NY Times OP-ED Columnist Nick Kristof on the weakness in US science and math education.
Mr. Subbakrishna, a management consultant specializing in technology, notes that in his native Bangalore, children learn algebra in elementary school. All in all, he says, the average upper-middle-class child in Bangalore finishes elementary school with a better grounding in math and science than the average kid in the U.S.
Monthly Archives: February 2004
Federal Red Ink
The Cato Institute published some very helpful (and illuminating) charts & graphs on the current federal budget.
Two Cars to Save Detroit
The Eastern Sierra, CA
Stunning, beautiful, visit! (we did last year)
Bridgeport is one of those California places Californians don’t think about much. If you drew a line due east from Petaluma, across the valleys and the mountains, you’d hit Bridgeport, about 115 miles south of Reno and 90 miles north of Bishop.
It’s as pretty as a postcard, nestled in a wide valley with the Sawtooth range of the Sierra Nevada to the west. The highest peak is the 12,264-foot Matterhorn, named for the Swiss mountain.
Highway 395 is the town’s main street, and it runs past old white houses, and a modest business district surrounding the 123-year-old Mono County Courthouse, plunked like a Victorian wedding cake in the middle of town. There is even a cannon on the lawn. Carl Nolte, SF Chronicle.
X Prize
The government is very close to deciding whether to grant the first licenses for commercial space flights carrying passengers, the chief commercial space regulator said on Monday.
Three teams have applied for permission to send people on suborbital ships, which would fly to an altitude of about 100 kilometers, or 63 miles, and then return near the point of launching.
Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites has posted an extensive library of photos and information from their test flight program (very interesting!). They recently flew faster than the speed of sound.
Carter on Mali
Former President Jimmy Carter writes a weblog with musings from his current Africa trip.
1954 – 2004 Brown vs. Board of Education
In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that segregating students in public schools by race denied black children their constitutional right to equal protection under the law.
Brown vs. Board of Education sparked the civil rights movement that wrought enormous change to America’s laws and public schools. Yet 50 years later, most African-American children in Wisconsin remain far behind whites in education, jobs, housing, safety and family stability – further behind, in some measures, than in any other state. Why, in a Northern state with a progressive tradition, have we seen so little progress after so much time?
The Journal Sentinel has an excellent set of articles here.
Steuben’s Story
Herb Kohl at 13. Bud Selig at 13. The solid base of the next generation of Milwaukeeans, not only future senators and baseball commissioners, but future tool-and-die makers and teachers, accountants and business owners, professionals and laborers of all kinds.
That was then at Steuben Middle School.
This is now:
“I have five assignments, I have 33 students. Why do I only have five assignments?” eighth-grade science teacher Yolanda Williams asks her class.
A few more comments from Steuben Middle School.
MPS Direct Reading Approach
Sarah Carr writes that a drill-oriented approach to teaching reading is gaining followers in Milwaukee public school classrooms. In 1998, 15 MPS schools used direct instruction. Today, about 47 schools do.
But some critics say drill-based reading method hurts students.
“There’s such tremendous pressure on teachers and administrators to advance reading scores that they are literally desperate to try new things they think will bring them success,” said Randall Ryder, a professor in the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Last month, Ryder completed a study concluding that students in direct instruction classrooms fared worse than students taught using other reading methods.
But Dolores Mishelow, a former principal and one of the leading backers of direct instruction within MPS, said: “I get really upset when people bash it, because I know that it works.”
Requiem for the Record Store
File sharing, online music sales and high cd prices are taking their toll on record stores. [Washington Post]
The market for legally downloadable music is tiny today, but the success of Apple’s iTunes online music store and the rush of rival services to the marketplace is expected to gobble up an ever-larger share of the pop music pie. A recent study by Forrester Research, which examines technology trends, predicts that in five years fully one-third of all music will be delivered through modems, and the CD itself will be passe, if not obsolete, in the years after. This isn’t necessarily bad news for the record labels, but it could be lethal for brick-and-mortar stores.