I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent New York Times story, which detailed the parental donation divide in a suburban Los Angeles school district. The district includes two communities with very different fortunes–Malibu (overwhelmingly affluent) and Santa Monica (more mixed income, with nearly a third of students qualifying as low-income). Turns out Malibu was taking in a lot more money than… Read more →
Young people go to college to search for themselves, explore, experiment, discover a passion . . . Or perhaps to retake algebra, stumble through classes that won’t fulfill a major, go into debt and drop out without a credential. Flexibility leads to failure for most students at unselective two- and four-year colleges, writes Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times.… Read more →
Back in the day, when I was an education reporter and trying to figure out where to find the school stories that would illuminate something revealing or surprising, I was given a great piece of advice by a veteran principal: “Study their budgets and look at how they spending their discretionary dollars. It will tell you a lot about what… Read more →
To President Trump: I was one of the 470,000 women who marched on Washington Saturday, the day after your inauguration, holding a sign that was earnest but not angry, focused on the aspirations I have for my young adult daughters. In a million years I couldn’t have imagined I would ever be writing you a letter (let alone putting the… Read more →
School pushout of black students is endemic in public education. In California, where I now live, many of the black students forced out of the classroom in recent years weren’t suspended for fighting or bringing weapons to school, but for the subjective behaviors that fall under the umbrella of “willful defiance.” So many black students were disciplined for behaviors that… Read more →
Homework is a topic that elicits emotional responses from parents and students of every background. Rarely do children and families approach homework with unbridled joy and enthusiasm, and at times, it can cause significant stress. There are only so many hours in the day and our students seem to be increasingly overscheduled and under-rested. Most children spend at least 6.5… Read more →