Education Week 2008 Kids and the D Word I was cooking dinner for some friends milling around the kitchen when I forgot my nine-year-old was within earshot.“But what do I know,” I asked after expressing an opinion. “I’m just a college dropout.”“Kids and the D Word” By Nancy French 9/12 12:00 PM

Education Week 2008 Eliminate This The public is used to stories of jaw-dropping waste — hundred-million-dollar bridges to nowhere — so it’s no surprise that a bill for a few million for anti-discrimination workshops elicits little more than yawns. Yet the public should take note of the “Gender Bias Elimination Act,” a bill introduced in this Congress and which is sure to come up again, since its implications are bigger than its price tag suggests.As the media often reports, while women have made big gains in American classrooms, they still lag behind men in some science and math-based fields. This bill is supposed to help address the disparity. Among the bill’s findings is that “unintentional biases” and “outmoded institutional structures” are responsible for the relative scarcity of women in science and engineering. It’s a claim with considerable power. Clearly discrimination once impeded women’s progress in these areas, and the public recoils at the idea that such injustice could continue today.“Eliminate This” By Carrie Lukas 9/12 11:20 AM

Education Week 2008 Homework, Por Favor Unless the educational achievement of non-Asian minorities in the U.S. improves, America’s imminent demographic changes do not bode particularly well for its technological competitiveness. By 2023, the majority of youth under 18 will be non-white, and the greatest portion of non-whites will be Hispanic. The number of college-aged Latinos is expected to nearly triple, from 3 million today to 8 million by 2040, but the number of Hispanics actually enrolled in college will just double — to 2 million. Once in college, few of those students will graduate with a science or engineering degree. In 2006, only 7 percent of bachelors degrees in science, math, and technology were awarded to Hispanics, and the trends are not promising. In 2007, the math SAT scores of Hispanic students in California, home to the largest proportion of Hispanics in the country, dropped to 450, while rising for whites and Asians to 549 and 564, respectively. “Homework, Por Favor” By Heather Mac Donald 9/12 8:00 AM

Education Week 2008 Meet Ingrid Mattson Ingrid Mattson, a 45-year-old Canadian-born convert to Islam, caused an uproar in the blogosphere after she was invited by the Democratic party to a gathering of religious leaders in Denver on the eve of the convention. Other notable participants included Bishop Charles E. Blake, (Church of God In Christ) and Rabbi Tzvi Weinreb (Orthodox Union). The commotion stemmed from the fact that Mattson is the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was labeled last year by the U.S. Justice Department as an un-indicted co-conspirator in U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas terrorism financing case. Mattson’s overt affiliation with ISNA created only a fleeting political liability in Denver, but she may pose a longer-term danger to the wider American public. “Meet Ingrid Mattson” By Jonathan Schanzer 9/11 2:00 PM

Education Week 2008 The Unfought War on Islamism In 1816, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in a letter to a friend an adage that we should be heeding today: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Never was this advice more desperately needed — or more consciously avoided — than it is today. American’s educational system has seemed unwilling to enlighten our children to the nature, history, and implications of the war that has been declared on us and on free people in general by Islamist theocratic totalitarians. At best, the subject is entirely avoided in America’s classrooms; at worst, it is ascribed to causes that facts prove are untrue — such as poverty or American foreign policy.“The Unfought War on Islamism” By M. Zuhdi Jasser 9/11 9:30 AM

Education Week 2008 Sidestepping the Sandstorm? Entrenched special interests. Inflexible ideologues. Influence peddling. Bloated bureaucracies. These maladies, at first glance, seem to depict life inside the Washington beltway. Readers of NRO know, due to its excellent blog Phi Beta Cons, that these ailments also afflict large swaths of American higher education. But just as both presidential candidates this year promise to challenge the status quo in our nation's capital, a dedicated core of professors and administrators has worked tirelessly to reform academic life on our college campuses. They have sought to return the American university to its original purpose: liberal education, not ideological indoctrination. They have challenged the political correctness that asphyxiates intellectual inquiry in academia. Progress has been made, yet much work remains.“Sidestepping the Sandstorm?” By Joseph Morrison Skelly 9/11 5:00 AM

