Today The New York Times ran a forum with seven people weighing in on summer homework, my contribution being a strong "Yea!" The comments are profuse, with lots of personal anecdotes and indignation coming from both sides. One line of objection, however, is puzzling, and it begins with the second contributor, Nancy Kalish, who offers a portrait of "how miserable a child looks as he slogs through that pile of book reports, math packets, journal entries, and other typical assignments."

One commenter urges, "Lay off the required summer reading lists, book reports, etc. It’s absurd. Children need more play opportunities, which will help them grow and mature, and give them a necessary break."

Another says, "The method to fix education in the U.S....

My economist’s eye caught a familiar (false) debate over Catholic social teaching while reading New York Times columunist Ross Douthat, who compared Eunice Shriver favorably to Teddy Kennedy because she was a pro-life Catholic and Teddy was a Catholic for Choice. Unfortunately, Douthat advances a distorted version of Catholic social teaching: making us believe abortion is front and center.

Dignity for the human person includes opposition to the death penalty and promoting the right of workers to organize. On advancing the Church’s agenda on social issues both Kennedys deserve recognition. To be sure, Ted Kennedy had the platform and the power to effectively advance social justice, which is very much an economic agenda: See the

Anyone who's taken a hard look at the reasons why more students drop out of community college realizes it's got to have at least something to do with their need for more frequent, higher-quality advising.  After all, in many cases these are students who are juggling multiple responsibilities, only one of which is attending college, and they need to figure out a lot of details--how to take the right courses to fit their particular program (especially if they hope to later transfer credits), how to get the best financial aid package, how to work out a daily schedule that can maximize their learning, etc. It's fairly easy to figure that in fact community college students would probably stand to benefit more from good advising than their counterparts at many four-year institutions.

Except high-quality advising isn't what they get.  Counselor-student ratios are on...

Laurie's post on bad writing by students wisely cautions against what we might call the nostalgic impulse, that is, the tendency of people to regard everything as heading downward.  It afflicts people middle-age and older, and conservatives, too.  One of the mottos of conservatism is a statement I've seen attributed to Lord Palmerston at the height of Victorian reform: "Change, change, change--all this talk about change--aren't things bad enough already?"

And so, those folks who think student writing keeps getting worse need to check their pessimism for evidence.

But there is another impulse to be identified as well.  It's the opposite one, the "progress" belief, in its extreme form, the claim of "revolution."  We see it in the quotation from Andrea Lunsford: "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen...

It would be good for the blood pressure of everyone involved in criticizing education—state legislators, education policy professionals, professors, school administrators, parents—to take a deep breath. Put aside the statistics, the studies, the anecdotes, and take a look at the big picture.

Here’s what Edith Hamilton had to say about education, in The Echo of Greece (1957), one of her many trenchant books on the subject of the ancient Greeks: 

"If people feel that things are going from bad to worse and look at the new generation to see if they can be trusted to take charge among such dangers, they invariably conclude that they cannot and that these irresponsible young people have not been trained properly. Then the cry goes up, 'What is wrong with our education?' and many answers are always forthcoming."

Note the...

I just came across Mike Stanfill's cartoon from last week, which captures a truth about the way the coding of the words "public" and "private" function in our debates about our laughing-stock-of-the-developed-world system of "health care."

(You know, health care for those who can pay and aren't sick, health care as a reason to stay in a lousy job with more unpaid overtime and less vacation than the Japanese, health care for the last ten days of your life, but not the first thirty years, etc, etc. The whole pile of crap--which appears irrational until you see how efficiently it operates in its actual purpose, which isn't "health" but to provide second homes, compliant spouses, and boats for a bunch of...

This week The Chronicle's annual Almanac of Higher Education hit the mailboxes, and deep in the data are some usual and unusual findings.

On the "Political Orientation" question, the customary breakdowns appear. The percentage of faculty members who declare themselves "Far left" or "Liberal" outnumber that of "Far right" or "Conservative" by more than three to one: 55.8 percent to 15.9 percent. The other category, "Middle-of-the-road" stands at 28.4 percent. Given the political climate of the campus, I assume that most of those moderates aren't, in fact, in the middle, but rather fall into center-left or liberal. Compared to their colleagues, perhaps yes, but not compared to the general U.S. population.

The slant to the left is no surprise, of course, but the "far" polarities do merit notice. If we just take far left and far right, the...

Ted Kennedy was one of the most influential Senators to ever serve. His death is a major historic turning point for social justice in the nation.

His accomplishments in higher education alone would distinguish him in the history of the Senate. Kennedy championed access to higher education by supporting Pell Grants and federal student loans and by directing federal research money through national institutes to colleges and universities.

His early fights were over civil rights; he championed affirmative action and equal economic opportunity for minorities and women; he led the fight for Title IX and for voting rights.

Much of the media will emphasize Kennedy's early and consistent fight for fairer and universal health care, Medicare and Medicaid, and universal health care for low-income...

The release of this year's U.S. News college rankings has produced the usual meaningless attention to Princeton and Harvard jousting for the top spot despite the gnat-sized statistical differences between them. I'm on record with deep concerns about the way U.S. News creates strong incentives for institutions to act counter to public and student interests. The peer survey, which comprises 25 percent of each institution's score, is clearly biased toward age-old institutions and thus feeds the mistaken and damaging idea that true excellence in higher education takes decades or longer to achieve. When it comes to the teaching and learning mission,...