History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
How to unite us squabbling education wonks
- 05-04-2011
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Blog by Jay Mathews/Washington Post
In my endless search for ways to reconcile our differences over how to fix our schools, I have found the best guide yet to finding common ground. This new book, “Wasting Minds: Why Our Education System Is Failing and What We Can Do About It” is by Ronald A. Wolk, the founder and former editor of Education Week. He is a friend. I have served with him on the board of Editorial Projects in Education, the non-profit which publishes Edweek. But I don’t think this threatens my impartiality too much because we have often disagreed. I started the book thinking I would not like his solutions. I feel differently now. Wolk is a man of courage. Turning Edweek into a success was difficult. He knows how kids learn. He brings the traditionalist, rigor-loving, no-excuses crowd, my side in the debate, much closer to the progressive, relevance-loving, leery-of-testing people like Wolk and the many folks who make fun of me on this blog. Wolk divides the book into a series of assumptions, first what he considers the bad ones, then some good ones. Here is each one. (more...)
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