Education Week 2008 Studying the Islamic Way of War At the inaugural conference for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) back in April, presenter LTC Joseph Myers made an interesting point that deserves further elaboration. Though military studies have traditionally valued and absorbed the texts of classical war doctrine — such as Clausewitz’s On War, Sun Tsu’s The Art of War, even the exploits of Alexander the Great as recorded in Arrian and Plutarch — Islamic war doctrine, which is just as if not more textually grounded, is totally ignored.As recently as 2006, former top Pentagon official William Gawthrop lamented that “the senior Service colleges of the Department of Defense had not incorporated into their curriculum a systematic study of Muhammad as a military or political leader. As a consequence, we still do not have an in-depth understanding of the war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, how it might be applied today by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be countered [emphasis added].” Today, seven full years after September 11, our understanding of the Islamic way of war is little better.“Studying the Islamic Way of War” By Raymond Ibrahim 9/11 4:00 AM

Education Week 2008 Yale’s Enduring Shame ‘Performance artist” Pia Lindman is the Yale instructor who authorized and guided Aliza Shvarts’s proposed “abortion art” project for a senior art show in the 2007-2008 school year. Yale has once again engaged Lindman to teach during this academic year, to the university’s enduring shame.Shvarts’s proposed project, as widely reported, consisted in repeatedly artificially inseminating herself, inducing possible miscarriages, and videotaping herself bleeding into a cup. Her plan was then to display her bodily fluids and presumably aborted fetuses in a plastic-wrapped ceiling installation, upon which she would also have projected the videos of said miscarriages. “Yale’s Enduring Shame” By Candace de Russy 9/10 8:00 AM

Education Week 2008 Treasure A.C.E. ‘Gloom, despair, and agony on me,” Buck Owens and Roy Clark used to sing. One could be forgiven for assuming that the sad sages of Hee Haw were wailing about education policy in America. Bad news, dispiriting trends, cringe-inducing venality, and flat-out stupidity are not only easy to find, they seem impossible to avoid. When it comes to America’s Catholic schools, it’s also tempting to focus on the negative. More than 1,600 parochial schools have been closed or consolidated during the past two decades. Those that survive struggle to pay decent, let alone competitive, salaries. Administrators often lack the experience and training to navigate daunting bureaucratic mazes, raise money creatively, or invest strategically. Innovative policy experiments that might help these schools and their students, like school vouchers and tuition-tax credits, are resisted at every turn by powerful special interests. “Treasure A.C.E.” By Richard W. Garnett 9/10 6:00 AM

Education Week 2008 Seven-Year Itch It was always an awkward marriage. But it appears that after seven years together, the Republican party is preparing to leave behind No Child Left Behind. At the GOP’s convention in St. Paul, there was little mention of the administration’s signature initiative. The new party platform doesn’t reference NCLB and instead includes a new section — “reviewing the federal role in elementary and secondary education” — signaling that Republicans intend to return to conservative principles. The platform calls for giving federal education funds to the states as simple block grants, so long as states conduct testing and make the results public. “Seven-Year Itch” By Dan Lips 9/10 6:00 AM

Education Week 2008 No Chance When asked to specify his bipartisan bonafides, to which he often alludes, Sen. Barack Obama likes to talk about education. He’ll tell you, for instance, that he took a big risk by supporting merit pay for teachers even though their unions, those stalwart allies of Democratic politicians and the status quo, mostly abhor it. “No Chance” By Liam Julian 9/10 6:00 AM

Education Week 2008 History Lies Larry Schweikart, previously co-author of A Patriot’s History of the United States, is author of the new (released today) 49 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School). A professor of history at the University of Dayton, he takes some opening-day questions from NRO editor Kathryn Lopez, in the hopes of undoing some of the lies early in the school year. Kathryn Jean Lopez: So only 49? Larry Schweikart: You know, publishers do have cost restraints. The original version was the size of The Historical Statistics of the United States. So we allowed for volume 2, 3, 4, . . . .“History Lies” An Interview with the Author 9/9 8:30 AM

Education Week 2008 Rhee Reform Every July, an elite group assembles in the mountain resort of Sun Valley, Idaho, for a private retreat. It’s like summer camp for the executive set, with golf, rafting, and fishing for seasoned attendees like Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Bloomberg. Recreation is combined with more intellectual pursuits, however, including closed-door panels that survey economic, geopolitical, and cultural trends. This past summer, there was a new face in the mix: Michelle Rhee, reform-chancellor-extraordinaire of the D.C. public-school system. And though she’s only headed into her second year on the job, Rhee says she felt at home among the Sun Valley crowd, populated not only by wealthy moguls, but also by some the most successful entrepreneurs in recent memory. “These are folks who really understand what it takes to run a high-functioning, high-performing organization,” Rhee told National Review Online. “And they were incredibly supportive, incredibly excited about what we’re doing here in D.C.” “Rhee Reform” By Elise Viebeck 9/9 8:00 AM

