Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/michael-diedrich/)
How frustrating is it when you’ve grown skilled at playing a game with one set of rules, only to have everyone else start playing a different game without telling you? In a way, that’s what happens to women in the transition between education and employment. Continue Reading
MERCUTIO: …I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,
By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,
By her fine foot, straight leg and quivering thigh
And the demesnes that there adjacent lie,
That in thy likeness thou appear to us!
That’s Mercutio summoning Romeo in Act II, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and deploying one of the less intense pieces of sexual innuendo scattered throughout the play. That one of the most commonly taught pieces of literature, from one of the most celebrated writers in the history of the English language, contains such themes and passages is worth keeping in mind as we observe Banned Books Week this year. Schools, naturally enough, are one of the centers of these controversies. Continue Reading
Pay attention to any policy area long enough and you’ll see good ideas twisted out of the hands of their founders and turned into something else entirely. At a certain level, that’s what happened to charter schools. Minnesota just might be the place to start fixing that. Continue Reading
One of the themes running through 2010’s Waiting for “Superman” and many branches of education reform rhetoric is the notion of a “sense of urgency.” It’s the idea that the issues in our school system (whatever the speaker may have diagnosed them as being) are so pressing and so immediately hurting kids that we must change them dramatically and as quickly as possible. But can that be counterproductive? Is it true, as Matt DiCarlo of the Shanker Institute has written, that “kids can wait for good policy making”? Continue Reading
The paradox of teaching is that it’s seen as noble, missionary work when it isn’t the refuge of the lazy and incompetent. We see this in how teachers are portrayed in movies—especially movies about teaching —as well as in the rhetoric pervading all sides of our current reform debates. But has it always been this way? Continue Reading
There’s a certain bias many of us seem prone to when thinking about improving schools, and that’s focusing too much on just a handful of aspects of education to the neglect of everything else that matters. Here’s a story about one of them. Continue Reading
What’s the best way to change the number of people living in poverty? Use a different definition of poverty. Continue Reading
Congressional conservatives have made it hard to get much done these past few years. This has led to a series of creative workarounds by the Obama administration, including the Race to the Top grant competition five years ago which in part took the place of passing new education legislation. I’m less than thrilled with the program which led to many states agreeing to significant policy changes but only funded a few of those efforts. Continue Reading
Corinthian Colleges, a country-wide for-profit college company, recently collapsed while under federal review. For-profit colleges like to portray themselves as a good option for students who haven’t succeeded anywhere else but this happy story doesn’t always match reality. Corinthian’s story illustrates how the for-profit approach to college can go very wrong. Continue Reading
That early learning is critical is one of the few points of agreement in today’s education reform debate. Unfortunately, actually improving early childhood education on a large scale is trickier than it looks at first.The high return on investment for strong early childhood education has become a well-worn talking point. Estimates as high as $16 of benefit for every $1 invested raise eyebrows and catch attention. Those benefits come from many sources: higher income (and thus higher tax revenue), lower K-12 expenditures for special education or remediation, and—one of the most beneficial—lower crime rates, producing lower justice system expenditures and “savings” for victims. Of course, some students benefit more than others, and the return on investment numbers capture trends, not absolute guarantees for each student.Defining what constitutes a high-quality early childhood program is still a challenge. While individual programs with high returns on investment are known—the Abecedarian Project at the University of North Carolina, the Chicago Child-Parent Centers, the HighScope Perry Preschools, and others—it’s tougher to identify the characteristics that are most important for replicating those results. Continue Reading