by Jeff Bryant | Oct 29, 2013 | Education
This past week, two videos captured just about everything you need to know about the status of the movement known as "education reform." The first filmed event was a staged encounter between two prominent advocates for what is conventionally thought of to be "opposing...
by Jeff Bryant | Oct 22, 2013 | Education
T.S. Eliot had it wrong. October is the cruelest month. Far crueler than Spring's "lilacs out of a dead land" Eliot wrote about in "The Waste Land" is a harvest season of failed crops. All that work and hope for this? "This" we confront is the empty yield from...
by Jeff Bryant | Oct 15, 2013 | Education
The latest news stories from the brave frontiers of a movement known as "education reform" are in, and the consensus view is that down continues to be the new up. Personnel programs such as teacher merit pay that were supposed to improve the financial efficiency of...
by Jeff Bryant | Oct 8, 2013 | Education
Education "reform" wasn't supposed to turn out like this. In an ironic coda to the No Child Left Behind era last week, Texas officially turned its back on George W. Bush's policy triumph by opting out of his signature mandate for schools to achieve "adequate yearly...
by Jeff Bryant | Oct 1, 2013 | Education
Scores on the SAT – "the nation's most widely used" college entrance exam – made news headlines recently, and the averages are either a "call to action," a sign of progress, or "meaningless." Confused? You should be. Because reports of testing data, whether they're...
by Jeff Bryant | Sep 25, 2013 | Education
One of the most popular shows on TV currently centers on a high school chemistry teacher whose cancer diagnosis and lack of adequate health insurance vault him into a life of crime in the drug trade. The series takes to an extreme the personal human drama of the main...