Education Week 2008 The Law that Dare Not Speak Its Name As the new school year and the climactic period of the presidential election both commence, the future of federal education policy is murkier than ever before. Both national parties manifest grave internal schisms over education, even as today’s federal policy centerpiece, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, is treated by both candidates for the Oval Office as if it didn’t quite exist and certainly ought not be discussed in polite company. “The Law that Dare Not Speak Its Name” By Chester E. Finn Jr. 9/9 6:00 AM

Education Week 2008 Teachers Matter Education reform has made impressive strides in the last several years. Once taboo, school-choice policies in the form of charter schools and vouchers have become increasingly prevalent as the years pass, and policies holding schools accountable for student performance are now the norm. But better schools are impossible without better teachers. And the surest way to upgrade teacher quality is to tie pay to performance. By now it is well established that teacher quality — that is, a teacher’s independent contribution to the academic improvements of her students — is the single factor within a school’s control that is most responsible for student achievement. Even so, teacher quality varies quite a bit. In their evaluation of Texas teachers, Steven Rivken, Eric Hanushek, and Thomas Kain found that a one-standard-deviation increase in the quality of a student’s teacher would have the same impact as the student being in a class with ten fewer students. A similar study found that a student whose teacher is in the top quarter of effectiveness winds up a year more academically advanced than a similar student whose teacher is in the bottom quarter. If we could either improve or remove those teachers at the bottom, the general standard of teaching, and thus learning, would rise.“Teachers Matter” By Marcus A. Winters 9/9 6:00 AM

Education Week 2008 A Special Plan for Palin Sometimes even the greatest joys bring challenge. And children with special needs inspire a special love. To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House. — Governor Sarah PalinIt would be great to have an advocate for special-needs kids in the White House. It would be even better if that advocate endorsed the most promising reform for improving special education — vouchers for disabled students.While every student with disabilities is entitled under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to a free and appropriate education, which sounds great in theory, that right is only as good as the ability to enforce it, which is extremely difficult in practice. We need a mechanism that empowers parents of special-needs kids so that they can make those rights a reality.“A Special Plan for Palin” By Jay P. Greene 9/9 6:00 AM

Education Week 2008 USA: We’re Number 20! With the 2008 Summer Olympic Games receding in our memories, there’s still consternation in some parts about the fact that China bested the United States in the gold-medal count. But with 110 first-, second-, or third-place finishes to its credit, the United States Olympic team performed many times better than our Education Olympics team — which won only a single medal in this year’s competition. Where’s the consternation over that?“USA: We’re Number 20!” By Michael J. Petrilli 9/8 7:00 AM

Education Week 2008 Kids (and Lizards) Return to School, Moms Collapse You know it’s back-to-school month when your lizard leaves. Last week, Spike, the third-grade classroom pet — who spent August at our house — looked at me with his separately moving eyes, grabbed a big cricket with his tongue, and went back to standing completely still for the next four hours. It was his way of saying goodbye.“Kids (and Lizards) Return to School, Moms Collapse” By Susan Konig 9/8 6:00 AM

Education Week 2008 Battleground Stakes All around the country, children are boarding school buses, mounting bikes, or heading out on foot for another year of battling ignorance. Meanwhile, adults are mobilizing for their own educational warfare — annual political combat over what our children will be taught.“Battleground Stakes” By Neal McCluskey 9/8 6:00 AM

Education Week 2008 Educating Helen Keller ‘The world isn’t an easy place for anyone. I don’t want her just to obey, but to let her have her way in everything is a lie, to her,” says Anne Sullivan about her pupil, Helen Keller, in William Gibson’s famous play The Miracle Worker. The riveting play, made into an excellent film starring Oscar winners Anne Bancroft (Sullivan) and Patty Duke (Keller), is one of the greatest American statements on the nature of education, the craft of teaching, and the many obstacles to its implementation. The story of Sullivan and Keller remains a devastating critique of the self-esteem movement and an affirmation of the proper role of obedience and repetition in the life of the student. Most dramatically — and most surprisingly — it insists that the true teacher cannot simply be an instrument of the wishes of the student’s family.“Educating Helen Keller” By Thomas S. Hibbs 9/8 6:00 AM