http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
Finland’s education system regularly scores best or near-best worldwide, yet the country has no private schools (period, at any level from preschool to doctorate), no government-created teacher evaluations, no uniform grading system ( Read more... )

Claim: The subjects of biology, chemistry, and physics tend to be taught in that specific order in American high schools, and have been for over a century, as a result of one of the earliest national education standardization efforts: the Report of the Committee [of Ten] on Secondary School Studies, 1892.

Several official-sounding sources make ( Read more... )

As someone with no children of my own, I arguably have no legitimate business getting involved in the politics of education. But I have a sister and a future sister-in-law who are grade school teachers, and another sister who has three kids, from not-even-preschool to almost-middle-school, so I have occasion to be concerned anyway.

I’m concerned ( Read more... )

Did anyone else read this short-short story in middle school?

"Test", by Theodore Thomas

My sister is a primary school teacher in rural Pennsylvania, so I asked her her opinion of Bill Gates’s latest experiments at improving education.

Quick summary: over the past dozen years, Gates has given $5 billion - more than half the total charity this cause has received throughout its existence - to scholarships and education grants. He built ( Read more... )

I took the biology semester of my mandatory science requirement in…I think it was my sophomore year of college. One short quiz was multiple choice, with five questions and five possible answers, not counting "none of the above". One question clearly had A as its answer. One question clearly had D. One question clearly had E. The remaining two ( Read more... )

I stumbled onto the Jump$tart Coalition’s Student Financial Literacy Survey today. I tried to take it but could not find the questions in their raw form, so I had to imagine that the correct answers weren’t marked. Frustratingly, I had trouble understanding a few of the answers. #4 didn’t make sense until I read the detailed coverage in the Survey ( Read more... )

Arthur Robinson is a curious fellow. He has a doctorate in chemistry and briefly taught at UCSD. He co-founded a medical research institute with Linus Pauling. He is the founder and former head of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the primary author of that institute’s famous Oregon Petition, which purports there is no scientific ( Read more... )

This conversation didn’t exactly happen, but it was close.

“Guess what I discovered: it’s unconstitutional to require evolution to be taught in school.”

“Really? How so?”

“It contradicts the Christian story of creation. That means it directly attacks a main tenet of a major religion. The government isn’t supposed to promote any particular ( Read more... )

This year’s Miss USA pageant picked one of its fifteen semifinalists by posing three questions to all the contestants, recording their answers, putting these videos on the internet, and opening them up to a public vote. Those questions were:

• Have you, or would you, use an online dating service?
• Should evolution be taught in schools?
• How do you feel ( Read more... )