories
From Schoolhouse to Courthouse
Disrupting class used to land kids in the principal’s office or detention. In Texas, however, more and more children are facing criminal prosecution, criminal records and hefty fines for acting out in school. It is estimated that at least 275,000 non-traffic tickets are issued to kids in Texas each year. The vast majority of […]
Charter schools are quickly becoming an important piece of both national and state-level education reform efforts. They’ve been praised in movies like “Waiting For Superman” as one of the few hopes for improving inner-city education. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made boosting charter school enrollment on criteria for the Race to the Top grant […]
Frustrated by rising costs and stagnant achievement levels on standardized tests, American politicians and media-savvy education reformers have over the past several years pushed for a complete overhaul of this country’s public school system. The ways their frustration has been vented – from demonizing teacher unions to implementing punitive policies that look to evaluate […]
Categories
Keeping Schools Out of the OR
As Texas legislators and education officials are scrambling to find ways to reduce school spending, a few of the politically savvy ones are spinning the budget crisis as a means to “reinvent public education in Texas.” However, the cost-saving measures they are proposing are simply more strongly-worded versions of the same complaints we’ve heard […]
For as long as there has been a public education system, there have been wealthy families that have ignored it, opting instead for expensive private schools. But lately, wealthy Americans have stopped turning their noses up at public education and are doing something that is pretty remarkable: They’re investing in it. Microsoft founder Bill Gates […]
This week on Dialectica: Producer/Host Josh Haney takes you inside today’s biggest debate in education politics: value-added teacher evaluations. Guests include education policy expert Cynthia Dunbar, an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Ms. Lesa Haney, a classroom evaluator, former teacher, and yes, Josh’s mom. [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/114229229%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-OCwD1″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ […]