Tag: public education

Commentary: When Classical Learning Meets Public Education, the Dialogue Isn’t Always Socratic

RealClearWire
School Work

The future of the controversial classical education movement will be showcased later this month when Columbia University senior lecturer Roosevelt Montás is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at a national symposium hosted by Great Hearts, the biggest classical charter network.

The views of Montás, author of the widely praised memoir “Rescuing Socrates,” are well to the left of many in the classical charter movement, which is rooted in Christian conservatism. What makes Montás’ upcoming speech so notable, then, is the signal it sends about the movement’s effort to diversify its brand and project a welcoming attitude as it seeks to expand beyond conservative strongholds and suburbs where it began.

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Commentary: Chronically Absent Students Need an Alternative

South Carolina Sun Staff
Empty Chairs

It’s no secret that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. As The 74s Linda Jacobson writes, a new analysis of federal data released in late 2023 shows the problem may be even worse than previously understood.

The report from Johns Hopkins University shows that two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism rates during the 2021-22 school year—more than double the rate in 2017-18. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)

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Commentary: Clever Teachers Unions Embed Socialism into Their Contracts

South Carolina Sun Staff

From Boston to Los Angeles, teachers’ unions and their progressive counterparts have quietly devised an unprecedented method to bypass the legislative process by embedding unrelated policy issues deep within the intricate terms of teacher contracts.

This new, covert strategy, hidden in plain sight, allows state and municipal officials to create sweeping policy changes that evade the scrutiny typically associated with customary legislative procedures, which include publicly available draft legislation, committee hearings, amendments and comprehensive floor debates.

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Commentary: Public Education’s Alarming Reversal of Learning Trend

RealClearWire
School Work

Call it the big reset – downward – in public education.

The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.

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