About one-fourth of Egyptian workers under 25 are unemployed, a statistic that is often cited as a reason for the revolution there. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January an official unemployment rate of 21 percent for workers ages 16 to 24. This is not exactly an encouraging article for […]
Wow! Somebody “discovered” unschooling. I am the only one who is a little sad every time a limited experiment in the school system validates something we’ve known for a long time? These one-off experiments never amount to anything. Yes, these 8 kids are better off, and that by itself is valuable. But does anybody really […]
A common complaint about parents today is that they let the schools raise their kids. This line of thought is especially common among the holier than thou HSer crowd. Heck, if you dig deep into the archives here you can probably catch me guilty of saying something along those lines. So consider this passage from […]
From Drop Box I had much higher expectations. (Picture taken in Orange VA) HT Christine Gookin – I stole her joke.
Very brief review: I was blindsided by a layoff the Monday after Thanksgiving. I’m a software sales and marketing executive by trade, and for the most part, focused my job search on opportunities to sell complex technical products or services. I was out of work about 90 days, although I’ve sort of had a job, […]
This is depressingly unsurprising. The essay portion of your kid’s standardized test is being scored by a low paid temp who is likely a worse writer than your child, and probably is just making up the scores to fit a pre-determined normal distribution that needs to be returned to the school district. My son is […]
This is really cool – 66 photos from the Western Frontier, circa late 19th century. When I watch old westerns I often wonder how close John Ford and the others got to capturing the essence of the era on film. After looking through these first hand accounts captured on film, I’d have to say the […]
If we spent $50 billion less on K-12 education—in both public and private money—and instead spent $50 billion more on early intervention programs, we’d almost certainly get a way bigger bang for the buck. Politicians understand the concept of leverage when it comes to investing money for their personal gain. Why do they have so […]
The word unschooling is never used in this book, but trust me, this is a book about unschooling. The author’s 16 year old son is flunking out of high school. School just doesn’t work for him. So he makes a deal with the kid. He can drop out, but he has to watch 3 movies […]
It probably should not be surprising that founder of Kahn Academy is thinking bigger than tutoring kids on YouTube these days. He is out to do nothing less than change education in the US. First, he says, we should “decouple credentialing from learning.” Instead of handing out degrees, standardized assessments would be the measure of […]
