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Is College Worth It? Rising Costs, Falling Benefits Hamper Higher Education
At the Republican primary debate on November 10, 2015, presidential candidate Marco Rubio called for “more welders and less philosophers.” Fact-checkers quickly pointed out that this statement was based on comparing starting salaries of philosophers to mid-career salaries of welders, but the sentiment is far from Rubio’s alone. Last year, President Barack Obama was pressured…
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The Liberal Arts Can Work
Support science and the arts—especially the arts,” advised the documentarian Ken Burns during his commencement address to Wash U Class of 2015. “They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country. They Just Make Our Country Worth Defending!” As a historian, Burns was probably referring to the liberal arts, not simply the…
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A Verdict on Backfiles
Students learn from a young age that cheating in school is a cardinal sin, and the penalties are there to prove it. In writing essays, taking tests, working problem sets, and doing research, students know it is of the utmost importance they avoid plagiarizing, cite their sources, meet expectations of group work, and avoid the…
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Standarized Testing and Public Education
In recent decades, the United States has shifted its approach to schooling to incorporate neoliberal ideals. Traditionally, schools were regulated and funded by local governments. More recently, federal and state governments devoted programming and funding to efforts to reduce educational inequality caused by differences across communities such as income and tax revenue. However, rather than…
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The Return of Segregated Schools
There’s nothing like coming home for the holidays to news that your high school is in the midst of being resegregated. Despite what spell check may think, I didn’t mean to type ‘desegregated.’ I say resegregation, and I mean resegregation, because that’s precisely what many teachers, students, and parents at my North Miami Beach, Florida…
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The 28th Amendment?
The quality and efficiency of education within the United States is a controversial topic, but data from various cross-national tests consistently underscores the fact that United States students are lagging internationally. One of the biggest cross-national tests, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), placed the United States 24th, 28th, and 36th in reading, science,…
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The Legacy of No Child Left Behind
After years of intense public pressure to improve the quality of education, on January 23 of 2001, President Bush proposed a plan to Congress to improve the standards of America’s failing primary and secondary education systems. The plan would reauthorize Lyndon B. Johnson’s, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) with a forceful new piece of…
