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Commentary
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, a Latin phrase found in the work of the Roman poet Juvenal, is commonly used to refer to the problem of how one monitors the actions of persons in positions of power. It means literally: Who will guard the guards? Example: We don't know
Commentary
Individual secondary teachers often have had personalized and idiosyncratic goals for the elective courses they prepared and taught. What is not clear is why local taxpayers should have supported courses years ago that contributed to an incoherent school curriculum. Or why they support a K-12 reading and literature curriculum today
Commentary
Two U.S. senators plan to revise the federal Higher Education Act to make it ready for re-authorization. Should we find that reassuring? The senators, Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) and Patti Murray (D-Washington), don't tell us who will be writing or paying for the drafting of this mammoth bill
Commentary
How did unconstitutional four-year state education plans get to be legal? Or are they? In their new book, Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty, Emmett McGroarty, Jane Robbins, and Erin Tuttle tell us about the over-reach by bureaucrats in past decades through an "administrative" central government.
Commentary
We live in a remarkable age. Even when Florence Foster Jenkins sang in a packed Carnegie Hall decades ago, music critics were able to say that she did not have the voice of an authentic opera singer. Few in the musical world really cared how Jenkins spent her own money.
Commentary
Common Core supporters have been asserting that before Common Core's emphasis on skills, all our teachers did for 50 years was ask kids to memorize facts. So implies Alfie Kohn in The Schools Our Children Deserve, in arguing that students didn't understand what they used to
Commentary
Are "achievement gaps" caused by K-12 schools and the teachers in them? Many policymakers, including those at the U.S. Department of Education, seem to think so, because Race to the Top federal grant applications in 2010 wanted states to hold teachers accountable for student test scores. Indeed,
Commentary
What do you call the seller if you label new English Language Arts test items as more rigorous than those on the original tests with the same name and then sell another state these new English Language Arts test items knowing that parents there expect the original test items, not