Category: Culture
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Running in a Race to Nowhere
The other night I joined a boisterous, energized crowd at the Rio Theater to see the second of two films about education making waves these days. (See my review of the first, Waiting for Superman. I’m going to attempt to avoid a compare/contrast of these two radically different films here; hopefully I’ll get to that…
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Mandate, schmandate
So we have a state budget and we perhaps think that all is good. All is not good. This economy is less like a roller coaster and more like a very slow sink into thick black mud. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll find a diamond down there in the mud, but for now, all we see…
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No time to wait for Superman
I went today to a special showing of Waiting for Superman, the first of the two films about the sorry state of American education that are coming out this fall. It was sponsored by the Santa Cruz Education Foundation and had a panel discussion afterward by John Laird, Ellen Moir of the New Teacher Center,…
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Beloved picture books
According to the New York Times, parents are starting to push their kids away from picture books at unusually early ages. “Picture books are for babies,” seems to be the message: The economic downturn is certainly a major factor, but many in the industry see an additional reason for the slump. Parents have begun pressing…
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State subsidized preschools need support
When my daughter was three, I was in big trouble. I’d found what I thought was the perfect school for my son, a parent participation charter school. But I had to take one morning out of my schedule to spend in my son’s classroom, and I didn’t know if I could do it. My daughter…