Liberal Talk Radio

It’s a little too wonky and academic for my, um, tastes, but Goldy has the definitife solution to our education funding problems in Washington State.

An amazing educational experiment is about to happen in New York City, where a charter school is testing the concept of raising teacher pay to increase academic achievement: A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly higher [...]

You can expect high returns on your hedge fund investments but just don’t expect those guys to know the capital of North Dakota: Students at many of the country’s most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors [...]

Josh Feit has a great post on how the current crop of Seattle School Board candidates are forging new ideas on race and integration after this year’s Supreme Court decision.

Merit-based pay for teachers is an idea that’s gaining some traction, especially since leading Democratic presidential contenders are showing new spine in their relationship with the donkey-crack teacher’s unions (“donkey crack,” in that they’re an addictive, and destructive, drug for Democrats). For example, today’s WaPo notes how wunderkind Obama is trying to simultaneously push the [...]

Former Seattle Times education reporter Dick Lilly takes to the pages of Crosscut to argue for class-based tiebraking in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling: As always with education, there’s no simple answer, but the Seattle School District has, broadly, two ways to increase efforts on behalf of low-income students who enter school [...]

In the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling, the Seattle Public Schools are wrestling with the idea of using income instead of race as a “tiebraker” when deciding high school admission: Currently, Seattle’s Open Choice system allows students to choose their schools. Several popular — and mostly white — high schools have waiting lists [...]

The details about the latest free speech in schools battle going on at the Supreme Court are supremely depressing: The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in a case that has attracted attention mainly because of its eccentric story line: An Alaska student was suspended from high school in 2002 after he unfurled a banner reading [...]

The push to reform the U.S. educational system, including the smart idea to push kids out after the tenth grade, is validated in part by quandaries like the one faced in Arizona regarding slacking seniors: It’s senior year and the hardest work is over. For many high school students, that means it’s time to coast. [...]

If you exclude for the moment the concept of outsourcing education to “independent contractors” (whatever that means exactly . . .)*, this new report has some exciting new ideas for educational reform: Warning that Americans face a grave risk of losing their prosperity and high quality of life to better educated workers overseas, a panel [...]