Everybody knows about the "negative learning" effect of July and August. Students enter the next grade in September having lost knowledge and proficiencies that they possessed in May. 

One crucial area of decline is in reading levels, which is why summer reading is so important. Not necessarily summer homework reading, but reading of any sustained kind. (For a debate on summer homework, see this New York Times roundtable with abundant comments.)  It doesn't have to be classics and great books, just more or less challenging and interesting books and shorter pieces that pull an hour or two a day out of the vacationing and working teens' leisure time.

Yes, the better the materials, the better the experience, but if we aim for sustaining the elements that make students handle the following year's biology and social studies textbooks, it may be that the page count matters as much as the...

Broken promises, high-sounding hypocrisy, debt.  To more and more graduates, it doesn't seem fair.  In their handouts and flyers and inserts and Web pages, the colleges profiled their graduates as world successes.  Accordingly, parents shelled out up to $200,000 or the kids piled up student loans, and the degree followed on schedule. Now, though, they can't find a job.

Here is what one of them wrote on Craig's List (warning: expletives in abundance). Apparently, what prompted this alumnus in Seattle to write it was receiving a request for donations along with promotional literature about the school. It was too much, and he or she had to reply, adding the simple and salient fact of unemployment:

"So, what I want to know is, why are you wasting money on glossy fundraising brochures full of meaningless synonyms for the word 'Excellence'? And, why are you sending them to ME? Yes, I know...

This week, Stanford University will have a groundbreaking ceremony to initiate construction of the Bing Concert Hall, a performance hall scheduled for completion January 2013. (See here for plans.)  It's part of a larger plan to create an "arts district" on the campus that will consolidate arts programs and connect with the Cantor Arts Center. For more on the Stanford Arts Initiative, see here.

The initiative is important for a particular reason that extends beyond the Stanford campus. As everyone knows, the arts continue to struggle for roles and places in rural, suburban, and urban communities. Theaters come and go, performing groups linger from year to year on financial cliffs, and performers barely eke out a living. 

Everyone wants the arts, though, and here is where campuses come into play. In many areas, campuses are the only place where people can hear live chamber music and...

A middle-school principal in New Jersey is getting attention for an e-mail message he sent out to parents a week ago with a stern request: get your kids off Facebook!  Here is Principal Tony Orsini talking with George Stephanopoulis, and here is a portion of his e-mail:

"There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! Let me repeat that—there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None."

On the TV show, he advises parents to remove computers from bedrooms. Since 90 percent of their homework does not require a computer, he notes, they don't need it everywhere they go. He claims, too, that "The threat to your son or daughter from online adult predators is insignificant compared to the damage that children at this age constantly and repeatedly do to one another...

Back in the 1990s, Leonard Sax began to notice in more and  more familiies "from every economic condition where the daughter is hardworking and motivated while her brother is a goofball: he's more concerned about getting to the next level in his video game than he is about getting a good grade on his Spanish final." His observations led to a widely-cited book Boys Adrift (see here for info).  It joins works by Richard Whitmire, Peg Tyre, and others in establishing general acceptance of a "boy problem" among American teens today, particularly as measured by their academic achievement relative to girls.

Now, Sax has a new book out entitled Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls (see here for details). In it, he draws a far-reaching distinction between the troubles with girls and the troubles with boys.

"Both the girls and the boys are disadvantaged, but they...

Literature departments make up the bulk of the humanities, but when it comes to humanities scholarship, literary thinkers and theorists and critics and scholars are overlooked for leading minds in other areas—philosophy, linguistics, sociology, psychology, anthropology.

That conclusion may be drawn from this list taken from the ISI Web of Science and published in the Times Higher Education Supplement. It ranks authors of books by the number of citations they received in humanities research during the year 2007. (Note: There is some ambiguity in the headline and the description that follows the chart, making it unclear whether this list applies to the humanities alone or not.)  Each name was cited at least 500 times.

Here are those who broke 1,000:

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Philosophy, sociology, criticism        2,521       

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Sociology        2,465       ...

Here are statements from columns by Frank Rich in the last few months. Heed the metaphors and adjectives and catchwords.

• "On ABC's 'This Week,' a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe." 3/28/10

• ". . . the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his 'Hell no, you can't!' incantation . . . Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons." 3/28/10

• "How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn't recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a...

What's an "education conservative"?

Education conservatives believe that liberal education should be centered on a core body of knowledge. In the humanities and "softer" social-science fields, all students should study a set of books, ideas, artworks, theories, events, and personages more or less stable over time. Those items are chosen on a variety of grounds: aesthetic excellence, historical impact, intellectual brilliance, ethical positions, etc. They may contradict one another and represent vastly different people and places and outlooks. The important thing is that the learning of them produces a thoughtful, informed, and responsible intelligence. Yes, additions and subtractions take place in the materials, but in a gradualist process. Education conservatives don't accept new things or drop old things without a fair degree of circumspection. They reject criteria of "relevance" and ...

The 1965 legislation that established the National Endowment for the Humanities defined "humanities" as "the study and interpretation of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of the social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life."  (See the full text of the opening sections here.)

The NEH was created for "The encouragement and support of national progress and scholarship in the humanities," the document says, and it reiterates several times...

The NAEP reading scores for 2009 came in recently, the overall results showing tiny or no gains from 2007.  (See here for details.)  The goal is to improve "proficient" ratings -- that's what the Federal education policy aims to do. In spite of the meager advance in the last couple of years, comparing scores from the early 90s, one finds reason for optimism among 4th- and 8th-graders.

In 1992, 28 percent of 4th-graders reached proficiency in reading. Last year, that figure hit 33 percent. In 1992, 29 percent of 8th-graders reached proficiency in reading. Last year, the portion was 33 percent.

That's not terribly encouraging to educators, given all the money and resources and legislation and publicity that have come down upon reading scores over the years. 

Even worse, look at 12th-graders. The last assessment figures available are from 2005.  That year, 35 percent of them reached...